Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity

by Devon Price

the way I kept all my deepest fixations hidden from people in my life.

The more I read about Autism, the more things began clicking into place. I had always been overwhelmed by loud sounds and bright lights. I got inexplicably angry in crowds; laughter and chatter could make me blow up with rage. 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 asshole. Now I was beginning to wonder why I believed such awful things about myself.

Autistic: she lined up toys in rows instead of playing pretend with them, chewed on her blanket while staring at the wall,

A child exhibits early signs of difficulty, but their families and teachers balk when disability is raised.

They work hard, demand little, and play by society’s rules as closely as possible. They grow into an adult who is even more self-effacing, and even less capable of voicing how they feel.

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]

They said that if she had really been hurting that bad all her life, they would have realized it.

In fact, some research suggests that when people understand disabilities such as depression and ADHD as being purely biological, they actually show more stigma toward people with those conditions, not less.[23]

In this way, neurotypicality is more of an oppressive cultural standard than it actually is a privileged identity a person has. Essentially no one lives up to neurotypical standards all of the time, and the rigidity of those standards harms everyone.[42] Much as heteronormativity harms straight and queer folks alike, neurotypicality hurts people no matter their mental health status.

44] I often brute-force my way into paying attention to something by shutting the rest of the world out.

“Everybody is a little bit Autistic,” is a common refrain that masked Autistic people hear when we come out to others. This remark can feel a bit grating to hear, because it feels like our experiences are being downplayed. It’s similar to when bisexual people get told that “everybody is a little bit bi.” When most people make remarks like these, they’re implying that because our difference is so universal, we can’t actually be oppressed for it, and should just shut up about it. However, I do think that when allistic people declare that everyone is a little Autistic, it means they are close to making an important breakthrough about how mental disorders are defined: why do we declare some people broken, and others perfectly normal, when they exhibit the exact same traits? Where do we draw the line, and why do we even bother doing so? If an Autistic person benefits from more flexibility at work, and more social patience, why not extend those same benefits to everybody? Autistic people are a normal part of humanity, and we have qualities that can be observed in any other non-Autistic human. So yes, everyone is a little bit Autistic. That’s all the more reason to broaden our definition of what is deserving of dignity and acceptance.

But in actuality, it was a sneaky way to cosplay as my favorite male video game character every day without consequence.

While they found it easy to make surface-level friends at the bar where they use to work, they say that bonding with someone in a deeper way proved very difficult. They second-guess themselves, and are constantly running an algorithm in the back of their mind about how their actions and words will be received by others. They think a lot about how they’re perceived and rarely feel at home in any community. Their immaculate style is also an effort to have their personhood and individuality recognized by other people. They’ve always been misunderstood, and every day is a fight to communicate who they really are. Bethy is masking, and putting extensive energy into doing so—just like inhibited, quiet me.

When an Autistic person is a sensory seeker, they might crave loud music, spicy food, blazing bright colors, or plenty of activity and motion. They don’t wear headphones in public to drown out the overwhelming noise of other people, but because a thumping synthpop track helps keep them engaged and grounded. The goal is the same in either case—to make sense of a barrage of data that’s hard to process. A sensory seeking, fun-loving persona makes for a very effective Autism mask; no one sees you as an “overly sensitive” disabled person if you’re constantly traveling the world and thrashing to the music at your local bar’s metal night.

The more outgoing and sensory seeking among us love anime conventions, house parties, political campaigning, and competitive sports. It’s often very difficult, though, for these kinds of Autistic people to get their disability taken seriously, because they can be so outspoken and charming. When they do have trouble socializing or they fall behind at work, their loved ones accuse them of “faking” that they’re having a hard time, because they found it effortless to go out and party at a burlesque show the evening before. It’s an all-too-common experience for disabled people, being told that your skills in one area are proof that you’re “not trying hard enough” in another. Very few people would guess these outspoken, high-energy folks are Autistic, particularly during their rambunctious childhoods. If anything about them seemed unusual, ADHD was probably what people guessed. Incidentally, Autism and ADHD co-occur at very high rates, and are diagnostically quite difficult to untangle.[69] Psychologists often call them “sister conditions” because both of them impact things like distractibility, sensory seeking, and being deeply pained by social rejection.

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).

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 that’s caused it.

When neurotypical people equate “functioning” with being less disabled, they fail to recognize the immense, hidden labor that goes into appearing normal. It also misses just how oppressive having to seem normal is by itself.

For me, and for countless “high functioning” Autistics, communication and intelligence become an essential part of our masks. I never could fit in with other kids, but I could impress teachers with my grasp of big words and my sophisticated-sounding opinions. Though my language was highly developed, my social and emotional life was not. I annoyed other kids by talking too much about subjects that didn’t interest them. I clung to adults who found me “impressive” and equated being well-behaved with being mature and worthy of their respect. I also absorbed the idea, common to many “gifted” children, that a person’s intellectual potential belongs to society,

The very concept of “functioning status” is predicated on the logic of capitalism and the legacy of the Protestant work ethic, which both have trained us to believe that a person’s productivity determines their worth.[94] No one is more harmed by this worldview than the disabled people who cannot work and produce value at all, and are the most likely to wind up abused, forcibly institutionalized, or homeless as a result. Equating a person’s social value (or even their right to exist) with their productivity is sadly a common outlook, but it’s also a profoundly alienating and ableist one.

