Unmasking for Life: The Autistic Person's Guide to Connecting, Loving, and Living Authentically

I regularly hear from Autistic people who cannot fathom alienating anyone, or even setting a boundary that another person might not like to hear. Considering embarking on an unconventional life path can call forth emotions of terror, shame, or guilt because it threatens the status quo, where they put impressing and soothing others first. But managi

Fourth, we want to express our sexualities and form attachments that reflect our real desires, not traditional roles that have only ever felt like a performance for many of us.

On top of having a mental processing style that is unfriendly to change, we’re also a group of people who are largely traumatized.

took a more active interest in other people, finally asking them why they felt the way they did and believed the things they believed. I didn’t have to pretend to naturally understand other people anymore. By being so openly curious, I found it far easier to make friends.

In order to accomplish these things, we must target the important social skill of engagement, the ability to initiate hard conversations, articulate past harms and current demands, ask for help, and take agency in our own lives.

Because they never received disability accommodations or any understanding of themselves as members of an oppressed group, many masked Autistics cope by hiding behind a façade of neurotypicality.

a conventional life defined by work, marriage, and property ownership is not right for us, we need the creativity and courage to define for ourselves what a life well lived means.

In order to survive in an unpredictable world, we have to develop the ability to resiliently weather change.

This brings us to the second stage of boosting our distress tolerance: disregarding opinions that aren’t useful to us or that come from a person we don’t respect.