At twenty six, it’s now officially unlikely I will ever make it as a stripper. Quite a depressing thought, really. Am I that banal? When you consider the facts of my existence, the answer is a resounding ‘yes’. I’m twenty-six years old, I live in south London, I work in marketing. I’m twenty-six years old, I live in south London, I work in marketing. No matter how many times I say it, it never fills me with joy. I am financially stable, I stay sober on Fridays, I can’t even smoke weed anymore because I get addicted far too readily. What’s the world coming to? I might as well pop out two babies now and be done with it, because there’s nothing to claw back from this life anymore.
The only thing I’ve got going for me is my personality. It’s hard to communicate that through the medium of Microsoft Word, but trust me, I’ve got a cracking one. Yesterday, on a marketing software training course, I got the biggest laugh of the day for my phonic pun on trigger campaigns. I’m wasted here, I thought to myself. Comics talk about how making people laugh is addictive. I don’t find it addictive. Just vaguely relieving that I might not be a complete social pariah.
I have autism. So growing up, my personality was a bit of a sticking point. The only way I can describe it is, ‘very niche’. My mother always said I was an acquired taste. And I never took that in the spirit it was intended – a backhanded compliment designed to make me feel embarrassed about the fourth shutdown I’d had that week. I took her at face value; just another glaring sign I was on the spectrum. When I was first diagnosed, I was convinced they’d made an error. Nothing about me seemed autistic. Being lumped in with the circus freaks religiously playing Yu-Gi-Oh in a room specifically designated to keep the hordes of bullies away, was grossly offensive to me.
It took me five years to realise the diagnosis might be accurate. I’d fooled myself into thinking I was too normal looking to have autism, you see. I followed fashion trends, displayed no signs of disordered eating, and had my pick of the boys at school (so long as the boys in question were circus freaks who religiously played Yu-Gi-Oh; I’ve always stuck to my lane). Nothing about me screamed ‘I have autism’, on the surface at least. Spend more than five minutes talking to me though, and you might come away with a different impression. Mostly, why is that fourteen-year-old girl obsessed with the pre-1979 discography of folk legend Bob Dylan? My answer was always, because have you heard his Christian rock era? Not amount of autism is going to make me listen to that.
Unlike other autists, I’ve always relished small talk. It’s the only sort of talk I’m any good at. How’s your day been, what do you do, where are you going on your holidays… Small talk is just the real-world equivalent of a script, and if there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s memorising a script. It’s only when I go off-script that I falter. But it took me a while to get there. Having autism is a bit like having the wrong script, you see. The best way I can describe it is to imagine you’re halfway through a confident rendition of Maggie’s act II monologue from Cat on the Hot Tin Roof when you realise everyone else is clutching Death of a Salesman. You apologise profusely, muttering about how you got your mid-twentieth century American playwrights mixed up, and vow never again to start a conversation again with a stranger in the office kitchen.
After twenty incidents like that, you tend to catch on. You copy those around you, and conversation comes more easily to you. Just when you get used to peoples’ blank facial expressions when you open your mouth, you stop seeing them so often. And slowly you stop seeing them at all, unless it’s been a particularly tough commute on the Piccadilly line that morning, in which case the mask slips slightly. But broadly speaking, you’re doing it right. This whole socialising thing. It is possible to get the right script, to clutch Death of the Salesman to your chest, and thank your lucky stars you were paying attention in your postmodern literature module at uni.
It just takes a bit of trial and error, that’s all. I’ve been through the trial and error now. I’ve smoothed out the creases in my personality. I’ve smoothed them out almost too well. And now I’m sat on a sofa at half 4 on a Friday afternoon, pining the death of my non-existent-until-five-minutes-ago ambition to be a stripper. Most people think those with autism are strange, insular, and don’t subscribe to social norms. Well, I’m autistic, and at 26, I’ve never felt more normal. I’m paying for the premium porn subscription equivalent of social norms. I’m twenty-six years old, I live in south London, I work in marketing. I’m living the middle-England dream. Am I happy about it? Eh.
For women with autism, it’s been drummed into us from birth that our behaviour is wrong, and we better alter it if there’s any hope of anyone ever loving us. I drank the figurative Kool-Aid in this respect. I went through the motions - got the therapy, practised speaking to cashiers in the mirror, and did well enough at school to escape my dismal hometown. I did everything the normal way - I just worked twice as hard at it. I was adamant I didn’t have autism the entire time too, even though it was glaringly obvious to every psychologist within a five-mile radius of me.
I was doing something called masking, I suppose. One of the biggest misconceptions about masking is that the person is always aware they’re doing it. People think that when an autistic person masks, they literally think to themselves, ‘better stick on the old normie mask for the next two hours’. In my experience, this has never been the case. Maybe it’s just because I’m a woman, but masking for me has always been far more instinctual than that. I blame infant school, where all my meltdowns were treated with disdain and hostility. Being told that you’re ugly when you cry by your year one teacher is enough to jolt any five-year-old into submission to social rules.
No, masking is not a conscious thing. It’s a coping mechanism. It’s a knee-jerk reaction to the terrifying reality of life. It’s the accumulation of decades of short sharp shocks to your system. Like getting into an ice-cold swimming pool. By the time you’ve put your head under, you’ve forgotten how it felt to have a normal core temperature anyway. That’s what masking is. It’s forgetting your real personality, and swimming off with your spanking new, socially acceptable one. That’s what I set out to do at the beginning of this. To explain how I came to be so normal. And why I will never be a stripper. And I’m okay with that, truly. I’m just glad I’m keeping my head below the water.
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