I Want Friends, Also Screw You

Sometimes as an undiagnosed autistic person, I pushed back against the need to mask

I am a people pleaser, of that there is little denial, but also I am a cage rattler, a boat rocker, an anti-masker (of autism, not Covid), and at times, a neurotypical tormentor.

I am not a huge rebel. I will say that at the outset, I have not done big or bold things. I am not some maverick or trailblazer. I acknowledge this reality.

I just have spent 50 years vacillating between compliant, good little “girl” masking autistic and a fed-up undiagnosed autistic who says, “To hell with this, I’m not playing your games just to win friends.”

For one, I have never been a great masker. Yeah, I am a people pleaser at times and I do mask, but I am hopeless to hide my stimming. I literally stim all day long.

In public this looks like me rubbing my hands along my lap or bouncing my knee, maybe rubbing my foot along the floor or ground. I look anxious most of the time and well, I am.

When I masked in the past, I didn’t so much take on a new persona but instead curated my personality to the point that I became really boring. My clothes weren’t — they were always slightly quirky — but I was. People acted accordingly.

I never fit anywhere. I was too weird for the mainstream, but not weird enough for what was probably my fellow neurodivergent folks leaning into their eccentricities.

But, sometimes, I would drop the mask a bit and say screw it, I don’t care anymore.

I might take an opportunity to go on the attack in a debate in church (where I went under duress) with some pious POS, or I might torment a neurotypical at a party who rubbed me the wrong way.

I never stopped wanting friends, but not at the cost of my entire self. As a result, my life has been lonely for long periods and very isolating. I have held out hope that it will be different someday, and it still hurts a lot, but I just can’t be arsed to try to ingratiate myself to people for what will probably be social crumbs anyway.

Way later than most masking autistics, I realized maybe I should take on an all-new persona, but that sounded too exhausting and with my medical issues, I did not fancy my chances to have the energy to pull that off. I also wasn’t sure I was that good of an actress.

So, I continued to hold back some of my weirdness at times, and then at others, I was the spider and the neurotypicals were the flies.

Turning the tables? Nah, flipping them.

Sometimes when I didn’t like the vibe of someone or I was just feeling like I wanted to get into some social tomfoolery, I would answer truthfully when a fellow partygoer would ask “How are you?”

I knew they didn’t want to know. I knew it was some kind of social sonar to feel me out as safe, but I didn’t care. I sometimes do not want to give off the signal that I am okay to talk to. Sometimes my irritation at the question takes over so I decide to screw with neurotypicals. I know that is petty, but it is what happened.

I would tell them exactly how bad my day was, how things didn’t go well at work, how my episodic vertigo was ruining my life, and all the different ways in which I had to deal with how soul-crushing the oppression of capitalism is.

I would talk about how the planet is being destroyed and that there’s no equity for BIPOC, LGBT, and disabled people. I would go on and on about my latest deep dive into neuropsychology. No, I am not getting a degree, I am just doing this for fun.

Nothing was more fun than watching them regret their life decisions and try to find a polite excuse to scuttle away. Years of torment at the hand of the dominant neurotype can make you bitter like that.

At church, I would challenge people’s takes on bible verses because I would point out the ten different ways that the text could be interpreted. Never argue with a former English major/undiagnosed autistic on literary interpretations.

They would all just look at me as though I had two heads which only served to fuel my barely-contained fury further because let’s face it, they had already decided long ago to dislike me.

Otherwise, I wouldn’t be toying with them. I would continue to argue and debate them into a corner until I challenged everything that they believed and held sacred.

I sometimes love injecting a little chaos into the lives of those who despise me upon sight.

If someone started messing with me at an informal social gathering at someone’s house, trying to make me look bad, there were times when all of my mental processing burners were cooking and I could deflect and bob and weave in a conversation to make them look like the stupid one. I could lob their bullshit back in their faces.

Other times I would make them squirm if they had ulterior motives with a friend (yes sometimes I have had them) and I could see that. Then I would drop the mask and act extra weird so they knew that I knew and that they could not fuck with me or my friend.

Well into my forties, I continued to wear fun clothes that were not “age appropriate” because they made me happy. I would still wear them if plus size clothes weren’t either so expensive or really boring (I know there is Shein but polyester won’t do. It’s a texture ick for me).

Around 2010 I realized that geeks were making it into the mainstream and weren’t as reviled as they once were, so I stopped guarding my love of Sci-Fi, embraced Doctor Who with full force, and unabashedly, for the first time in two decades, let my Sci-Fi superfan flag fly publicly.

I began to care less and less if I was going to fit in. I would walk to my son’s school and pick him up in the afternoons and all of the other moms would arrive in their exercise spandex with their bleached or highlighted long hair and their saccharine voices and here was twisty, angsty me over in the corner with my favorite pair of jeans, a Doctor Who t-shirt and my pixie-cut hair, wearing a necklace made out of a vintage metal toy rocket ship.

Nothing too outrageous, but in my conservative neighborhood I might as well have been going topless and wearing a thong for all the stares and side eyes I got every day.

I wanted to make a friend, but I did not like these cookie-cutter people and I didn’t want to change to fit in. This puzzle piece was getting less and less willing to cut her edges off to fit the bigger picture.

I rarely worried about what people thought of me using my cane or having to use a store scooter when shopping. Other POTS patients would say they were too timid to use assistive devices when they needed them. I was determined not to need any more care than I already so often needed.

I would march right into any situation with my custom duct-taped cane and ignore the stares as I went. It’s the only way to deal with ignorant fools who stare with their mouths hanging open like Michael Banks. We’re not a codfish, folks!

But if I got into situations where I was trying desperately to impress someone I wanted to be friends with or was in a situation where I was too nervous and felt too unsafe, I fawned and still do.

I would either become so ingratiatingly and annoyingly compliant and solicitously polite that I came off super weird. My customer service voice would take over and all of my desires would take a backseat. I had no will and was malleable as hell.

This is when I am even more vulnerable. This fawning does me no favors. I can’t see danger when my people-pleaser takes over, and my people-pleaser mask has been the victim of manipulation by several boyfriends, and one time almost got lured into a cult.

I was and am a mixed bag of bucking the system and hyper-focused fawn responses. I am unapologetic, I did what I had to do and I may continue to do so.

Because dropping what little mask I have may be too hard for me at 50. It has gone on too long. But as I have shown, have no fear because my authentic autistic self sometimes comes out to not play well with others. And she doesn’t even care. Much.

Perhaps not the greatest story for Autism Acceptance Month, but to paraphrase author Anne Lamott, If {neurotypicals} wanted {me} to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.