The High-Functioning Mask

I’m not going to belabor this, but I’ve got to call out one thing in Jeremy Brown’s look at undiagnosed adults for Autism Parenting Magazine.

Most adults with undiagnosed autism would fall under the category of high functioning autism. While that term has fallen out of favor with many in the autistic community, it remains an accurate depiction for adults who weren’t diagnosed as children. As our knowledge of what is a sign of autism changes, so do efforts to diagnose both adults and children. Many autistic adults weren’t diagnosed because their cases weren’t obvious by the known symptoms of the times.

In fact, it is not “an accurate depiction for adults who weren’t diagnosed as children”. People aren’t missed merely because “our knowledge of what is a sign of autism changes” or because “their cases weren’t obvious by the known symptoms of the times” but because when you’re an undiagnosed autistic in a world designed and built for more typical brains, the sheer gravity of conformity turns you into a high-masking individual.

Combine that innate drive to conform with, in my case, circumstantially finding communities where any outward signs of difference weren’t seen as challenging or even worth commenting upon, and you don’t end up with “high functioning”. You just end up with a hidden—even to yourself—impairment and a complex over being a failure and a fuckup.

The term “high-functioning” isn’t problematic just because functioning levels fluctuate even within the life of any given individual autistic, but because what normative society might deem “functioning” in fact might just be a masked autistic silently failing and falling through the cracks.

In other words, it’s possible that the only thing “high-functioning” is the mask, not the person.