Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity

by Devon Price

I didn’t know how to approach people or initiate conversations, and I didn’t care to learn, because most interactions left me feeling irritated and unheard. The few relationships I did have were enmeshed; I took responsibility for others’ problems, tried to manage their emotions for them, and lacked any capacity to say “no” to unreasonable requests. I didn’t know what I wanted out of life, other than to become a professor.

and I believed I was incapable of really being loved. But I was getting good grades and my intellect earned me a lot of praise, so I just focused on those strengths. I pretended all the rest was a meaningless distraction.

I had to get completely hammered to overcome my inhibitions and seem “fun.” Otherwise I spent whole weekends alone in my apartment, reading journal articles and falling down strange internet rabbit-holes.

At night bone-shaking sobs of despair and overwhelm would overtake me, and I’d pace around my room, whimpering and striking myself in the temples with the heels of my hands. My solitude had somehow become imprisoning, but I was too lacking in social skills or emotional self-awareness to get myself out of it.

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.

My cousin started talking to me about all the things he struggled with—how hard it was to relate to classmates, how adrift and overstimulated he felt. A therapist had floated Autism as a likely explanation. Then my cousin pointed out all the Autistic traits he’d noticed were common in our family. 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.

Though I was a psychologist, all I knew about Autism was the broadest and most dehumanizing of stereotypes. Being Autistic would mean I was broken.

we tend to latch on to subjects that fascinate us and focus on them with a fervor others find weird. After being mocked about our passions, we become secretive about our special interests. Already I was thinking about Autism in terms like we and us; I saw myself clearly reflected in the community, a fact that scared and exhilarated me.

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.

To other people, my tears were immature tantrums and my opinions were condescending diatribes. As I grew up, I learned to be less intense, less embarrassing—less me. I 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. That was why I’d gotten a PhD in social psychology. I had needed to carefully study the social norms and patterns of thinking that seemingly felt natural to everybody else.

After researching Autism privately for about a year, I discovered the Autistic self-advocacy community. There was an entire movement led by Autistic people who argued we should view the disability as a perfectly normal form of human difference. These thinkers and activists said our way of being wasn’t wrong at all; it was society’s

failure to adapt to our needs that left us feeling broken. People like Rabbi Ruti Regan (author of the blog Real Social Skills) and Amythest Schaber (the creator of the Neurowonderful video series) taught me about neurodiversity. I came to recognize that many disabilities are created or worsened by social exclusion. Armed with this knowledge and a growing sense of self-confidence, I started meeting Autis...

Many of these stealthily Autistic people fell back on their intellect or other talents to gain acceptance. Others became incredibly passive, because if they toned down their personalities, they

Many of them suffered from self-harm, eating disorders, and alcoholism.

Older Autistics never had the opportunity to be assessed, because knowledge about the disability was so limited during their childhoods. These systematic exclusions had forced an entire

massive, diverse population of disabled people to live in obscurity. This gave rise to what I am now calling masked Autism—a camouflaged version of the disorder that’s still widely neglected by researchers, mental health providers, and Autism organizations that aren’t led by Autistic people, such as the much-reviled Autism Speaks.

craved sensory stimulation and pressure.

To call the stealthy, more socially camouflaged form of Autism a “female” version of the disorder is to indicate that masking is a phenomenon of gender, or even of assigned sex at birth, rather than a much broader phenomenon of social exclusion. Women don’t have “milder” Autism because of their biology; people who are marginalized have their Autism ignored because of their peripheral status in society.

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] It’s also not necessarily a conscious

The more other people around me relaxed, spoke passionately about their special interests, and rocked in place excitedly, the less shame I felt about who I was, and how my brain and body worked.

I sleep with a stuffed animal every night, and a loud fan blowing to block out my neighborhood’s ambient noise.

When I’m excited, I flap my hands and squirm in place. On good days, I don’t think any of these things make me childish, or cringey, or bad. I love myself as I am, and others can see and love the real me.

Existence seemed like one long slog of faked enthusiasm.

Refusing to perform neurotypicality is a revolutionary act of disability justice. It’s also a radical act of self-love. But in order for Autistic people to

take our masks off and show our real, authentically disabled selves to the world, we first have to feel safe enough to get reacquainted with who we really are. Developing self-trust and self-compassion is a whole journey unto itself.

