Welcome to ‘Wavy Thoughts’, my weekly newsletter about how I’m reframing my entire life following my discovery that I am AuDHD (autistic and ADHD). My name is Ren and I am a writer from the North of England. It’s very chilly here at present!

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As soon as I received confirmation that my suspicions were true, when the clinician told me that I am autistic, I made a typical snap decision (I had yet to receive my ADHD diagnosis, natch).

It was time to live as my true self, I thought. Living authentically will take away all of the psychological pain I have gone through in my life and lead me to live a happier life. I finally knew that it was autistic thinking that was causing me to say and do some of the things I had been saying and doing over the years, to great shame and embarrassment, and it was obvious what I should do next. Knowledge is power. I should get to know everything about what being autistic means. Unmasking will be the silver bullet, and I will live happily ever after.

I’m an eternal student who craves learning new things. Autism quickly became my new special interest. Diligently, over the next few years, I read books, studied research papers, listened to podcasts, watched YouTube videos, and became an enthusiastic member of the #ActuallyAutistic community on Twitter (RIP) and Reddit. I knew immediately the kind of affectations I could drop like a hot potato, everything from forcing eye contact with people, to the way I pretended everything was ok all of the time, when it so clearly was not. No more struggling, I was going to live on my terms.

This isn’t a post about how I have gone through the process of unmasking, that is a post for another day. Instead, this is a post about what happened after I started to unmask.

I realised that I did not have a clue who I really was.

When you have spent your life collecting identities in order to fit in, down to subconsciously adopting the way another person speaks or dresses, and you’ve always on some level felt that your opinions, your preferences and needs simply don’t matter because they’ve been subject to ridicule time and time again, it is understandable that when you strip back the masked personality, you can’t expect to find a fully formed human underneath.

I was 30, with no real idea of my own points of view or what I really needed in life. If I had ever considered any of these things in the past, I had simply felt ashamed of myself, and locked the feelings in a box somewhere, never to be revisited.

I’d masked so much that it was genuinely confusing what my actual accent was. How mad is that?!

Unmasking revealed the wobbliest sense of self imaginable. Naturally, it led me back to old masking behaviours - laughing at other people’s unfunny jokes, agreeing with people when I felt in my gut that something wasn’t right, doing things that I did not want to do. Always pushing through far beyond my limits. Not ever stopping to examine or assess what my limits were. Wilfully ignorant to my limits, which of course, leads to burnout.

I fell back into masking because there was nothing robust to hold up my unmasked self, and I panicked and I wanted people to like me. I still had those people pleasing behaviours I had learned from a life of not fitting in. The fawning as a way of appeasing people. A mindset of ‘I will do literally anything you want me to as long as you don’t point out that you, or anyone else here thinks I am a massive weirdo.’

I have had to slowly build myself back up to try and find out who I really am as a person. It is laughable to think that when I first started asking myself big questions about what I liked, preferred, and thought about the world, that I genuinely felt like I was being selfish, or self-centred. I resented this navel gazing (ironic given what I write about on this Substack nowadays!). I felt this inner work was all a massive waste of time, other people didn’t need to do this sort of interrogation and I should really just get over myself.

Yet I kept on going, and realised, after properly thinking about myself and my life, after gently taking myself off the autopilot of masking, that there were big life changes I both wanted and needed, and I had been consistently denying myself for too long. It was revelatory, and it literally just required me to take a bit of time for myself, to think about who I am and what I want my life to look like. Of course my real self was there all along, they just needed to be listened to.

The process happened slowly, where I began to take ownership over my wants and needs, and I built a personality that is authentically me. I had to convince myself that I was worth spending my time on and that this would make me feel better in the long run. Maybe that is a reflection of the non-existent self-worth I felt at the time. I suspect that feeling is something many of us late-discovered autistic folks have in common.

It’s still a work in progress, but it’s a damn site better than it was a few years ago. I know who I am now and I can say I am about 75% unmasked in public, and that’s probably as comfortably unmasked as I am ever going to get, for reasons I can explore on here another day. At home I am 100% me, and this place is where I can recharge my energy.

Unmasking is so hard. Sometimes it isn’t safe for someone to unmask. Sometimes those around you misread your unmasking as rude or ‘bad’ behaviour. Sometimes unmasking leads you to examine who you really are, and that is something that even most allistic people do not wish to really do.

To any newly discovered autistic person who is thinking of unmasking, I’ll say this: go at your own pace, there is no external pressure to unmask if you do not want to. If you do want to unmask, go gently, and try your best to centre your own needs in all of this. Unmasking should lead to improved wellbeing, and if it doesn’t then clearly something is wrong.

Moreover, remember, you are enough, however you present yourself.

Until next time,

Ren

Thank you so much for reading! I’m so excited to welcome 250 subscribers to this newsletter. This week I will release my first mid-week post for paid subscribers only. I’m also at the start of my novel writing journey and I’m nearly at 8,000 words. It’s going to be an exciting year filled with writing, thank you for being here.

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