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

by Devon Price

“Reframe failure as data,” Marta writes, “and everything changes.” Marta encourages neurodiverse people to think of progress not as approaching a fixed point that lies ahead of us, but as movement and adaptation, slowing down and speeding up as our situation requires.

It’s scary to allow ourselves to disappoint other people, but it can be radical and liberating, too. Admitting what we can’t do means confronting the fact we have a disability, and therefore we occupy a marginalized position in society—but it also is an essential part of finally figuring out what assistance we need, and which ways of living are best for us. You have to be able to say no to certain unreasonable expectations in order to genuinely say “yes” to the things you care about.

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. To an external, neurotypical observer, it doesn’t look like we’re struggling. It just looks like we’re being “lazy.”

Being more radically visible is also an exercise in unlearning shame.

What is radical visibility? It’s an approach to LGBT and disabled acceptance that emphasizes and celebrates that which is usually obscured. It lays claim to words that have been used to dehumanize our communities—queer, cripple, mad—and wears them defiantly, as a source of pride. Radical visibility presents tools such as canes and prostheses as enviable fashion accessories. It renders our differences cool.

Radical visibility, in other words, is absolutely antithetical to masking. Where masking conceals, radical visibility steps into the limelight. Where masking scans the environment constantly for signs of social threat, and reins in the unruly stims and tics of the Autistic body, radical visibility encourages it to simply be. A masker gets their needs met in private, through a serious of apologetic half measures and veiled coping mechanisms; a radically visible person openly declares who they are and what they require, because it’s what they deserve.

At its core, both unmasking and radical visibility are about dropping the façade of compliant neurotypicality, and learning to live openly and honestly as oneself. That is primarily a change in how we express ourselves and our needs to other people.

Radical visibility is self-advocacy, as well as self-expression.

Unmasking requires we stop relying on neurotypical people’s acceptance in order to guide how we should act—and that means sometimes doing the “right” thing even when we know it will rub others the wrong way. Most masked Autistics need a lot of practice developing a strong sense of discernment, which is essentially using our own beliefs and perceptions to guide our behavior, rather than deferring to everyone else’s fleeting reactions and impressions. Maskers tend to get very distressed when people are unhappy with us, because disapproval has been so dangerous and painful for us in the past. Many of us will do nearly anything to keep other people satisfied.

Maskers are highly dependent on the opinions and feelings of other people.

normal and healthy to be considerate toward other people, but masked Autistics tend to devote so much energy to people pleasing that we have almost no cognitive space left to think about (or listen to) ourselves. It also impedes us from connecting with people in a genuine way. You have to really recognize a person’s emotions—good and bad—and respond to them honestly in order to forge a bond.

As adults, people who are anxious-ambivalent tend to get into patterns of intense emotional dependency, combined with insecurity. They yearn to be accepted yet doubt that they can be. When other people try to connect with us, we rebuff them without even realizing it.

started assuming that if someone took an interest in me, it was because they wanted to fix me for their own amusement, or because they thought I was useful.

It’s challenging for Autistic people to tell the difference between friends who genuinely like us, and superficial acquaintances who are responding favorably to our masks. One way to probe the difference, though, is to look at people who have stuck around when you haven’t been perfect.

For many Autistic people, including Reese, self-acceptance looks less like flawless and serene self-love and more like a “fuck it, let them deal with it” attitude that helps her shake off the desire to hide. She’s willing to be honest about who she is—even if it scares off potential roommates who would have been a bad fit. Slowly, she’s come to let go of neurotypical benchmarks for measuring her life.

The medical model understands disability as a condition that exists inside an individual person’s body or mind. If you’re disabled, you personally have a problem that must be identified, diagnosed, and then either treated or cured. The purpose of medicine and psychiatry is to identify what is wrong with people and prescribe some kind of intervention that will make the symptoms of that wrongness go away.

The medical model of disability has given many of us (and most of our doctors and therapists) the idea that human suffering is best understood as a problem to be fixed through individual changes.