This book is for any person who is neurodiverse (or suspects that they are neurodiverse) and wants to attain new levels of self-acceptance. Neurodiversity is a wide umbrella, including everyone from Autistics, to ADHDers, to people with Schizophrenia, brain injuries, or Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Though the book’s focus is masked Autistic people, I have found there is considerable overlap between Autistics and other neurodiverse groups. Many of us share mental health symptoms and traits and have overlapping or comorbid diagnoses. All of us have internalized mental illness stigma and felt the shame of deviating from what’s considered “normal.” Almost every person with a mental illness or disability has been crushed under the weight of neurotypical expectations, and has repeatedly tr...

When you stop judging yourself according to the neurotypical gaze, everything from your relationship norms and daily habits, to the way you dress yourself and design your home is free to change.

Peers detect there’s something unnameably “off” about them, and exclude them despite their best attempts at friendliness. When the child makes themselves small and inobtrusive, they’re granted some of the affection they desperately crave and never get enough of. So they do it more and more, quieting the voice inside themselves that says how they’re being treated isn’t fair. 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. 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.

In her final year of college, Crystal was required to oversee set design for the theater department’s biggest show of the year. Designing dozens of props, sourcing their materials, managing the building of them, and then keeping track of all the items in a big Google spreadsheet was simply too stressful for her to manage, especially while taking her final remaining classes. She pushed through, losing hair and losing weight, but once the project was completed, she collapsed. “After I graduated, I was in bed at my mom’s house for three months,” she says. “Didn’t apply to jobs. I barely showered, had all these McDonald’s wrappers on the floor of my bedroom, and my family still insisted I was just being lazy.”

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.

In addition to all the baseline cognitive and sensory challenges that came with Autism for Crystal, she was also having to put a lot of energy into always seeming “normal.” She constantly fought the urge to suck on her fingers, and when people spoke to her, she had to forcibly point her attention at their words and face.

Autistic people continue to grow in their social and emotional skills for much later in life than allistics tend to.

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. Throughout our brains, Autistic people have delayed and reduced development of Von Economo neurons (or VENs), brain cells that help with rapid, intuitive processing of complex situations.[15] Similarly, Autistic brains differ from allistic brains in how excitable our neurons are.[16] 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.

Autistic brains respond to our environments differently; whereas neurotypical brains are believed to readily adapt to the sensory and social input they receive from the outside world, Autistic brain development and pruning appears to be “disrupted.”[18]

Autistic people also exhibit less of what neuroscientists call global-to-local interference:[19] we are inclined to zero in on small details, even when those details don’t jibe with the overall “big picture” that a non-Autistic person might see. For example, one series of studies found that Autistic people are far better than allistics at copying down a drawing of a distorted 3-D object that couldn’t exist in real life.[20]

Together, all of this means that Autistic people tend to have the following qualities: 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

Allistic people often accuse us of overthinking things, or being too slow and hesitant to come up with a response. We also get overwhelmed when presented with mountains of data, which neurotypical people find much easier to just ignore.

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).

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. 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.

Autism can predispose a person to having fanatical interests (often referred to as special interests)[30] and to following rules very rigidly. Many of us have trouble identifying sarcasm or reading nonverbal signals. Disruptions to our routines or expectations can make us panic.

Repetitiveness is a key feature of Autistic behavior, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM). And it is true that many of us crave the stability that repetition provides.

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. We echo phrases from movies and TV because they help us emulate “normal” social behavior, or because we lack our own words for how we are feeling, or simply because the sounds feel pleasant to have vibrating in our vocal cords.

We’re at an elevated risk of eating disorders,[32] alcoholism and drug addiction,[33] and insecure attachments to others.

It co-occurs with other disabilities such as Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD)[38] and dyslexia at a high rate.

What unites us, generally speaking, is a bottom-up processing style that impacts every aspect of our lives and how we move through the world, and the myriad practical and social challenges that come with being different.

“My life as a parent was a battleground for various belief systems,” she writes,[43] “all of which

had one thing in common: an inability to come to terms with human variability.”