The power and the pain of autistic unmasking

From the time we're very young, we're trained to disbelieve, ignore, and betray our autistic nervous system.

Don't be such a picky eater. Look at me when I'm talking to you. Stop being so sensitive. Everyone else is doing {the thing}, why can't you?

The list goes on and on.

All those messages are introduced to us so early and reinforced to us so often that eventually we don't even need someone else's voice broadcasting those messages to us; we have them playing on repeat in our mind, in our own voice.

We absorb the messages and adopt them as our own. They simply become part of how we understand ourselves.

And then years later, once we come to understand ourselves as autistic, at some point we begin to realize that these messages were actually planted like seeds within us and took root.

Every day they grew the distance between who we really are and who we come to believe ourselves to be.

The size of that gap – the distance between our true self and the version of our self that we've been trained to believe is real – becomes the wound we start to recognize once we understand ourselves as autistic.

And that wound is what we each are now working to heal.

Community with other autistic people is powerful because it enables us to hold up a mirror to one another. As we listen to each other's stories, we're better able to understand and recognize and distinguish the difference between our true self and the self we've been trained to believe is real.

This yields incredible pain as well as incredible power.

Pain because the more clearly you see the distance between your true, authentic self and the neurotypically acceptable version of your self, the bigger you recognize the wound to be. There is so much to grieve.

And power because this newfound awareness of the gap means that you get to make countless choices every day that each moves you closer either to your true self or to your fabricated self.

You get to choose.

Over and over, you get to choose.