Where the medical model of disability fails is in making sense of disabilities that come from social exclusion or oppression.

the social model of disability, originally coined in the 1980s by disabled academic Mike Oliver.2 In his writing, Oliver described disability as a political status, one that is created by the systems that surround us, not our minds and bodies. A

Having a social disability goes hand in hand with the obligation to mask.

At present, the Autistic people (or anyone who is neurodiverse) who have the greatest freedom to unmask are the ones who otherwise have the most powerful social position.

But their disabilities aren’t more medically severe than my own. They’re just more socially disabled than I am, with less social power and freedom, and that takes a real toll.

As the psychiatric anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker writes in his titular book, Nobody’s Normal, our current definition of mental health is tied to the state and employers’ desire for productive, inoffensive conformity.6

Many people who are categorized today as disabled or mentally ill might have functioned just fine outside of an industrialized capitalist economy.

By reworking society to make it more flexible and accommodating of difference, we can improve the mental and physical health of all people. In this way, unmasking is a political goal. It requires we place value on all human life, no matter a person’s abilities or needs, and view society as a social system that exists to care for all people—not an apparatus to make everyone as productive as possible.

It’s not enough for Autistic people to be tolerated at stores and restaurants. We need to be given equal footing (relative to neurotypical people) in volunteer positions, in the workplace, and in our churches, community centers, and gyms.

Notably, getting to this place requires justice be attained for all marginalized people—it’s not enough for white Autistic people to be treated as equal to white neurotypical coworkers; Black people, women, trans people, immigrants, and other oppressed groups must be at equal footing as well.

When looked at through a medical, individual lens, a push for greater mental health can quickly warp into demanding compliance. So if we are to create a world where all Autistic people of all backgrounds are able to unmask, we have to remove the systems of power that might violently punish those who fail or refuse to conform.

All the self-affirmations and radical visibility practices in the world cannot overcome economic injustice, racism, transphobia, or profound social exclusion. We have to fight to create a more just, accepting, and supportive world for all people if we wish for everyone to be free to unmask.

When a masked Autistic person lacks self-knowledge or any kind of broad social acceptance, they are often forced to conceive of themselves as compartmentalized, inconsistent parts. Here is the person I have to be at work, and the person I must be at home. These are the things I fantasize about doing but can’t tell anybody about. Here are the drugs that keep my energy levels up, and the lies I tell to be entertaining at parties. These are the tension-defusing distractions I’ll deploy when someone begins to suspect there’s something off about me.

In my experience, being a masked Autistic is eerily similar to being in the closet about being gay or trans. It’s a painful state of self-loathing and denial that warps your inner experience. Though it often feels like being “crazy,” it’s not actually an internal neurosis. It’s caused by society’s repeated, often violent insistence you are not who you say you are, and that any evidence to the contrary is shameful.

The opposite of alienation is integration, a psychological sense of connection and wholeness.1 People whose identities are integrated can see a through-line connecting the many selves they have been across various times and places. Every human being changes over time, of course, and alters their behavior depending on the situation or setting they’re in. There is no static “true self” that stops adapting and changing. To a masked Autistic person, this fact can be really disturbing, because we may lack a consistent “story” to tell ourselves about who we really are. Our personalities are just means to an end, externally motivated rather than driven by some internal force or desire. Someone with an integrated identity isn’t disturbed by change and variance, though, because they see a connection that endures across the many people they have been: core values that persist across their life span, and a narrative of personal growth that explains how they moved from the person they once were, to who they are today.

It’s striking to me how compatible the redemptive self is with the process of unmasking. The redemptive self essentially is an unmasked Autistic self: unashamed of one’s sensitivity, profoundly committed to one’s values, passionately driven by the causes ones cares about, strong enough to self-advocate, and vulnerable enough to seek connection and aid. A person with an integrated, redemptive sense of self knows who they are, and isn’t ashamed of it.