‘You Don’t Look Autistic’
What do I look like then?
If we would never say to someone, 'You look Autistic,' when they courageously make a disclosure, we should also never say, 'You don't look Autistic," either.
For the first time since my autism diagnosis in November 2021, someone recently said to me that I didn't look Autistic. I thought I had escaped this societal ignorance, but unfortunately it is still there, and more shockingly, the person worked with children with disabilities.
I didn't get into a debate as it was neither the time nor place, and frankly, I didn't want to waste my energy on them as I was at a social event and I had used up most of it already.
But if I had the time and energy, I would have asked...
'Do I look like I have Crohn's disease, a two-level spinal fusion, multiple miscarriages, and a rare blood disorder, too?'
'What do they look like?'
I would also hope we would never say to someone, 'You don't look depressed or suicidal.'
Because in that moment of such misuse of words and because words can hold such intense power over others, we can completely invalidate a human's lived experience and submit them into a self-impostering cycle of self-doubt, which can look like...
'What if I am not?
'What if I am imagining it?
'What if people don't believe me?'
I have done this. I have gaslighted myself and set myself on fire to please others in my self doubt. Until I had a consultant who sat with me after many years of undiagnosed Crohn's disease and assured me it was never in my head. My bowel was festering under the weight of carrying such disbelief.
My autism has many layers, many strengths, and weaknesses; you will never see all of them at once to be able to define how it looks. Because I have been undiagnosed and masking for so long. I have been conditioned to conceal. There is still more of that to unload. Thankfully, I am nearly there. A whole autistic self. A woman staunch in her self-advocacy and belief in her true strength, with more trust in herself.
If it were truly the case that autism had a look, I wouldn't have had to unconsciously conceal so much for so long and to the level I did to fit in with societal norms. I would have had a diagnosis a lot earlier and maybe escaped burnout.
Who knows?
It's all just a Sunday morning lie-in with a cup of tea in bed hypotheses on my part, but it's still an important part of my self-reflection to heal and accept remnants that still stick to the insides of my head and heart like scar tissue.
I need to make peace with those broken pieces. And all I can hope for is that as we educate and relate more as a community, elements of society can find a way to relearn not to define others ability or inability by what they define as a 'look'.
And actually start looking for the strength-based attributes all humans can carry when they are granted the time, grace, and space to honour them.
To Sunday mornings and safe spaces with the many true faces of my autism I can now embrace.
