Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity

by Devon Price

Some Autistics are sensory seekers and crave bold, bright lights, or lots of sound, and their homes reflect that. Honoring the need for stimulation and excitement is just as important as providing quiet and stillness, and so for some Autistic people, unmasking your home may mean simply giving yourself permission to keep your space as cluttered as you like.

As we’ve repeatedly discussed in this book, research shows Autistic people pay much closer attention to small details than neurotypical people do, particularly when they have the cognitive energy to do so, and in the workplace that can have real benefits.[11]

“I don’t have a lot of patience for inefficiency or sloppiness,” she says, “or being asked to do work that is meaningless busywork. The upshot of that is that when you work with me, you know I’m raising the standard.”

many of us are able to complete a great deal of work in a single hyperfocused burst, though typically we’ll need much more rest and recovery in order to sustain such efforts.

One reason that we may need more sleep than others is just how tiring it is for us to be in the world. Sensory overload, social overwhelm, and the pressures of masking all significantly drain our batteries.

Most workers are only capable of truly focusing and being “productive” for about four hours per day.[15] Long workdays and long commutes erode a person’s life satisfaction,[16] job satisfaction,[17] and their physical and mental health.

“When I am actively working on something, I turn my whole attention to it,” he writes. “After this kind of focus, I need rest. Resting doesn’t always look like relaxing baths or naps. It might look like immersing myself in work on as special interest, or zoning out in front of a screen.”

Some of us operate best on boom-and-bust cycles of intense hyperfocus followed by recuperation time.

When I’m swept up in a special interest, I feel alive.

Engaging our special interests is an important part of maintaining Autistic people’s mental health; one study by clinical psychologist Melis Aday found that Autistic adults’ participation in special interests was associated with stress management, and with having low levels of depression.[20]

It’s equally important that we make time for repetitive, self-stimulatory behavior as well, as research has repeatedly shown that improves our mental health and coping.[21]

Because Autistic minds are all about understanding details and analyzing complex systems of information, it makes sense to think of our lives as fractal, forever expanding to new subjects and narrowing into precise focus at the same time. We’re not single-minded Marios, running across a side-scrolling level to rescue Princess Peach.

Like so many of us, they’ve developed Autism-friendly “life hacks” to make regular life manageable. These are compensation strategies in a sense, but their goal isn’t to mask Rory’s neurodiversity, so much as to make life easier and more bearable.

We often have trouble dividing up complex activities into small steps, or putting those steps into a logical sequence.

Many neurodiverse people suffer from Autistic inertia.[24] The same heightened focus that makes us so good at studying our special interests for hours also makes it challenging for us to get off the couch and attend to the overflowing trash. To an external, neurotypical observer, it doesn’t look like we’re struggling. It just looks like we’re being “lazy.” Almost every neurodiverse person I’ve spoken to has been deemed “lazy” numerous times by exasperated parents, teachers, and friends.

Neurotypicals also tend to assume we know how to complete a chore or task without instructing us in exactly what it entails, not understanding that we can’t intuit our way through unstated expectations.

Autistic people are constantly having to invent our own unique ways of getting things done. We use extensive research, digital tools, and a variety of little sneaks and cheats to brute-force our way through activities that NT people don’t even think about.

she uses online research to plan ahead any time she visits a new place. “I need to know where the front door is. Where the parking is. Who I will have to interact with,” she writes.

I don’t know any neurotypical people who sit at home googling how to pronounce words like bouillabaisse or injera so they don’t seem “weird” at a restaurant. But for Autistics, this level of scripting and pre-planning is normal.

when neurotypical people figure out we’ve put this much time and thought into activities that are “basic” to them, they tend to find it very off-putting.

For masked Autistic people, knowing “too much” or thinking about something too deeply is seen as suspect. People find it calculating or creepy for us to put more effort into something they never grant a passing thought.

And if we need a lot of information in order to feel comfortable navigating an unfamiliar space, we shouldn’t have to conceal that fact, either.

But we don’t always have to rely on subtle approaches that appeal to neurotypical sensibilities. We can proudly, visibly do our own things in our own ways, and share the shortcuts and systems that make our lives possible. We can stim with big, intense gestures, wear large, obvious ear defenders, and ask for help when we need it.

With everyone wearing masks, I struggled to tell when someone was speaking to me, because I relied on the visual cue of their lips moving to tune my attention toward them.

