“I had to become almost a cartoon of vapid femininity to explain why I was so out of it.

We tend to be emotionally withdrawn yet friendly and socially adaptive. We’re social chameleons, and masters at making people like us, but we never let much of our real selves show. We erect rigid rules around our lives to manage stress and make an unpredictable social world feel a little less scary: make eye contact for this many seconds, eat this

All Crystal knew at the time was that the school bells stressed her out and everything was moving too quickly.

Values-Based Integration Process Step 1: Find Your Why Instructions: Think of five moments in your life when you felt like you were FULLY ALIVE. Try to find moments from throughout your life (childhood, adolescence, adulthood; school, work, vacation, hobbies). Some of the moments might leave you with a sense of awe and wonder—“wow, if all of life

You might also wish to seek out tools created by Autistic people, for Autistic people.

Autistic people also exhibit less of what neuroscientists call global-to-local interference:[19]

Radical visibility, in other words, is absolutely antithetical to masking.

No one knows how to name her troubles yet.

It can be beneficial to get an outsider’s perspective to see if someone really is being “too nice” to you, as Samuel put it, or if you’re just so accustomed to mistreatment that niceness strikes you as suspect.