Autism, Masking, and Romancing the Goblin

Pictured: Autism

If you don't already know, in February of this year I started a new job as a paraeducator at my former high school. I work in the special education department, it's been great. 

Eventually in this post I'd like to share a bit about this one particular student, who I'm pretty sure simultaneously considers me to be 1) his best friend and 2) the most irritating person he's ever met. First, he's autistic. All of my students are. And honestly, from everything I know about autism, I'm pretty sure I am too. So sometimes I use my autistic (or pseudo-autistic if you prefer) self-reflections to help relate to them.

But before I can start telling stories I'd first like to write about autism generally. It's a pretty important subject to me and I think a lot of people don't really understand what it is, including (and sometimes especially) parents with autistic children. So I just want to share a little of my perspective, for whatever it may be worth. 

Something about autistic kids (and adults for that matter) you might not know is that they often endure pretty brutal, deep-set anxiety as they manage the balancing act of attempting to act normal while lacking a firm ability to understand what "normal" is. This can be a difficult concept to grasp, and if you don't get it then hey, congratulations, you probably aren't autistic. If you've never been anything but normal your whole life, at least when it comes to the fundamentals of acting like a human, then the concept of struggling to understand normalcy obviously won't make much sense. It'd like trying to explain the idea of wetness to a fish. If you're one of those fish, here's a metaphor to hopefully shed some light on what I'm trying to say. If you played sports, you already know how much coaches love to preach about the fundamentals. My eighth grade basketball coach used to foam at the mouth over fundamentals, always screaming about how crucial they are. "BOXING OUT IS CRUCIAL," he'd say, before adding "CRUCIAL, CRUCIAL, CRUCIAL!" (he loved that word). But unhinged as Coach Fed may have been, he was right. That's because if you try to play in a live game without first learning the fundamentals you're doomed to resemble an uncoordinated ape in gym shorts. Let's stick with basketball: if, for example, you don't know you're supposed to bend your knees while playing defense then it's only a matter of time before you get crossed over so shamefully your ankles literally explode and your wife has no choice but to divorce you. Now, substitute the bend-your-knees metaphor with something simple like eye-contact-during-communication and you've got a better understanding of autism. 

But I want to be even more clear than that because I'm also conscious of the fact that here in 2024 the concept of normal can be pretty hard to pin down. We live in a weird, internet-driven, postmodern version of society where everything is hyperreal and normality has all but ceased to exist outside of the subjective mind (check out Jean Baudrillard if this concept interests you). It doesn't matter whether we're talking about who you should vote for, why the weather is acting strange, the proposed existence of aliens, or presumably any other newsworthy topic you can think of; there's a billion different worldviews which can be arrived at via a billion different information sources, each of which purport to offer some version of "The Truth." Think about it like this- have you ever felt pity for people that "fall for" misinformation? It might surprise you they may feel precisely the same about you, with precisely the same justification. So who's the pitiful one then? Neither of you, it turns out- you're both just doing your best with the information you have. To me, this suggests the best way to determine the truth is probably to examine and "try on" multiple perspectives, compare and contrast them with one another, and see which purported facts rise to the surface across multiple sources. Ironically, this sort of willingness to abandon the rigid sense of individuality inherent in one's worldview is exactly the sort of thing neurodivergent/autistic brains have a significantly easier time accomplishing- but as it stands such an approach is not the preferred (read: "normal") method of doing things in society. Oh well.

At any rate, these are obviously bizarre circumstances posing difficulty for anyone to navigate- and especially difficult for kids. And because the feeling that this isn't normal is a pretty universal one these days, I feel like I need to be extra specific about what I mean when I talk about normality. So here's the distinction as I see it: if you're non-autistic you may not always feel like you fit in socially, but generally speaking you probably still maintain a basic understanding of the rules of participation in human society. For example, perhaps you no longer feel particularly comfortable at the dinner table on Thanksgiving, but chances are you don't have to work terribly hard to figure out when it's your turn to talk in that conversation with your paranoid, CIA-obsessed uncle (and hey, his perspective is worth exploring anyway). That's the sort of thing that separates a neurotypical brain from an autistic brain in social situations- the ability to grasp and follow the basic rules of engagement without having to think about them. So having that ability is my chosen definition of "normal," at least in this context. 

(Btw if you're into all these autism metaphors there's another I particularly like. It's about left-handedness, and this guy explains it much better than I ever could. And I know it says it's about Aspergers, but Aspergers is just a particular subset of autism. I love this dude's YouTube channel and relate with him in so many ways- you should subscribe to it if you're into that sort of thing.) 

