Nice to Meet You!: Remembering Who You Are Beyond Masking: By Amanda Briones Marrero (@amandabrionesmarrero)
My official autism diagnosis does not include stereotypies. Everything else, yes, but not that. In fact, most of the DSM criteria that I meet were identified after a detailed evaluation, as no one would notice at first glance that I might have any social or sensory sensitivities, for example. This is because my masking abilities are so refined that it was only after 29 years and several conversations with a good friend—who is a psychologist, autistic, and ADHDer (thanks, Silvia)—that I suspected my apparent quirks had a common root: being born autistic without knowing it.
Nowadays, the spectrum is officially divided into three levels, as if it were a video game that separates the gifted from the non-gifted (note my sarcastic tone, which you might not notice if we were talking in person, because my sense of humor is not very normative). It would be reasonable to think that being “classified” at level 1, I have gone unnoticed as autistic until now, a time when there is more knowledge and tools about neurodivergence, especially in people of diverse genders. I myself have come to think that. But, again, this is not true.
Going back to the beginning of this post, it turns out that I do (or did) have stereotypies, and some of the most common ones, according to the neurotypical view that captures autism through “symptoms.” Recently, I found an old home video of myself at barely one or two years old. In that video, I was sitting on a floral sofa, very much in the style of a 90s house, and I was rhythmically and strongly rocking back and forth while making a regular sound. The curious thing is that I didn’t seem sick, abnormal, crazy, or weird—I clearly looked happy, even very happy (autistic joy!). Now comes the sad part: not only did I stop doing that movement entirely, but I also forgot that I had ever done it, to the point that during my evaluation, almost three decades after that video, I stated that I didn’t believe I had any stereotypies and even rejected the stimming toys that were offered to me to be more comfortable during the questions.
That inaccuracy in the evaluation is not the most important thing itself. First, because self-diagnosis is valid, and official reports simply help us obtain institutional validation, which unfortunately is necessary to navigate a neurotypical world where neurodivergent people, though numerous, are considered the exception. Second, because even without that trait, the DSM still considers me perfectly autistic, so there are no significant differences. The reason I bring up this anecdote is that when we mask all the time, almost intuitively, we may come to believe that the mask is a reality that exhaustively represents our entire being. If I forgot that rocking that brought me so much joy, what else might I have forgotten? How many of us have fragmented our identity into so many pieces that we wouldn’t be able to put the puzzle back together? And what do we do with that mask that has become a prosthesis, inseparable from our skin? Do we discard it completely, or keep it to defend ourselves when necessary? Masking is adaptive in many situations where we want to survive. But surviving is not living, even though for many autistic people, these verbs might be synonymous. Masking modifies and even suppresses identities that were and are valid and beautiful, but unacceptable to the norms of conventionality.
Masking, therefore, though sometimes useful, is a harmful practice that many autistic people want to deconstruct. And it’s also something we share with those socialized in femininity and gender nonconformists, as we have become keen social observers to imitate certain patterns and roles with which we believed we would go unnoticed and be accepted (though often, even this didn’t work).
However, I would like to propose a twist. The harm of masking is already done, and with it, probably traumatic experiences and self-denial that may take a long time to disappear. But with the help of supportive networks and neuro-affirmative therapy, perhaps we can turn our post-diagnosis journey into an opportunity to reconnect with who we were in a past life, when the weight of prejudices had not yet taken a toll on us. Reconnecting with our inner child is far from a cliché. For me, it’s a recovery and reaffirmation of an identity that was denied to us and that we can now reclaim with joy.
