Unmasking for Life

Unmasking for Life

Introduction

From Unmasking Autism to Unmasking Life

I first found out that I was Autistic in 2014, when I was twenty-five years old. I’d known very little about Autism up to that point, despite having completed a PhD in psychology. I mostly viewed the disability the same way the average person did: a condition of three-year-old boys who were obsessed with baseball statistics or trains. Even in some graduate-level clinical classes, I’d heard ignorant, stereotypical myths about Autism: that Autistic people lacked any interest in forming friendships, for example, and that they were incapable of compassion. I’d heard that Autism was always a very obviously debilitating burden, and that there was essentially no hope of Autistics ever leading fulfilling lives. Though I’d struggled to form healthy relationships, live independently, and experience happiness of my own, I’d never considered that the Autism label had anything to do with me.

What I didn’t realize then was that Autism is actually a complex developmental disorder, one that shapes every aspect of how a person processes information and makes sense of the world around them. I didn’t understand, for example, that Autistic people take in sensory data in a bottom-up fashion, rather than the efficient top-down way many non-Autistics (also known as allistics) do. For example, laboratory studies have used eye-tracking technology to observe that Autistic people, when presented with a photo of a person’s face and asked to judge what emotion the person in the photo is feeling, look at all the individual components of the face equally, and carefully: their gaze darts from the mouth to the nose to the eyes, forehead, and chin, processing each feature and trying to piece together what the person might be feeling. Non-Autistic people, in contrast, look at the face as a whole, and recognize emotions on an intuitive level at a glance.1 Because Autistics typically can’t see this top-down “picture” of an emotion, we instead have to memorize what specific arrangements of face parts might mean (for example, that wide eyes could mean either fear or aggression).

This bottom-up processing style also explains why we Autistics find it so much more stressful to be in loud or visually busy spaces compared to most allistics, whose brains instinctively filter out unwanted distractions in ways ours cannot. It is also the reason Autistics need far more time to figure out how to behave in an unfamiliar situation. But sometimes our processing style works to our advantage: studies show that we make fewer errors than non-Autistics when faced with complicated logic problems. I didn’t know my brain processed things more effortfully, precisely, and slowly than many other people’s brains when I was growing up. All I knew was that other people seemed to move so quickly, driven by instincts I couldn’t follow. By my teenage years, I chalked up my confusion and detachment to my being a misanthrope.

I also didn’t understand that many Autistic people desperately crave close relationships but have trouble forming them, because many of us cannot read facial expressions, hear differences in tone of voice, or comprehend the indirectness of sarcasm and small talk. I’d just figured other people were worse communicators than me, and I had no time for their irrationality.

I had no clue that my childhood inability to ride a bike or write in cursive could be linked to Autistic fine motor deficits, or that the furious rage I felt when a meeting dragged on longer than expected was due to an Autistic need for predictability and structure. Finally, I didn’t understand that my inability to recognize my own emotions or bodily needs (such as hunger or tiredness) was because I’d been masquerading as neurotypical for my entire life, stuffing down all the voices inside me that were constantly clamoring for softer clothes, darker rooms, less cluttered spaces, more intense flavors, and an explanation for what the hell was going on around me at all times.

I spent many years of my life believing that I was an unfeeling robot who could never love or be loved by other people, and camouflaging every moment of discomfort and confusion I ever experienced. Then I finally received the gift of learning I was Autistic, after a relative’s diagnosis set off a chain reaction of self-examination, research, and embedding myself within the Autistic self-advocacy community. I realized then that my grumpy, misanthropic exterior was how I’d survived in a painfully unaccommodating world. All my anger, all my coldness and judgment, the aloof walls I put up to keep people from taking advantage of my naivete—it was all masking, an attempt at hiding my disability that many undiagnosed Autistic people take part in.

As I learned more about Autism and got to know myself as a disabled person a bit better, decades of emotional repression and complex trauma burst from deep within. Suddenly I became a person who called in sick to work for the sake of my mental health, and cried myself to sleep at night while clutching stuffed animals. I stopped wearing painfully tight skirt suits and chopped off my long, scratchy hair; I began working alone in the dark at odd hours and climbing underneath the bed to hide when ambulances blared too loudly on my street. These were things I had always craved doing but had feared would make me seem pathetic, childish, or attention-seeking.

Discovering that I was Autistic gave me the freedom to behave in a more obviously Autistic way, and my life improved immensely. My chronic anemia went away, as I learned to feed myself the heavily seasoned, burnt-to-a-crisp meals that my palate could tolerate. The quality of my writing got better, as I stopped trying to hide what made my thinking unique. I started dressing the way I’d always wanted to dress, sitting the way I wanted to sit, and I became more outgoing and expressive about topics that interested me. I took a more active interest in other people, finally asking them why they felt the way they did and believed the things they believed. I didn’t have to pretend to naturally understand other people anymore. By being so openly curious, I found it far easier to make friends. I worked less, I slept more, and I started trying an array of new hobbies and experiences just for the sake of better knowing myself and studying how other people behaved. Slowly, a work. Often it was quite unpopular with others who didn’t “get” me, or who were deeply invested in conformity to the neurotypical ideal. Powerful institutions like the federal government, the education system, and my employer had created policies that rewarded people for living in conventional ways, so I was systematically discouraged from diverging from the “normal” path. Still, I knew I had to keep at it. There was no returning to the state of ignorance and self-hatred I’d been in when I was masked.

To build an existence that worked with my Autism rather than against it, I needed extensive self-advocacy tools, scripts for negotiating with other people, resources for taking care of myself and those I cared about, and the courage to believe I genuinely deserved any of it. Today, in my late thirties with a steady support system, a plan for the future, and vast reserves of self-acceptance that I’d never believed were possible for me, I can say all this planning and self-advocacy was completely worth it. I wasn’t able to fully live when I was masquerading as a neurotypical person and quietly hating myself for my difference. Now I am vibrantly alive, and connected, and I get to author the rules for my own existence.