Masking with romantic partners is certainly exhausting, yes. I had one relationship where, in retrospect, I was definitely doing that. The strange thing is, the person I was dating was also autistic, and I wasn't yet diagnosed at the time. I think it's a large part of why that relationship ultimately failed.
I think a key part is, if you're masking almost all the time, it can be very hard to unlearn that and learn to release.
Diagnosed Aspy who needs to go off. I work at a big-box store. In october, my manager said to my face, "since you are full-time, you now qualify for benefits." Key words in that phrase: You. Are. Full-time. Now, I find out that it was all a lie, and the store manager is taking her side. To the point of threatening me with firing. I admit, I could have handled the situation better, but I should not have been in that situation in the first place.
Ableds will never know what it's like to have someone tell your mother, "We didn't hire him because we don't think he has the capability to pour the right amount of cleaner into a bucket," the fact that you have a B.S. in chemistry be damned. They don't know what it's like to have a manager hire you, not train you properly, and fire you for a disability, and you have no legal recourse because you only stated verbally. I live like an abused animal, waiting in fear for life to kick me again, just because I wasn't born right. I... I just give up. I'm done fighting.
Forward, boys! For God's sake, forward!Justice eyes court reforms to serve those on autism spectrum
“The juvenile was nonresponsive. I asked him to look me in the eye and he wouldn’t,” Dougherty told The York Dispatch. “I was finding his behaviors as being incorrigible and borderline delinquent.”
It was Dougherty’s job that day as a Philadelphia court judge to determine the disposition of the young man’s case, he said, and thankfully the juvenile’s mother was a strong advocate for her son.
She explained that her son wasn’t being defiant — he had autism and couldn’t respond in the way the judge expected him to, he recalled.
“I had viewed myself as a forward-thinking judge and was pretty much humiliated and embarrassed,” the justice said.
Seeking change: Now, as a justice on Pennsylvania’s highest court, Dougherty wants to see change throughout the commonwealth that allows courts to better understand and serve those on the autism spectrum, he said, whether they be defendants, victims, witnesses, jurors or other participants.
I hope this spreads to other places as well. The idea of an autistic person in a courtroom having justice denied to them because their behaviors or presentation are misinterpreted is upsetting. Also, I notice he says he wants jurors to be well understood as well. I know someone who had a bad experience on jury duty, where the other jurors just didn't like her. Stuff like this needs to change, and some of that change is occurring in Pennsylvania.
Another article about how autistics come across in the courtroom.
"If you ask most people how they determine if someone is not telling the truth, they will often refer to lack of eye contact or fidgety behavior," says lead author Dr Alliyza Lim.
It's good to see more attention being drawn towards this. Individually, issues affecting us seem to be addressed one by one.
When Eye Contact Hurts
. Finding eye contact uncomfortable is a mega common autism trait.
From my experience, that is so true.
No, of course not. You can't force people to go totally against their continued instincts.
Years ago, I was interviewed by a committee for a prestigious program in neuroscience at my university. I had explicitly been asked to apply for the program since I was one of the top students in my year. Job interviews are a nightmare for most people, and even more so for autistic people. This interview definitely felt like a nightmare to me! I couldn’t make eye contact at all and felt horrible throughout it. Afterwards I beat myself up for doing such a poor job. A short while later I found out that one of the professors in the committee was hesitant to accept me into the program because I had come across as socially immature and therefore wouldn’t be a great “poster boy” for the program. I only made it into the program because my mentor convinced the committee to let me give a presentation about the research project I had been doing in his lab. This happened in 2005, but it still hurts that that professor initially judged me for my social skills rather than my academic ones.
Anyway, just a few highlights from this blog post.
Edited by BonsaiForest on Apr 2nd 2021 at 12:51:07 PM
As I've mentioned previously, I'm not diagnosed, but I do recognize finding eye contact extremely uncomfortable. I've never liked looking people in the eye, not even family members, and I don't know if it's merely a personality quirk of mine (Could be) or indicative of some undiagnosed disorder.
A paper on how autism self advocates are influencing the conversation about autism. There is a lot here!
A ton of promotion of the idea that autism self-advocates should play a major role in things such as autism intervention for children (including non-speaking children), and autism research.
My fixations get weirdly specific lately. I end up rewatching the same compilations every night of stuff I never really cared about before. Like the Michigan J. Frog bumpers for The WB or Press Your Luck Whammy compilations. It's not full blown enough to be a special interest (and they're both pretty barebones in terms of, like, lore to care about) so it's just annoying.
Edited by mightymewtron on Apr 26th 2021 at 3:47:12 PM
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.Highly visible autistic people carry certain responsibilities. Fairly or not, many non-autistic people often start comparing the rest of us to them. I have been informed more than once about the existence of Temple Grandin, as though her success is supposed to make me feel better. Or something.
I wonder if I and other autistic people will now told that we can be like Elon Musk. To which I say: no thanks!
My message to Elon is this: If you want to be enthusiastically welcomed into the autistic community, act like a member of our community. Stop using the “Asperger’s” language. Familiarize yourself with the issues facing less privileged members of our community, and pass the mic over to them. And, for goodness’ sake, stop promoting sci-fi solutions to our problems.
