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Lived experience, Autistic Pride Day Symposium 2023
Autistic founders described masking, bluntness and keeping clients happy
In short
At the 2023 Autistic Pride Day Symposium, one panellist described unmasking as unfinished work, and Dr Sharon Zivkovic explained why, in her sixties, she had stopped.
Read it instead, 5 minutesThe transcript
The story
When Kyriakos Gold, who hosted the session, asked a panellist on the entrepreneurship panel at the 2023 Autistic Pride Day Symposium whether they had had aha moments in understanding their own neurodiversity, the panellist said they came every day. Asked to share one, the panellist said it was hard to think of one on the spot, but that unmasking was ongoing. “It is peeling back the layers of the onion”, the panellist said, and just when it seemed finished, it was clearly not.
The distinction between work life and the rest of life was still a struggle, the panellist said, because the work required quite a high level of having it all together. The panellist said both things were true at once, having it all together at work and really not having it all together.
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Sources the story draws on
- Understanding the Reasons, Contexts and Costs of Camouflaging for Autistic Adults (opens in a new tab), Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, vol. 49 (E. Cage and Z. Troxell-Whitman)
- "Putting on My Best Normal": Social Camouflaging in Adults with Autism Spectrum Conditions (opens in a new tab), UCL Discovery record (L. Hull, K. V. Petrides, C. Allison, P. Smith, S. Baron-Cohen, M.-C. Lai and W. Mandy), ANAE vol. 29, no. 150
- Camouflaging in Autism: Age Effects and Cross-Cultural Validation of the Camouflaging Autistic Traits Questionnaire (CAT-Q) (opens in a new tab), Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, vol. 54 (K. Lundin Remnélius and S. Bölte)
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