Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity

by Devon Price

How was I supposed to know I needed friends, and a life? How could I go about connecting with others, when every effort was so unsatisfying? What did I actually enjoy or care about? Around people, I felt I had to censor every natural reaction, and pretend to have interests and feelings that were normal. Plus, people were so overwhelming. They were all so loud and erratic, their eyes like painful laser beams boring into me. All I wanted to do was sit in the dark and not be bothered or judged.

I believed something was fundamentally wrong with me. I seemed to be broken in ways I couldn’t explain, but which everyone else could see at a glance.

We didn’t like change. None of us could handle talking about our emotions and mostly interacted using a surface-level script. Some of us had hang-ups about food textures and strong flavors. We rambled on and on about the subjects that interested us, even if it bored others to tears. We were easily overwhelmed by change and rarely went out into the world to have new experiences or make friends.

Like me, they had developed coping strategies to blend in. Things like staring at a person’s forehead to simulate eye contact, or memorizing conversational scripts based on exchanges they saw on TV.

When an Autistic person is not given resources or access to self-knowledge, and when they’re told their stigmatized traits are just signs that they’re a disruptive, overly sensitive, or annoying kid, they have no choice but to develop a neurotypical façade. Maintaining that neurotypical mask feels deeply inauthentic and it’s extremely exhausting to maintain.[5]

Label avoidance was common among the parents of potentially Autistic children during the 1990s, because the condition was so poorly understood and demonized.[4]

Peers detect there’s something unnameably “off” about them, and exclude them despite their best attempts at friendliness.

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.[5]

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.

To put it in very simple terms, our neurons activate easily, and don’t discriminate as readily between a “nuisance variable” that our brains might wish to ignore (for example, a dripping faucet in another room) and a crucial piece of data that deserves a ton of our attention (for example, a loved one beginning to quietly cry in the other room). This means we can both be easily distracted by a small stimulus and miss a large meaningful one.

This helps explain why many Autistic people have prosopagnosia (the inability to recognize faces),[22] and experience difficulty reading emotions on neurotypicals’ faces.

Of course, many non-Autistic people might resonate with some of the feelings and sensations I just described. There’s a difference between being allistic (which simply means non-Autistic) and being fully neurotypical (which means lacking any mental illness or cognitive disability). An allistic person with a social anxiety disorder may also feel overwhelmed in busy bars and restaurants, just as Autistic people do. Someone with post-traumatic stress disorder may similarly be rattled by a noisy pinball machine. The difference between Autism and these other disorders, however, is that Autism is a cognitive and sensory difference that affects every area of life. You wouldn’t expect a socially anxious person to get overwhelmed by the sound of a clanking radiator when they’re alone at home, for example (unless they’re also Autistic or have a sensory processing disorder).

Because the neural and cognitive features of Autism are so pervasive, it affects almost every aspect of a person’s body and brain. It’s related to coordination and muscle tone, the ability to read emotions on people’s faces, communication skills, reaction time, and even how a person recognizes feelings of pain or hunger.[28] When I look at a person’s face, I don’t simply see “happiness” or “sadness” radiating off them, for example; I see minute changes in their eyes, forehead, mouth, breathing, and posture, which I then have to effortfully piece together to make an informed guess about how they feel.