Chameleon

Chameleon

As a teenager, I had a grand literary project in mind that I imagined someday I would be able to complete. It was called "Chameleon" and was supposed to be a fictional account of what it was like to live in society as a chameleon. I had an acute sense in my teens that I was unable to live "authentically" and, in fact, had no real sense of who I actually was. I was always just playing a role dependent on the social conditions that I could see around me.

The literary project was to use quotes from masterpieces in every line of the book, but to create out of those quotes an entirely different work that would describe my experience in reality, but would also use a formal technique that hadn't been used before to show how you can seem to be completely unique when actually you are just very cleverly copying and imitating those who have gone before. In different periods of my life I have wondered about this project. Sometimes it has seemed silly and childish. Other times, like right now, I have wanted to go back to playing with it, wondering if I am experienced enough as a writer now to make it work.

An older adult friend told me at the time that this was ridiculous, that I was obviously distinct and very unique as an individual and that whatever role-playing I was doing was totally normal and didn't matter at all. This made me feel even more like no one actually saw how much work I was doing to pretend to be other people who weren't really me at all. But I did stop talking to people about this sense of what I would now clearly point to as "masking." I think on some level I always knew that I was autistic. It just took a long time for me to understand what "autistic" was so that I could see how much it applied to me.

I've been reading a book called "Off the Spectrum" about specifically autistic girls, why they've been missed and what seeing them more clearly teaches us about both autism and about being women. I will talk more about it later, but for now, it has exploded my brain in all the ways about yes! That was how I experienced myself. There is a distinct group of autistic girls who do masking very well and are then not seen as a problem and no one considers labeling them as autistic because they are fine. They pass as neurotypical.

And then in later life, these women finally get diagnosed because of burnout, but a lot of the people around them get angry that they aren't performing "normal woman" anymore because they were so succcessful at masking for some decades that only they know how much it is costing them. And yes, this has some overlap for women in general, because on some level I suspect "woman" just means someone who does emotional labor for other people and who is masking to a lesser degree all the time.