So that's what I mean when I say autistic people are often trying to act normal despite not grasping the fundamental concept of normal. Thus, social situations can be especially taxing for them as they grapple with that paradox in real time. This 'fly-the-plane-while-you-build-it' type of thing is called "masking." It's the process of attempting to: 

1) guess the expectations of those around you*  

2) self-consciously micro-manage your behavior to meet those expectations (for example, policing your face to make sure it's reacting appropriately while listening to a story)*   

3) consistently present this behavior in a way which appears, to the outside observer, to be authentic* 

*bear in mind these are all happening simultaneously. Not to mention that on top of all of this you're likely to be dealing with increased sensitivity to light, sound, and smell, which only makes the juggling act even more difficult.  

Sounds exhausting, right? It's like this: have you ever told a lie and then every time the subject you lied about came up you'd have to pay all this extra attention to yourself to make sure you didn't give yourself away? Imagine doing that ALL OF THE TIME, except the "lie" isn't anything sinister, it's simply a desperate attempt to fit in. And that's why autism and depression are so tightly linked (autistics are roughly 4x more likely to suffer from depression than typically developing individuals, according to a 2019 meta-analysis), because living like that is fucking difficult. 

Well okay, great! Now that the mood is so warm and cheerful in here, let me tell you about this student of mine. I love this dude, and I'm pretty sure he loves me too even though if you asked him he'd probably say he can't fucking stand me. Actually, to be honest, he'd probably just stare at you until you slowly backed away, but that's what his eyes would be saying.

Here's the thing about this kid- I feel like he's caught in a pretty vicious negative feedback loop, which I believe is a relatively common occurrence for autistics who mask. The loop looks something like this: you get the sense that certain people don't like you, which prompts your mask to begin reflecting that perceived expectation with unlikeable behavior. "That's ridiculous, John," you might be saying. "If the kid is the one controlling the mask, why wouldn't they adjust the mask to subvert the perceived expectation?" It can definitely be hard to believe that a person would act unlikeable on purpose just because they think others expect it. If you control the mask, why would you allow it to act against your own best interest? And should we be excusing bad behavior like this? What if someone anticipates that others expect them to be a murderer? These are good questions, and I won't pretend I have any objective answer to them. This is all just my personal perspective after all.  

What I can provide, however, is an example where my own mask did this exact thing (i.e., acting against my best interest in a way I couldn't control). Something like 4 years ago I was working at this restaurant, and the GM came up to me to tell me some money had gone missing from the drawer. I was a bartender and manager at this place, which means I had access to the drawer in question. Because of this, two things happened immediately when she told me about the missing money. 1) I immediately became conscious of the possibility that she may consider me a "suspect" in this great drawer heist (which I'm pretty sure was like $20, by the way), leading to 2) me becoming HYPER conscious of what my face looked like, because if she suspected me then I figured she'd likely be looking closely at my face for hints. Now, I had nothing to do with this missing money, and therefore had nothing to hide. This should have been an easy situation. And yet I could feel my face flush red and my eyes darting around the room, avoiding her gaze. Why the hell would my face react this way if I was innocent? Well, my theory is that it was subconscious masking. I anticipated her expectation of suspicion, and reacted immediately and involuntarily to "act out" the role I perceived her to be expecting. I remember it incredibly clearly because at that point I knew myself well enough to be able to physically feel all of this happening in real time, and yet still be unable to control it. It's a pretty crazy feeling to realize that when push comes to shove you don't have as much control over yourself as you'd like to think. That instance had me questioning the concept of free will for months. I was getting super into the philosophy of Sam Harris, romanticizing the idea of hedonism, embracing absurdism...idk, honestly it was fun but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it. 

Alright, back to the kid. My operating theory is that at some point in his past he attempted to mask in the "functional" sense (functional is in quotes here because I don't think any form of masking is functional/healthy, but it would be naive to ignore that some forms of masking yield more positive results than others)- that is, he tried to reflect the expectations of others in a way that would lead to connections and relationships. For any number of potential but as-of-yet unknown reasons, he was unable to achieve these connections to his desired degree. After enough of those attempts failed and enough trauma was collected, the mask could no longer perceive any feasibility of human connection. With that, his mask abandoned its attempts to scrape and claw and reflect "normality," instead electing to resign itself to the negative and isolated reality in which it currently perceives itself to reside. Presumably now his operating expectation is that the world has little to no interest in connecting with him, and thus his mask displays little to no interest in connecting with it. Alas, whether neurodivergent or neurotypical, the fact is that all human beings desire connection once you get beneath the surface.      

