Unmasking – is it the pulling of a thread in a knit, or the building of a new empire?

There is no wrong answer.

As long as I’ve been discussing autism the topic of ‘unmasking’ has been one I didn’t really understand. Initially the conversations took place in facebook groups for autistic women, which essentially were all gloom and doom, and intense triggered comment threads disguised as autistic communication styles. Given the ‘autistic women’ era was still in it’s earlier stages at this time we were seeking spaces that weren’t dominated by ‘autism mums’, so we made online groups and found ourselves obsessed and intense and madly writing essays and being met with black and white responses that lacked nuance or enough compassion and figured that this was unmasking. There was some joy in it, because to be honest we’re probably all a lot more stereotypical than we think, our need to be understood driving our fingers to type as fast as our mind thinks.

But there was a huge lack in it too. And for me the lack was deeper than the joy was joyous.

Often the posts were about unmasking. “Why can my daughter…