And as the research on self-stigma that I discussed earlier suggests, wearing one’s identity with pride can reduce feelings of self-consciousness and alienation.

Sasson and colleagues (2017), for example, found that neurotypical people quickly and subconsciously identify that a stranger is Autistic, often within milliseconds of meeting them.[29] They don’t realize that they’ve identified the person as Autistic, though; they just think the person is weird. Participants in the study were less interested in engaging in conversation with Autistic people and liked them less than non-Autistics, all based on a brief moment of social data.

It’s also important to point out that the Autistic people in this study didn’t do anything “wrong”; their behavior was perfectly socially appropriate, as was the content of their speech. Though they tried their damnedest to present as neurotypical, their performance had some key tells, and was just slightly “off,” and they were disliked because of it.

Inauthenticity and a forced-seeming social performance rubs neurotypicals the wrong way.

The creepiness factor they developed included the following traits: a person having awkward, unpredictable behavior, an unnatural-looking smile, laughter that occurred at “unnatural” times, speaking for too long about a single topic, and not knowing when to end a conversation.[30] When Autistic people attempt to socialize and bond with others in an affable, enthusiastic way, these are often the very traits we embody. Even as we try to put the neurotypical people around us at ease by smiling, keeping the conversation moving, and staying present, we might be seen as scary or unsettling.

People mirror one another’s postures and mannerisms as they get comfortable and fall into sync. But if you mirror someone too much, or at the wrong time, these studies show you can literally give other people the chills.

Autistic maskers try really hard to mirror

other people, but since we can’t do it as fluently and effortlessly as neurotypicals do, we often unwitt...

Follow-up research by Sasson and Morrison (2019) confirmed that when neurotypical people know that they’re meeting an Autistic person, first impressions of them are far more positive, and after the interaction neurotypicals express more interest in learning about Autism.[32]

We tend to default to people pleasing, smiling, and laughing uncomfortably through social difficulty, and to do so in such a reflexive way that it’s as if our true feelings and preferences disappear when other people are around. These reflexes exist to protect us, and there is no shame in having them.

Autistic people tend to love infodumping (sharing knowledge with other people as a means of bonding), we miss social cues that seem obvious to others, and we tend to speak in monotonous voices that are read as dry or sarcastic. A lot of us find the natural flow of conversation challenging, either interrupting people at the “wrong” times, or failing to jump in during a fast-paced exchange and being left out entirely.

For these and other reasons, Autistic women (particularly women of color) are often viewed as cold or “bitchy,” and Autistic men are often mistaken for being condescending “mansplainers.”

Abled people who are oppressed along one identity, such as gender, don’t always understand they might wield a certain degree of power over disabled people who look very socially powerful to them.

Maskers tend to get very distressed when people are unhappy with us, because disapproval has been so dangerous and painful for us in the past. Many of us will do nearly anything to keep other people satisfied.

It’s normal and healthy to be considerate toward other people, but masked Autistics tend to devote so much energy to people pleasing that we have almost no cognitive space left to think about (or listen to) ourselves. It also impedes us from connecting with people in a genuine way.

Surface-level smiling and mimicry makes it harder to see and appreciate people in all their complexity.

Unmasking in public feels nearly impossible, because when we are around people, it’s as if we have no thoughts or feelings of our own.

I’ve been in that position myself, so profoundly inhibited I had no idea what my genuine preferences were, unable to recognize someone had crossed a boundary or made me uncomfortable until hours afte...

In order for unmasking to be sustainable and healthy for us, we have to put a lot of new coping strategies in our arsenal and have some truly supportive loved ones in our corner.

When James explained that he couldn’t follow what was being said because he is Autistic, he was self-disclosing his disabled status.

When someone’s knowledge of Autism is shallow and stereotypical, they tend to react to self-disclosure in a highly stigmatizing, dehumanizing way.

Often, when a person from the majority group encounters information that runs against their stereotypes of an oppressed group, they respond by either discounting the

information

or by subgrouping the people who deviate f...

For Autistic self-disclosure to really have an impact on someone, you need a mutually respectful, trusting relationship. They need to be willing to keep learning and revise their understanding of what Autism is as they go along.

It’s also fine to come out slowly, first getting to know your unmasked self privately, then developing unmasked (or less-masked) relationships with the people who feel safest to you.