From an article on The Thinking Person's Guide to Autism.
Edited by BonsaiForest on May 13th 2021 at 6:12:16 AM
A movie review of "The Mitchells vs. the Machines"
which implies that the main characters have autism, and it's portrayed positively and even used as the reason they are able to save the world.
I'll quote.
The film doesn’t completely avoid the difficulties of their neurodivergence either. Katie is noticeably lonely, which fuels her excitement to attend film school and hopefully find “her people.” The potential for intense interests is often a privilege that provides a space of safety and excitement, but it can be both frustrating and disheartening when those interests alienate you or make it difficult to connect because of a lack of common interest. When Katie is unable to interest her father in her video work, she becomes visibly upset, and Aaron is seen phoning every number in the local phone book one by one in the hopes that someone will want to talk about dinosaurs. These desperate attempts to share in mutual enjoyment of a beloved subject are a desire for community, which can be a struggle when you find yourself on the fringes of wider society, a common experience for disabled people.
I had very similar thoughts. Everybody clocked Katie as gay very quickly into the movie, but I also clocked her as autistic within the first four minutes.
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.Or just have an autistic character without going on a big Author Tract about how autism works. Autistic people can exist without it being our whole thing. The only time I've ever actually liked a lesson about autism was the "alien planet" metaphor in Arthur.
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.Doesn't necessarily have to be an Author Tract, but little things said here or there. I realize that if done wrong, it can be very annoying, but I do think the public needs to be educated somehow. The tricky part is finding the right balance. Maybe show the traits, have the characters say "I've always been like this" or "this is just how I think" or such, then at the end say they have autism. Something like that.
I'd like a good balance of shows having a Very Special Episode about autism and shows that just have autistic characters passively mention being autistic, with their character being informed by autism but otherwise having standard plots.
I want representation, but I don't want it to be entirely in the context of teaching allistic people to treat us like human being, you know? I want characters who are openly autistic but also just, like, characters.
Edited by mightymewtron on Jun 22nd 2021 at 9:34:48 AM
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.I definitely got autism vibes from The Mitchells vs the Machines, yeah.
I agree I'd like more shows where characters are explicitly autistic but they don't make a huge deal out of it.
I think a good way of explaining things is just to have the autistic character explain it to an allistic character. That way things can be pretty explicit but it can still be pretty brief.
I tend to prefer characters who aren't canonically autistic or even "neuroatypical/autistic coded" but have traits associated with autism by coincidence and are headcanoned as autistic (Like Jotaro), because the people who started the headcanons are generally autistic themselves (and many of them have posts on websites like Tumblr going into detail on the character's autistic traits), I'd say something like Jojo is more mainstream than the average show with a canonical autistic character who is seen as good representation by the majority of autistic people so it's easier to explain autism to someone who isn't familiar with using someone like Jotaro than someone like Entrapta, and in a case like Jotaro it's very unlikely the author was intending for the character to have autistic traits so those characters are less likely to fall into stereotypes. Even autistic characters by autistic writers can have cliches, especially those from 5-10 years ago because there were so few good representations of autism that the bad representations got into the public consciousness. I have about five autistic OCs and all but one of them were intended to be autistic very early on in their creation. One of them happened to have some autistic traits and I was like "Why not?" and now they're my favorite of the five.
I found a study
about camouflaging in autistic people. 17 autistic adults in the UK were asked to have a 10-minute conversation with an allistic on camera, and then watch the footage and point out the forms of social mimicry/camouflaging they engaged in to try to appear "normal."
And what were found, was 38 distinct categories of social mimicry.
I'll link directly to the chart itself
◊ if you'd like to read it, but here are some that stuck out to me:
Facial expressions - altering facial expressions so these appear more similar to neurotypical facial expressions
Speech intonation - changing the tone of one's voice or the emphasis placed on words to sound more conventional or typical
Scripts - use an established repertoire of phrases, comments, questions or anecdotes that are pre-planned or practiced, or have previously been well received by others
HOLY SHIT! I mean, yeah, I get that mimicry is basically survival - it helps you keep jobs, friendships (albeit friendships with people who like the fake person you're pretending to be rather than the genuine autistic that you actually are), and avoid being bullied or mistreated. But copying facial expressions and relying on scripts sounds like hell.
And indeed, autistic people have reported this uses a lot of mental energy, and it's harder to do these things under stress. The study is about that as well.
Anyway, check out the full study if you want to read more.

Regarding autistic masking and ableism, I'm pretty sure this is how my parents think about me. I'm sure they'd blame me being trans or asexual or a hater of shoes on my being gullible because I'm "special needs." They've already thought that way based on me being—and I thinking I was—bisexual, and it's part of the reason they don't really trust me on the internet.
Yes, I'm autistic and neurodivergent. But I'm not stupid or gullible or [insert ableist slur here]. To say that the best thing for an autistic person to do is to mask themself is simply ableist rhetoric that discourages individuality. I am me, not anyone else.
Edited by TheWhistleTropes on Feb 27th 2021 at 8:22:43 AM
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