Unmasking Autism: The Power of Embracing Our Hidden Neurodiversity (Unmasking Autism Series)

by Devon Price

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. Dorian couldn’t handle the pressure of such high expectations, or the lack of compassion. So they began to self-harm.

“What I got from this article was this girl made herself so close to death that her family were afraid they were going to lose her, and now she has all this love and support around her. And she doesn’t have to achieve anything, because she nearly died,”

When a friend on the debate team told me that I seemed like a “robot” because I never seemed to sleep, eat, or like people, I felt an immense sense of triumph. My mask was solid steel.

We often seek out clear “rules” for good behavior, which we then adhere to rigidly, hoping they will keep us socially safe and finally render us worthy.

When I was an undiagnosed Autistic teen, my brain was constantly buzzing with vague anxiety.

When he’s dissociating, he can still go through the motions of eating, bathing, and walking around, but mentally he’s not really there.

In the short term, mentally detaching works great. It frees up a lot of energy and attention, so we can focus on activities we’re good at, or think only about the ideas that capture our interest. But in the long term, retreating inward alienates us from our needs even more. Some research suggests that Autistic people have a diminished sense of agency; in other words, we feel less in control of ourselves and our bodies than non-Autistic people do.29 A lifetime of being corrected for incompetence and childishness affects our self-concept, and makes it hard for us to develop basic skills of self-advocacy or assertiveness.

result appeared to be driven by Autistic people trusting internal cues less: they didn’t trust their own feelings of whether they were in control or not, so much as external benchmarks of success in the game.

We rely on external signs of success (winning a game, getting praised by another person) to guide us, rather than trusting our perceptions and power of discernment.

signals. Research shows that most Autistic people have a reduced sense of the body’s warning signals, or interoception.31 Most of us tend to feel like our bodies are not really our own, and struggle to draw connections between the external world and how we feel inside.

An Autistic person might instead be lost in their own head, and fail to draw a connection between their coworkers departing and the need to check for hunger within themselves. It’s unclear how much this is caused by a neurological feature of Autism, and how much it’s a byproduct of masking and social pressure. After all, masked Autistics are socially conditioned to silence the physical needs we do notice.

Alexithymia may arise, in part, because Autistics aren’t given the tools to understand how emotions feel in our bodies, and because we are taught to prioritize others’ feelings above our own.

Today I’m sometimes able to notice in the heat of the moment that I’m uncomfortable with the topic of conversation, for instance, or the way someone is pushing me to do something I don’t wish to do, and I can tell them to stop; other days I simply feel panicky and frantic, and can’t figure out what’s wrong until hours or days later.

In digital communication, Autistic people get the time we need to carefully process a message, google any terms that are unfamiliar, and carefully reflect on how we might want to respond.

Thomas still carries the baggage of being fully masked and undiagnosed, and thinking he was simply a difficult or angry person. Over the years, though, he’s learned to push past this cultural programming and actually construct a life that’s authentic to him. Building that kind of self-knowledge and acceptance has been vital to his happiness and his sobriety.

“I enjoy hanging out in train yards, and learning ridiculous amounts of useless knowledge, and I’d rather work on jigsaw puzzles than watch TV. Because my life is aligned with who I am now, I have much less need to drink. Recovery is predicated on aligning your life with your values, and you aren’t going to be able to align anything until you know who you are.”

Thankfully, it is possible to step away from defining yourself by the approval of other people, and by your adherence to society’s rules.

In the average person’s mind, there is a singular image of how Autism presents in adults: a genius, almost always a man, who is blunt and direct to the point of cruelty.

To avoid embodying this trope, Autistic people fold ourselves into all kinds of accommodating shapes. We do what we can to not seem difficult, cruel, or self-absorbed. We internalize the message that talking about ourselves and our interests bores other people, that we’re socially inept and bad at reading emotions, and that our sensory needs make us big babies who never stop complaining. 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 res...

Finch writes that when he really wants to connect with another person, his instinct is to censor his real self and “mirror” the other person: “The more invested I was in an emotional connection, the less likely I was to criticize that person, vocalize when my boundaries were crossed, express unhappiness with their behavior, or share anything that I felt might damage that relationship.”

Autistic people are at an increased risk of domestic abuse, in part because we tend to be a bit gullible or overly trusting, and are quick to alter ourselves to placate others.58 When you’re trapped under the mask, all love feels conditional. It’s hard to know which needs are acceptable to voice. It’s also easy for us to feel responsible for serving as an intermediary or peacekeeper when any tension arises between other people, because for us, conflict can be very dangerous.

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.

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.

Ultimately, all masking is about setting our feelings aside so we can focus on pleasing others or conforming to social norms. This is always going to be a self-destructive values system to live by, regardless of the coping mechanisms we use to prop it up. Whether we use alcohol, excessive exercise, overwork, social isolation, codependency, or some other self-destructive strategies to help us blend in, it’s always going to be damaging to put social approval and “passing” as neurotypical above our actual needs.

Autistic people can learn to listen to ourselves again, challenge the shame society has pushed on us, and become radically visible and outspoken about the accommodations we require and deserve. It may be challenging and daunting to detach from years of reflexive, self-protective masking, but a life free from its confines is possible for us.

