Hello everyone!

Before we get into today’s topic, I wanted to give you the head’s up that I’m planning to put together a short book of essays! The working title is ‘A Head Full of Bees: Essays on Life with a Busy Brain’, and hopefully I’ll be releasing it in September. It will be available as an ebook, but I’d also like to print a few physical books as well (It will fulfil a lifelong dream of mine to publish a book, I’m so flippin’ excited!).

I’ve put together a really short survey about the book and I’d be so grateful if you could fill it out if you’re interested. Thanks so much if you fill it out, it’ll really help me to figure out my plans!

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Unmasking is a tricky beast.

For readers who are new to my newsletter, here’s a quick re-cap.

For the first 29 years of my life I didn’t know I was autistic and ADHD. I just thought I was really weird and a bit broken. Turns out I am simply neurodivergent, very proudly weird and absolutely not broken.

Throughout my life I have experienced many periods of what I now understand to be autistic and ADHD burnout, where I have pushed myself beyond my own limits, ignored all the warning signs and ended up needing time off everything - job, house responsibilities, the whole shebang. Even when I discovered my neurodivergent identity, the burnouts just kept happening.

Reading through my previous posts on Neurowavy Thoughts, you’ll see that this year alone I have been walking a tightrope act, wobbling on the precipice of burnout, saying one thing on Substack and doing another in real life. While I was sounding off to you all about the benefits of taking it easy, I was back to my old bullshit of trying to play life on hard mode.

I think of it as a bit of an equation:

Masking + everything else life throws at you = burnout

For the past few weeks I decided to properly hold myself accountable, practice what I preach and unpick this equation. I started with the easier part ‘Everything else life throws at you’.

I am my own worst enemy. Life doesn’t just throw things at me, I love to throw things at life randomly because I love to sort problems out and I get bored really easily. I’ll poke at life with a stick whilst muttering ‘Do something.’

I love to fix things. But I also have a habit of spreading myself too thinly. It’s hard to change this outlook when you are so set in your ways like I am. How ironic that the routines and ways of being that I cling to as an autistic human, which are meant to make me feel regulated, are actually fairly detrimental to my own health!

I have been radically honest recently about when I need to schedule time off from my responsibilities, and about what truly matters in my life. I am trying to mindfully ask myself ‘Do I really need to sort out this problem and take it on as my responsibility, or am I just picking it up because it annoys me that I could solve the problem if they just let me? Is this worth my time and energy?’ Fixing my addiction to fixing other people’s problems is a work-in-progress, but so far I’m seeing positive results about my radical honesty with myself, and about viewing my time and energy as precious, finite resources.

For the stuff that life actually throws at me, it comes back to the old CBT techniques. I know we have mixed views on CBT within the autistic community - some CBT things I use, and some I chucked in the bin. Horses for courses as they say.

I am once again mindful to try and logically process my reactions to stuff. For me this looks like forcing myself to pause before reacting to bad news, and trying to calm myself before jumping to conclusions.

It also looks like writing stuff down to process how I feel about situations. I have no idea if the writer Joan Didion was autistic, but I totally relate to what she said about writing as a way of processing: ‘I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means.’

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The biggest change is, of course, the masking. When I started this experiment, I noticed that I had returned to masking behaviours, almost subconsciously. I’m not sure why I reverted back to my old ways, perhaps it’s to make life easier in an odd way. Perhaps the energy taken by pushing against society’s norms through unmasking was too much to expend. Perhaps, even though masking takes lots of effort, living truthfully takes even more effort. Living truthfully means shedding all the masked behaviours that have become second nature to you as a late-discovered neurodivergent person. This inevitably means you need to use your energy to consciously discard those behaviours. Living truthfully also means that there will be friction in your life, as you may clash with others over how you act/speak/exist.

I wanted to see if my theory held any weight. To try and measure how much energy I use when unmasked, I have gone back to unmasking as much as I can, in every environment I exist in. I’ve stopped trying to force eye contact and I’ve stopped policing myself so much in the things I do and don’t say. I’ve started to express more of my genuine self again. It has brought my a lot of joy these past few weeks, and if I’m honest I haven’t faced many hardships because of it. For me, it takes less energy to unmask, and more energy to mask. Unmasking can even give me energy, I feel it in ways where my true self is validated by those around me.

The experiment so far leads me to think that earlier this year when I was burning out all the time, I accidentally let the mask slip back on without me realising, because I was distracted by all the other stuff going on in my life.

I’m lucky, I don’t exist anywhere where the attitude to autism and ADHD is in any way negative. I have support for near enough everyone in my life. So for me, it’s comparatively easier to unmask than it is for many others, I totally realise that.

I’d love to know more about our Neurowavy community. Are you unmasking or considering unmasking? What are the barriers? We also need to continually remind ourselves that unmasking isn’t everything. Sometimes it is dangerous to unmask. Sometimes it is simply not going to work for the environment you find yourself in.

Dr Luke Beardon, an autism researcher at Sheffield Hallam University, talks of the concept of ‘Autopia’; a place where autistic people can live peacefully where the environment (including the people around them) do not disable them.

Maybe one day we will get there.

Thank you so much for reading.

I write Wavy Thoughts as a way to document my life as an autistic and ADHD person. We need more of our voices out there! If you’d like to read more of my work, please consider subscribing.

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Take it easy,

Ren