🧠What it means to have grown up on the autism spectrum
Growing up on the autism spectrum meant learning to live in two different worlds—your authentic neurodivergent self and the exhausting performance of appearing neurotypical.
You may have received constant messages that your natural behaviors, sensory experiences, and communication patterns were wrong and needed to be constantly modified. Maintaining the expected level of eye contact, small talk, and sensory tolerance in everyday situations required enormous energy that others never needed to expend. Your extraordinary abilities in certain areas often went unappreciated while your challenges in others were magnified and pathologized.
You may have developed elaborate masking behaviors, studying neurotypical people like an anthropologist and practicing their social rules until you could perform them flawlessly. Living in these two different worlds became a source of constant anxiety and stress that impacts your mental health and sometimes even physical wellbeing. Years of masking has led to profound identity confusion, and deep down, you've internalized the message that your natural way of being is fundamentally flawed—that success demands being something different from what you are.