hiimshayn

When I was four, we moved back home from Alaska, where we had previously been living. My mom had to make a decision about what school to send me to, and she remembered how awful things had been for her growing up.

She remembered not fitting in and being labeled as weird or nonconforming. And she remembered being bored all the time.

She saw her bookish little daughter who liked strange outfits and had a fondness for words like “precipice” and she knew there was no way I was going to a public school. Between her and my grandma, they were able to pull together the funds to send me to a private school, where the student-to-teacher ratios were so skewed that they had to combine two grades into each classroom.

I don't remember much of my childhood, but I do remember some things.

Some things I remember that are consistent with neurodiversity:

• I remember my grandma calling me a tomboy because I liked climbing trees and disliked wearing dresses and skirts.
• I remember how mean my female cousin was, and how she used to use sarcasm and obscure pop culture references to make me feel weird or disliked.
• I remember reading “advanced” reading assignments in third and fourth grade because the assigned reading was too boring and easy.
• I remember hating multiplication because memorizing numbers lacked so much context: there wasn't any reason why 7x7 is 49, so how could I be expected to remember it?

The interesting thing, though, is that for a lot of masked or late-diagnosed autistic people, it seems like they had a different experience that led to their masking. A lot of them describe the process as lonely, frustrating, and confusing.

But for me, I feel like it was different.

I grew up with a mom who took the time to answer my questions and explain why people did seemingly random illogical things. She was always intentional in telling me that sometimes kids say cruel things or tell you you're weird. But that's okay. Being weird just means that you're interesting and unique. And that doesn't make you bad or broken.

Despite being labelled weird, I always had friends in school and I was generally considered popular (mostly because there were so few people in our school and it was a religious school that prioritized kindness and compassion, so it simply wasn't feasible to ostracize anyone).

The way I learned to mask was different from the experiences I've heard of from other autistics.

My mom explicitly taught me manners: how to speak if you don't want to hurt people's feelings. I knew I didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings, so I did what I was told, even if it didn't really make sense. I learned rules for how to talk to people.

The other ways I learned to mask were through teasing. I got teased a lot more when I displayed my ignorance of cultural things or when I was too literal or too imaginative about the wrong things. And I almost exclusively got teased by girls. The boys didn't tease me, but they would tease whichever boy spent the most time with me.

There was one interaction that's always stood out to me about the way I saw socializing. This one girl had come from a public school, so she was very competitive and mean-girl-esque. She was bratty and passive aggressive, and so I didn't really interact with her much if I could help it. For some reason, we had to interact for a while, and she kept getting more and more frustrated with me (I don't remember why). Finally, she huffed and said, as though it was an insult, “I don't like you!” And I replied, matter of factly, “That's okay. I don't like you either.”

Throughout all of this I learned some lessons about masking:

• People like you if you know about pop culture and social taboos
• People like you if you aren't blunt or direct
• People will think you're weird, and that's okay because they'll probably still be your friend (and anyone that doesn't want to be your friend is probably a jerk that you don't want to be friends with anyway)
• If you don't want to hurt people's feelings or offend people, you should learn the rules of what they expect and try to do those things as best you can

Because of all of this, I don't have the deep-seated depression or lack of self that I think a lot of other autistics have. I think my process of unmasking is less about “finding myself” or “defining myself” as it is a realization that I don't have to constantly bend over backwards to conform myself to society's expectations. I don't have to carry the exhausting burden of navigating social norms and unspoken rules of civility. Instead, I can ask that society accept me as I truly am and give me the benefit of the doubt. I can ask that society tell me the rules instead of expecting me to inherently know them.