I guess what I'm saying is that his mask may not like me, but I don't care. I think I know what's beneath the thing and so I'm determined to keep drilling. Besides, it's fun. I'm romancing the goblin. Kissing the proverbial frog, right on the lips, warts and all.  

hubba hubba

One of my jobs is to get this guy to his classes on time and in one piece because he does this charming thing where he'll get lost in the hallways if his routine gets messed up. One time he was running like ten minutes late getting back to his homeroom (the room I work in) and I decided to go look for him. I found him standing in front of an elevator on the opposite side of the school looking deeply confused. In fact, when I walked up to him he asked me why he was there, which of course made me laugh because I was about to ask him the same question. Turns out he had somehow ended up in the wrong room the previous period and nobody knew he was in there. After voluntarily sitting alone for an hour in this presumably dark room, the bell rang. He knew this meant he was supposed to go back to homeroom, but with his routine having been disrupted he no longer remembered where it was. From there, he apparently wandered aimlessly around the hallways until eventually being discovered by me at the elevator. From that day on I started accompanying him to and from his classes. 

I love that I get to do this. He does not. Here's this intense, angsty, autistic teenager doing his best to get through the day, and then me cheerfully chasing him around, peppering him with questions, telling stories, and incessantly offering optimistic little nuggets of advice. It's especially funny because he's a pretty big dude, I bet he's got 40 or 50 pounds on me, yet I'll be struggling to keep up with him in the hallways while he casually sets Olympic speed walking records in an effort to get away from me. You know that scene in Space Jam where Tweety Bird is trying to get in the face of one of the Monstars and he just like flicks his finger and sends Tweety careening into the bleachers? That's basically our relationship. I chase after him in the halls and talk to the back of his head while he does his best to pretend I don't exist. I deeply enjoy picturing what we must look like to the students we pass in the hall. 

Pictured: me (left) and my friend who really likes me.

Of course he does respond to me sometimes. Usually it's when I ask him some kind of personal question he doesn't feel like answering. "I DON'T TELL," he'll hiss, with the same type of energy you'd hope your child would have if a creep in a minivan pulled up offering a bag of Skittles. The other day I asked him if he had an email address, and he hits me with one of those "I DON'T TELL"s. It's like, alright, fine, I suppose contact info is kind of an intrusive topic but it's not like I'm asking for his social security number for God's sake. Nor, for that matter, did I even ask for his email address! I just asked if he had one. But nah Mr. John, you can kick rocks. I know my rights and I don't have to tell you a damn thing. Call the cops. 

Honestly though, as much as he pretends to loathe me on the surface I live for the little moments where he drops his guard and lets his true self shine through, even if it's just for a second. Like the time he built a little machine gun out of toy pipe fittings and silently pointed it at my chest. Ha ha! Kids, right? 

But seriously there really are some profound moments. One time, in a split second of weakness, he told me a bit about how hard it is being isolated, and feeling like nobody ever pays attention to him. That was a beautiful and heartbreaking moment that I'll cherish for a long time. Obviously I don't want him to feel that way, but the fact that he was able/willing to "break character" by identifying that feeling and sharing it was absolutely huge. After all, recognizing you feel sad is the first step toward overcoming that sadness (a concept known colloquially as name it and tame it**).

I've also had a few wonderful conversations with him sprinkled amidst the longer, more stoic stretches. We've talked about astronomy (he's super interested in the possibility of life on the Jovian moons), the animal kingdom (especially ant societies), and his dreams of becoming a world-class bodybuilder (which prompted us to start lifting weights together in gym class). We like to pop quiz each other on our arithmetic, and one time we fished a broken laptop out of the middle of a creek together using a big stick we found in the woods. 

We're buds, he just may not realize it yet.

So yeah, I don't know if special education is ultimately going to be in my long-term future, but I'm incredibly grateful for this job. Hanging with these kids, learning from the other faculty (who are amazing and I could easily write another 3,000 words about), and getting the hands-on opportunity to broaden my personal perspective on autism (and, in the process, myself) has been unbelievably rewarding.

**I learned that (and a good deal of what I know about autism in general) from the incredible people I worked with at Camp Neeka. If you live in the suburbs of Chicago and have kids struggling with their mental health, send them there. I'm serious, sign them up right now. You won't regret it. They're flexible with payment too if that matters.