Unmasking My Autistic Self Part One: The Smiling

This is scary to write.

A lot of people know me and love me as a very outgoing, happy, smiley, DELIGHTED to talk to anyone kinda gal.

And I am here to say that she is a carefully crafted persona that I had absolutely no idea I was crafting until it became exhausting to be her.

Please don’t hang up.

I DIGRESS: AS PER USUAL

This past April, at the age of 44 (gasp! I know: thanks for the good skin genes, mom) I realized that I am autistic. I think this is exceptionally cool because it makes A LOT of things in my life make A LOT of sense, and I’ll be unpacking a lot of it here on the blog. Just for funzies, I already wrote you a little something about my autism and my work.

And if you are wondering “dear lord, how/why is she just so… open?!” well, there’s a post coming about that too.

I decided almost right away that I was going to be really open about my diagnosis and about my life as an autistic person. There are so many misconceptions about autism, and it presents differently in every single person, and if I can use my little platform to shed some awareness and help ease the stigma even one tenth of one percent, I will feel good. AND ALSO: unmasking.

SAY WHAT NOW?

Masking is a behavior or set of behaviors that autistic people adopt in order to present themselves in a certain light. Let it be known that autistic folks are not the only ones who do this; I know lots of friends with chronic illness, or varying forms of neurodivergence who have a way of behaving around others that is designed to protect them a little bit from stigma, if at all possible. In the process of uncovering my diagnosis, I took an assessment designed to help you figure out how much you are in the habit of masking. And my score was really really high. I mean, I had been masking my autism SO HARD my whole life that I didn’t know I was autistic until my mid-40’s. So that’s a thing. But what stopped me in my tracks is that there’s pretty compelling data that the longer and harder you mask, the more profound the impact on your mental health. You work so hard hiding what you’re really like and who you really are and that really takes a toll. And I was feeling it.

There are a lot of reasons why people mask, but in my case, a lot of it had to do with:
- social anxiety and
- internalized ableism.

So fun! Let’s get in there.

SOCIAL ANXIETY: EVERYONE’S FAVE

So I have what people used to call “resting bitch face.” I really hope we don’t say that to anyone anymore. My default face is a relatively slack, what to me feels like neutral expression. Can’t help but point out that men are allowed to have whatever face they have, but since I was born in a female presenting body, I also have rules about my effing face give me an effing break.

Sadly, my face is the most neutral when I am trying to listen or learn something or concentrate really hard. Where do these activities occur? School! That wonderful place of nurturing and dreams and mutual kindness from peer to peer. Lol. So here I am in high school, just trying to learn shit and mind my own business, when people start asking me “do you ever smile?” and “oh my god are you mad right now?” and whatever else they could think of that generally conveyed a message of you are doing face wrong.

Couple this with my first job, which was at Hersheypark! And bless them for giving me a job and teaching me about work, but it had a corporate atmosphere because it’s a huge place with lots of employees, and in one of our trainings they stressed the importance of EYE CONTACT when speaking with guests at the park.

So here is a very tall teen with very bad feelings about herself and a neutral (bitchy?) face who now knows that THE RULE IS EYE CONTACT and therefore I MUST EYE CONTACT BETTER THAN ANYONE EVER. I will absolutely and completely admit that coming from me, this is intense and way too much, and not that pleasant. So then I figured out people will let you eye contact them if you are also SMILING. If you are keeping score at home, this is two masking behaviors: deciding to hold eye contact even when I don’t wanna, and then attempting to make that eye contact more pleasant for the other person by smiling. I assumed that this would make me seem “normal,” “pleasant,” “professional,” and maybe at the very least less freaking weird.

Fast forward to college where almost everyone I became friends with told me “I thought you were the biggest bitch when I met you,” which sent me a signal that MAYDAY MAYDAY WE NEED MORE SMILING ALL OF THE TIME EVERYONE HATES YOU. Cue mega smiling against my own will. For a person who always felt like an outsider and never had a lot of friends, this felt essential if I was ever going to have a chance at being liked. (the moment where she reveals a deep existential fear that shapes daily existence)

Okay this part is hard.

INTERNALIZED ABLEISM

Uck.

So it’s a complex issue, but in the simplest terms, ableism is discriminating against people with disabilities, or treating people with disabilities like they have some sort of “problem” that needs to be “fixed.” You might think that a person with a disability would never be ableist because then hey! You’re just, like, fighting against yourself! But that’s the pervasiveness of ableism in our culture: even people with disabilities can feel less than, feel othered, feel like a burden, feel like it’s their own fault; we are taught that having a disability is a problem: it’s something wrong with you. You become needy and difficult and you need accommodations or support and oh God why are you so DIFFICULT.

When I was growing up, eight hundred and fifty years ago, we just barely started hearing about ADHD. We really, really did not know anything about neurodivergence. At my tiny Catholic school, I don’t even think we had any educational support services… was there a speech person maybe? Maybe some reading interventions? In any event, I presented as “smart.” I could memorize things and get good grades. Beyond that, anything else I was doing was just because I was a weird kid. And I tried as hard as I could to act what I thought was “normal” or at least try to be more like the other kids so nobody would think I was “dumb,” and HEAVEN FORBID if I were to be categorized as a “BAD KID.” I’m using quotes for all of these words because they reveal where my thinking was kind of gross, and there are a lot of unfair and unkind stereotypes. We all knew who the “bad kids” were, and they persisted in being labelled that way all the way through high school. Sorry “bad kids.” Probably many of them had undiagnosed ADHD but what do I know. I could learn but not really be social. I never really understood “girl stuff” and some of the activities that my classmates enjoyed. I always felt like an outsider and begain to internalize the message that I had a lot of problems and was generally not a likeable person. I irritated and offended numerous teachers. Le sigh.

So I tried really hard to just act “normal” because I somehow got the message that presenting any other way would get me labelled in a way that was derogatory. I was mildly okay with everyone thinking I was weird but otherwise I made up for the weirdness by getting good grades and being involved in way too much stuff and being really good at a lot of things so that people would think I was smart/weird (acceptable) and not just WEIRD WEIRD (MAYDAY mayday not okay).

SO NOW: THE UNSMILING

I know I’m autistic.

I know I get really tired when I have to fake smiling. Like, it hurts the muscles in my neck and jaw.

I know that I absolutely do genuinely smile, probably even a lot of the time.

I also know that I don’t feel like pretending to be anyone or anything that I’m not anymore. If people want to have feelings about my face, those are their own feelings and I don’t have to be in charge of those or take responsibility for them.

I smile when I wanna.

When my brain and body get really overwhelmed, I am less inclined to smile. This doesn’t mean that I’m a bitch, or that I’m a mean person. I know for a fact that I am a deeply caring and nice person. And now I am going to practice caring for myself by only smiling when I actually want to.