Change takes us more time to adjust to than it does for others, and we rely upon certainty and predictability as anchors when life does not make sense.

But an increase in social responsiveness does not translate into an Autistic person being able to communicate more honestly with people, or more persuasively, nor does it lead to them having more genuine friendships or locating people that they actually like. Paying more attention to others doesn’t necessarily make them feel more supported or

These were things I had always craved doing but had feared would make me seem pathetic, childish, or attention-seeking.

“Stay at the party,” he says. “Let those feelings linger inside you, but don’t leave…You need to demonstrate to your brain that nervousness is just a passing feeling. It’s not an emergency, and it’s not an identity.”

Several Autistic people that I spoke to for this book shared with me that the only period in their lives when they’d ever been able to thrive was the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. They were comfortably at home, freed from any expectation that they might socialize or work, and receiving federal aid money that covered their bills, with a

Masking comes at an immense personal cost. Empirical research shows that masked Autistics are lonelier and more socially anxious than their unmasked Autistic peers,[9] and experience depression at elevated rates.[10]

Aron et al. (1992). Inclusion of other in the self scale and the structure of interpersonal closeness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63(4), 596.

There is a psychological measure of interpersonal closeness called the Inclusion of Self in the Other Scale (or the IOS)[18] that I think illustrates this well.

Autistics who were diagnosed early in life reported that they were able to process any complex or negative feelings they had about their disability at a younger age, alongside parents and caregivers who were busy learning more about Autism at the same exact time.