Painful labels they’d carried around inside themselves for years suddenly didn’t seem as relevant: it wasn’t that they were stupid, or clueless, or lazy, they were just disabled. It wasn’t that their efforts had never been enough, or that they were fundamentally wrong or bad. They simply hadn’t been treated with the compassion they deserved, or given the tools that would have allowed them to flourish. Naming their position in society as a disabled person helped them to externalize that which had long been internalized. It proved that none of their suffering had been their fault.

adopting an Autistic identity doesn’t instantly undo the habitual camouflaging and compensation that so many of us have had to default to. Much like the hypervigilance that’s common to trauma survivors with PTSD, masking is a reflex that comes out most intensely when we experience uncertainty or social threat.

accepting ourselves as Autistic does free many of us (perhaps for the first time) to question whether it’s fair that we be expected to live in such a concealed, apologetic way.

“noncompliance is a social skill.”7 It’s only “bad” if you’re looking at it from the outside, from the perspective of someone who seeks to control or restrict.

Bobbi was emotionally astute, even as a child. Their family disliked how skillfully they picked up on emotional manipulation, neglect, and abuse. “Sensitivity,” despite being a sign of attentiveness and discernment, is frowned upon when you’re good at detecting things people would rather you not see.

Usually we internalize messages that we’re bad, immature, cruel people only because the neurotypical people around us lacked the tools to look at our Autistic traits from the proper angle.

Another powerful step in the unmasking process is learning to reclaim our passions and special interests. Most of us have been stifling all our large feelings for years—not just distress and discomfort, but joy as well. By happily delving into our special interests and reveling in our Autistic capacity to hyperfocus, we can help retrain our brains to see our neurotype as a source of beauty rather than a mark of shame.

When it comes to special interests, Autistic brains are total sponges, absorbing facts and figures at a rate that seems kind of inhuman to neurotypical people. We can develop a special interest in nearly anything. Some of us learn to speak fluent Klingon; others memorize algorithms for solving Rubik’s cubes.

sponge. He just naturally gravitated to work that gave him ample time to sit alone, processing information.

So, even though sometimes I feel lonely and even though sometimes I feel like people misjudge me, it’s all kind of worth it, too.”

many Autistic people have trouble ignoring visual “noise,” to the degree it really disrupts our processing.2 Clutter can erode our focus, making it hard for us to think clearly or regulate our emotions.

you have dozens of collectible toys, for instance, you could put up a single shelf featuring your current favorites and store the rest away.

The schedules and work habits of Autistic people challenge the prevailing neurotypical, one-size-fits-all conception of time. Like Sue, many of us are able to complete a great deal of work in a single hyper-focused burst, though typically we’ll need much more rest and recovery in order to sustain such efforts.

Autistic people don’t necessarily thrive in judiciously balanced days where rest, work, and play are parceled out in equal amounts. Some of us operate best on boom-and-bust cycles of intense hyperfocus followed by recuperation time. I’ve had periods of my life where I’ve spent upwards of thirty hours per week writing and blogging, in addition to my day job, and found that pace incredibly exciting. Other times I’ve spent every free moment deep-reading random subreddits and blogs until my eyes felt like they were going to melt out of my skull. I loved every minute of it, and craved doing it again. When I’m swept up in a special interest, I feel alive. The concepts of “work-life” balance and “burnout” just don’t always translate to Autistic people’s schedules in the ways neurotypicals might expect. I’ve gotten intense burnout from periods of my life where I worked relatively little but socialized a lot, for example.

“Reframe failure as data,” Marta writes, “and everything changes.”

Because Autistic minds are all about understanding details and analyzing complex systems of information, it makes sense to think of our lives as fractal, forever expanding to new subjects and narrowing into precise focus at the same time.

Expand the time frame you use to gauge productivity and success. Take the “long view” of your life. Don’t be afraid to cycle back to old projects, or let a passion go when it’s not serving you.

Slow down. Stillness helps neurodivergent minds process the huge quantities of data we take

Many neurodiverse people suffer from Autistic inertia.24 The same heightened focus that makes us so good at studying our special interests for hours also makes it challenging for us to get off the couch and attend to the overflowing trash.

Almost every neurodiverse person I’ve spoken to has been deemed “lazy” numerous times by exasperated parents, teachers, and friends.

I don’t know any neurotypical people who sit at home googling how to pronounce words like bouillabaisse or injera so they don’t seem “weird” at a restaurant. But for Autistics, this level of scripting and pre-planning is normal.27 It gives us a comforting sense of mastery and control. However, when neurotypical people figure out we’ve put this much time and thought into activities that are “basic” to them, they tend to find it very off-putting. So for masked Autistics, blending in isn’t just a matter of figuring out the right hacks. We also learn to hide the fact we’re relying on such hacks at all.

Sasson and colleagues (2017), for example, found that neurotypical people quickly and subconsciously identify that a stranger is Autistic, often within milliseconds of meeting them.29 They don’t realize that they’ve identified the person as Autistic, though; they just think the person is weird.

Inauthenticity and a forced-seeming social performance rubs neurotypicals the wrong way.

The creepiness factor they developed included the following traits: a person having awkward, unpredictable behavior, an unnatural-looking smile, laughter that occurred at “unnatural” times, speaking for too long about a single topic, and not knowing when to end a conversation.