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by
Devon Price
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June 8 - June 8, 2023
was just in this category of ‘weird annoying kid’ off to the side,”
and shifted their gender presentation to be more feminine so they could be seen as fully human.
When your belief system teaches that disability and gender variance are embarrassing and disgusting, it’s hard to look at your child and recognize those traits.
Neither girls nor boys related to me as one of their own, and I didn’t identify with them, either. I felt more like a mystical fairy creature dropped into the wrong reality than I felt like a “female,” or even a human being.
Racism has permeated psychology and psychiatry from its genesis.
White Autistics are 19 percent more likely to be diagnosed than Black Autistics are, and 65 percent more likely to be diagnosed than Latinx Autistics.[33]
Code switching is a cognitively demanding activity that can hinder a person’s performance on challenging or demanding tasks,[40] and it is associated with psychological stress and feeling inauthentic and socially isolated.[41]
Approximately 50 percent of people who are killed by police have disabilities,[48]
“I learned to grow masks for school. I had to be careful there. Covering up was
like an instinct, though. Like a brown walking stick turning green when it sits on a leaf. Watch…Watch hands. Watch lips. Watch eyebrows.”[50]
But in majority-white, abled institutions, openly saying what you mean or complaining about anything scares people.
We have to keep other people at arm’s length, because letting them see our hyperfixations, meltdowns, obsessions, and outbursts could mean losing their respect.
Hiding your Autism, your cultural Blackness, and your queerness or womanhood can be too much. Sometimes the only viable alternative is to shut down and become deeply inhibited.
You can’t offend anyone if you simply melt into the wallpaper.
Autistics can have intense and bright personalities just as easily as we can seem icy and withdrawn.
Their immaculate style is also an effort to have their personhood and individuality recognized by other people.
Amusement parks offer predictable social interactions and prepackaged experiences that rarely change. The layout is clearly marked, the food is bland yet filling, every attraction is over in a matter of minutes, and the signage is big and clear.
those with comorbid and overlapping conditions.
For all these reasons, it’s not always possible (or helpful) to try to untangle which of a person’s traits are Autistic and which are caused by the trauma of being neurodiverse in a neurotypical world.
He tells me his diagnosis of complex PTSD effectively masked his neurodivergence for many, many years.
“And is this Autism and not having a good theory of other people’s thinking? Or is it that my mother would hurl invectives at me if I so much as put the sponge on the wrong side of the sink? There is no answer.”
Therapy that is focused on battling “irrational beliefs,” such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), doesn’t work as well on Autistic people as it does on neurotypicals.[72] One reason for that is many of the fears and inhibitions of Autistic people are often entirely reasonable, and rooted in a lifetime of painful experiences. We tend to be pretty rational people, and many of us are already inclined to analyze our thoughts and feelings very closely (sometimes excessively so). Autistics don’t need cognitive behavioral training to help us not be ruled by our emotions. In fact, most of us have
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helped me talk to other Autistics online.” Autism can also look a lot like an anxiety disorder. Most of us are anxious nearly every moment we’re around other people, after all. Overstimulating, unpredictable surroundings will tend to activate our fight-or-flight response. The rituals and repetitive behaviors we develop to cope with stress can look a lot like Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Autistic burnout presents very much like a major depressive episode. All too often, these negative mental health consequences of masking are what a therapist recognizes, rather than the untreated disability
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People with BPD fear rejection very intensely.
They have an unstable sense of self that’s highly dependent on the acceptance of others.
“I used to pretend to be whoever my boyfriends wanted me to be so they wouldn’t leave me. And that was supposedly so manipulative and evil of me,” she says. In actuality,
says, “My mother is very self-involved, but that’s because she literally cannot understand what’s happening in others’ brains and she can get so locked into her own view. Her actions can seem selfish because Autism gets in the way of her empathy. I have really intense empathy, it is painful almost, and she is the flip side. She just doesn’t have it. But is that evil? She literally cannot help it.”
“She cares very much about feminism and saving the environment. Her heart is big and it is wounded. She’s a difficult person doing her very best, which in a Black woman seeking therapy in the 1970s meant you were a narcissist, apparently.”
that the reason many women are not diagnosed as Autistic is because they’re labeled as Borderline, Histrionic, or Narcissistic instead.
Yet even the fact that we struggle with these activities is contextual, and cultural: in a world where rugged individualism wasn’t prioritized, it might not be a disability to need help finding your car keys.
Autistic need for nonverbal methods of self-expression.
It also perpetuates the idea that the only disabled lives worth living are those that can still manage to be productive or impressive in some conventional way.
Neurotypical people are obsessed with functioning levels. If you tell a nondisabled person that you’re Autistic, but you’re able to hold a conversation or maintain a job, they’ll immediately start gushing about how functional you are.
he equates holding down a job with having a life of value.
Furthermore, some people don’t “function” independently in any area of life at all, and that shouldn’t detract from their value and the respect they receive, either.
they owe the world greatness to justify their oddness.
The first step to unmasking is accepting who you are, and finding others with similar experiences.
Stimtastic
But for as long as I could I got ‘stomachaches’ and stayed home, which really kept me sane.”
You’re only seen as less adult, and supposedly less of a person,[3] if you need help in ways that disrupt the illusions of self-sufficiency.
I learned that feigning maturity would be my sole salvation, the only way to ensure my humanity got recognized.
Camouflage is all about obscuring one’s unique qualities and struggles as a disabled person; compensation is all about crafting little hacks and cheats to help you get your needs met because you can’t request the accommodations you require.
“severity” on how much their kids’ behavior bothered them and required a lot of their time and attention.
Becoming “well behaved” is more important than being psychologically well.
you don’t need ABA to program you into compliance. Everyone around you is already doing it.
I recognized a much-loathed, deeply buried part of myself in Chris, and I hated him for it.
addiction. “I came to figure out I have had massive social anxiety and sensory issues all my life, and I was using alcohol to numb them,”
the longer we are around a stimulus, the more it bothers us.[2]
Drinking is really the only release valve neurotypical people can respect—as long as you present it as a fun habit, rather than a compulsion.
Herbs and Altars,
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