Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity

by Devon Price

It often led to us being filtered into gifted education programs rather than special education, which came with both advantages and its fair share of poorly boundaried, objectifying experiences.

Dissociation is also a means of controlling the social and sensory data we’re taking in, ignoring inputs that have become too intense. For example, when there are too many people around, my friend Angel says he goes away into “Angel World” in his head, and everyone around him becomes blurry. He has some relatives that he has never seen the faces of, because he’s only ever met them at big family gatherings where everyone blends into a sea of muddy, vague shapes. When he’s dissociating, he can still go through the motions of eating, bathing, and walking around, but mentally he’s not really there. The only thing that brings Angel back is having plenty of time to rest and disengage. For other Autistic people that I know, including myself, having to mask and socialize for an extended period increases the odds we’ll begin to dissociate or shut down.

For fear of becoming a Sherlock, we morph ourselves into Watsons: agreeable, docile, passive to a fault, always assuming that the larger personalities around us know what’s best.

Masked Autistics are frequently compulsive people pleasers. We present ourselves as cheery and friendly, or nonthreatening and small. Masked Autistics are also particularly likely to engage in the trauma response that therapist Pete Walker describes as “fawning.”[53] Coping with stress doesn’t always come down to fight versus flight; fawning is a response designed to pacify anyone who poses a threat. And to masked Autistics, social threat is just about everywhere.

“Fawn types avoid emotional investment and potential disappointment by barely showing themselves,” Walker writes, “by hiding behind their helpful personas, over-listening, over-eliciting or overdoing for the other.”[54] Walker notes that by never revealing their own needs or discomfort with other people, fawners spare themselves the risk of rejection. But they also fail to connect with people in any meaningful way. It’s a lonesome state to live in. It’s also deeply draining. Many masked Autistic adults struggle to balance full-time work with social lives or hobbies at all because maintaining a conciliatory mask for eight hours per day is just too labor intense to have energy for anything else.[55] The connections w...

One common fawning tactic among Autistics is mirroring: lightly mimicking the actions and emotions of another person, trying to meet the energy they are giving off so that they view us as normal and similar to themselves. However, paying close attention to a person’s actions and feelings and then mimicking it as best you can is a very cognitively draining and distracting endeavor. A study by Kulesza and colleagues (2015) found that when experimental study participants were asked to subtly mimic the behavior of a conversation partner, the mimicker actually had a harder time recognizing the emotions of the person they were mimicking.[59] Even though the (neurotypical) participants in the study were successfully imitating the emotional displays of their conversation partners, they were so focused on the performance that they stopped really thinking about what those emotional displays meant. This study has not been replicated in an Autistic or neurodiverse sample, but if mirroring other people is so mentally labor-intensive that it reduces the empathy of neurotypicals, it’s likely true of Autistic people as well. In fact, these results suggest that all the attention we put toward masking our own emotions and mirroring another person’s contributes to our struggles with empathy in the first place.

Self-stigma is a liar; you’re not cringey, “too much,” a baby, or a cold-blooded creep. You’re a marginalized person with many beautiful and unique qualities. Your needs are value-neutral, and your emotions are helpful signals to respond to that don’t merit any shame. Autism has always been a powerful driving force in your life, often for the better, even when you did not know that it was there. Now that you do know it’s there, you can work on accepting and loving the person you have always been beneath your mask, and practice sharing that version of you with the world. Unmasking doesn’t happen in one big burst of confidence; it’s a gradual process of relaxing your inhibitions, trusting your feelings, and letting go of compensatory strategies that no longer suit you.

I’ve gone from being an aspirational version of myself, and now I’m just doing what I want.”