Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity

by Devon Price

I took responsibility for others’ problems, tried to manage their emotions for them, and lacked any capacity to say “no” to unreasonable requests.

When graduate school began, I rarely went out with my new classmates. The few times I did, I had to get completely hammered to overcome my inhibitions and seem “fun.”

Around people, I felt I had to censor every natural reaction, and pretend to have interests and feelings that were normal.

When I got too stressed out or became overcome with sadness, I found it hard to speak.

I’d hidden all this for years because I was certain it made me a joyless, unlovable

To other people, my tears were immature tantrums and my opinions were condescending diatribes.

studied other people’s mannerisms. I spent a lot of time dissecting conversations in my head, and I read up on psychology so I could understand people better.

My social isolation was a way of rejecting other people before they could reject me. My workaholism was a sign of Autistic hyperfixation, as well as an acceptable excuse to withdraw from public places that caused me sensory overwhelm. I got into unhealthy, codependent relationships because I needed approval and didn’t know how to get it, so I just molded myself into whatever my partner at the time was looking for.

I have my life together too much for them to realize how hard it all is. Nobody wants to hear now about how hard it’s always been, always

Believing they are helping their child “rise above” a limitation and be tough, they encourage the child not to be visibly odd, or to ever ask for assistance.

Though a masked Autistic child has no way of explaining why they find life so difficult, they suffer all the same. Peers detect there’s something unnameably “off” about them, and exclude them despite their best attempts at friendliness.

They work hard, demand little, and play by society’s rules as closely as possible. They

Then, after decades of forcing themselves into a restrictive neurotypical box, they have some kind of breakdown that finally makes all the turmoil bubbling beneath the surface impossible to ignore. It’s only then that they discover they’re Autistic.

Autistic burnout is a state of chronic exhaustion where an Autistic person’s skills begin to degrade, and their tolerance to stress is greatly reduced.

College had taken her a few years longer than the rest of her friends, though she couldn’t explain exactly why. She was always having to drop classes in order to hold her life together.

“At first I couldn’t believe it,” Crystal says. “My family still doesn’t believe it. They had every indication, my whole life, but they don’t want to see it.”

lecture left her too tired to think or speak. Regular life actually did require more willpower out of her; Autistic people frequently experience inertia in starting a task,[6] and challenges in breaking complex activities down into small steps that follow a logical sequence.[7] This can make everything from basic household chores to applying to jobs and filing taxes incredibly challenging, or even impossible without help.

Autistic people have differences in the development of their anterior cingulate cortex,[14] a part of the brain that helps regulate attention, decision making, impulse control, and emotional processing.

We are hyperreactive to even small stimuli in our environment We have trouble distinguishing between information or sensory data that should be ignored versus data that should be carefully considered We are highly focused on details rather than “big picture” concepts We’re deeply and deliberatively analytical Our decision-making process is methodical rather than efficient; we don’t rely on mental shortcuts or “gut feelings” Processing a situation takes us more time and energy than it does for a neurotypical person

Autism is associated with a deliberative processing style. When making sense of the world, Autistic people usually defer to logic and reason rather than emotion or intuition. We dive deep into all the pros and cons, sometimes excessively so, not knowing where to draw the line between an important variable and an unimportant one. We tend not to get habituated to familiar situations or stimuli as readily as other people, so we often think through a situation as if it’s completely new to us, even if it isn’t.[25] All of this requires a lot of energy, focus, and time, so we get exhausted and overloaded quite easily. However, it also makes us less prone to errors. Experimental research shows that Autistic people are far less susceptible to the biases allistic people commonly fall prey to.[26]

Autistic people process the world from the bottom up. If you want to understand Autism as a disability and a source of human difference at a glance, it’s best summed up this way: we process in a careful, systematic, bottom-up way. Allistic folks, in contrast, make sense of the world in a very top-down fashion. They’ll enter a new environment, such as an unfamiliar restaurant, take a quick look around, and jump to reasonable conclusions about how to order, where to sit, what kind of service to expect, and even how loudly they should talk.

make an informed guess about how they feel. Often, it’s too much discordant data to make sense of. When I don’t have the energy to carefully process others’ emotional expressions, people are inscrutable to me and arouse a lot of anxiety.

to following rules very rigidly.

Autism is behavioral. Autism is associated with repetitive self-stimulatory behavior (“stimming”),[31] which can be something as benign as hand-flapping, or as severe as chewing one’s fingers until they bleed.

We hyperfixate on activities that we enjoy and can get so engrossed in them that we forget to eat or take a break to stretch our legs.

paradoxical ways. At times, I can be so intensely focused on a task (such as reading or writing) that the rest of the world entirely drops away. When I’m hyperfixating, I fail to notice things like someone speaking to me or smoke filling the room because I forgot to turn the oven off. At other times, I’m an anxious and distractible wreck, unable to make my way through a single sentence of a book because my pet chinchilla is hopping around in his cage and making the bars rattle.

Some researchers have also theorized that sensory issues in Autistics are, at least in part, caused by the anxiety and hypervigilance we experience from living in a world that doesn’t accommodate us, and often treats us with hostility.[46]

Their sensory pain and social overwhelm is near-constant, and they can’t hide how profoundly they’re suffering.

“Getting smaller and asking for nothing was how I kept people from calling me too sensitive so often,” she says. “That and assuming that if I was bad at something, it’s because I was never, ever gonna be good at it. Better to not ask.”

Crystal is trying to unlearn these deep-seated beliefs about herself. She wants to become someone who doesn’t apologize for crying, and doesn’t always cope with stress by locking herself away from the world.

Like many people who have only recently figured out they’re Autistic, Crystal is still reeling about her newfound identity, and can’t seem to stop thinking about how unfairly she was treated in the past.

Abed Nadir on the sitcom Community is a Palestinian Muslim man with a sharp wit and a penchant for movies, as well as the more clichéd chilly demeanor and difficulty smiling.

Though many of us experience sensory issues, anxiety, meltdowns, and debilitating mental health symptoms, we push as much of that misery into the private realm as possible. Our elaborate veils of coping mechanisms and camouflaging can create the illusion we don’t need help. Often this comes at the expense of giving up on the areas of life where we might need assistance. We may eschew relationships, drop out of grueling academic programs, avoid working in fields that require networking and socializing, or completely disengage from activities that involve using our bodies, because we feel so detached and uncoordinated in them. Most of us are haunted by the sense there’s something “wrong” or “missing” in our lives—that we’re sacrificing far more of ourselves than other people in order to get by and receiving far less in return.

You might hope that people will take your problems more seriously when a psychiatrist has validated them.

A formal diagnosis means you can receive disability accommodations at school or work, and you can pursue a legal case if an employer or landlord shows documentable signs of bias against you.

Medical documentation does not make your experience any more real.

The baffled families of transgender people and adult Autistics alike tend to claim there “were no signs” of these identities when the person was young.[1] In actuality, there were often many signs, which the child’s family either did not know to look for, or didn’t wish to see.[2]

Some are assumed to be too “high functioning” to need accommodations, but actually suffer deeply from a lack of accessibility and support.

I played Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and recognized myself for the first time in the game’s wordless, androgynous protagonist Link. He didn’t speak, and didn’t belong in the community of childlike elves he’d been raised in. His difference was what marked him as special and destined to save the world. Link was brave, strong, and softly pretty, all at the same time. He was clueless and ineffectual in most social situations, but that didn’t keep him from doing important things or from being met with gratitude and affection everywhere he went. I loved absolutely everything about Link, and modeled my own style after him for many years.