Undiagnosed and clueless about the root of her challenges, Crystal had to suffer in silence throughout childhood. As her grandfather observed, she was a well-behaved, sweet kid, and a total teacher’s pet. Yet behind her smiling, agreeable façade, she was coping with constant social confusion and loneliness. In classes where instructions weren’t always clear, like science and math, she floundered. At school, she socialized with other girls, but she rarely got invited to sleepovers or outings to the mall or skating rink. She kept her head down around other people, and at home complained of frequent stomachaches and threw “tantrums” out of stress. By middle school, it was impossible for her to ignore how difficult she found regular life. “Once you get to middle school, you have this really complicated class schedule you have to follow. All these transitions, bells going off, everyone switching classrooms every hour, after school-activities, busy busy busy. I don’t do well with shifting gears; it takes a ton of energy for me now and I was suddenly having to do it all day.”

All she wanted to do was find a private place to lie down and vegetate. No one had noticed yet that she needed help. So, she started begging her mom to let her skip school.

Crystal had already observed that if she asked for help with something that neurotypical people found “obvious,” she wouldn’t get assistance. They’d just find her exhausting, or think she was asking questions just to waste time. But Crystal genuinely didn’t know what role x played in a linear equation. She didn’t understand what “show your work” meant in a math context, so she’d write long paragraphs explaining her thought process in words, and describing exactly which buttons on the calculator she’d pressed. Her teacher took this as some kind of personal insult, and wrote Crystal up for it. She cried in the detention hall the entire time, baffled that her best attempt at showing her work had somehow been rude.

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.

A person might camouflage their auditory sensitivities by gritting their teeth through the pain and never complaining about it, or they might compensate for it by wearing subtle noise-canceling earbuds that don’t stand out as unusual.

Researchers Zablotsky, Bramlett, and Blumberg set out to understand how parents perceive the “severity” of their Autistic kids’ symptoms.[9] They surveyed nearly a thousand families raising Autistic kids, and also measured the Autism symptom severity of the children themselves. What the researchers found was that parents did not accurately perceive the level of their kids’ suffering. Instead, parents based their ratings of Autism “severity” on how much their kids’ behavior bothered them and required a lot of their time and attention. Many children described by parents as “high functioning” were quietly coping with debilitating sensory pain, or were falling behind academically or socially in significant ways. This carries over to how Autistic adults are perceived, and the expectations that neurotypical institutions place on us to appear “normal.”

In college he nearly attained a 4.0 GPA—then dropped out very suddenly, because he couldn’t handle the social aspects of school. A few years later, he had a good job and could maintain a sixty-hour workweek, but was sneaking drinks and coming to work hungover.

When an Autistic person is flooded with upsetting sensory information for too long, they enter a state of sensory overload. Sensory overload can look like a temper tantrum or a crying fit, it can take the form of a shutdown or meltdown, or it can present as the Autistic person becoming confused and responding to questions in routinized or nonsensical ways. Sensory overload makes it hard to complete complex tasks, think through things rationally, or manage emotions. When we’re overloaded, we become irritable, or filled with despair; we might even start self-harming to get an endorphin rush or ground ourselves. Our bodies are visibly tense with anxiety, and we’re difficult to engage with during these times. What non-Autistic folks often don’t realize is that Autistic people experience intense sensory input as if it were physical pain.[6]

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.

If you’ve been unaware of your disability for a long time, or been in denial about it, you may have used getting high or drunk to cover up your suffering, or to give you the energy to socialize.

Often the fears that CBT therapists train their patients to view as irrational (if I say the wrong thing, I’ll lose my job and wind up on the street!) are completely rational for Autistics, and rooted in genuine experience.

Many masked Autistics are sent to gifted education as children, instead of being referred to disability services.[18] Our apparent high intelligence puts us in a double bind: we are expected to accomplish great things to justify our oddness, and because we possess an enviable, socially prized quality, it’s assumed we need less help than other people, not more.

Warning Signs of a High-Control Group The group promotes an antagonistic view of the outside world and nongroup members: “It’s us versus the world.” Group members constantly feel insecure about their position within the group; members may be punished for any small mistake or failure. Personal boundaries are discouraged; people are expected to view the group as a “family,” and sacrifice as much as they can for it. Any perspective that challenges the group’s orthodoxy is unspeakable; members feel shame about thinking or feeling the “wrong” things. Repetitive language and group jargon are used to dismiss criticism. Group members repeat empty clichés in order to silence difficult conversations.

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]

When you’re trapped under the mask, all love feels conditional.