Faking NT vs. Being Yourself

Well, I see this topic is coming up again. I'm pretty much of a "lurker" on the autism lists, and I'm also a very private person who doesn't like to disclose a lot of details about my personal life. However, when it comes to this kind of debate, I'm inclined to think that's more important, and useful, to examine actual instances of "faking NT" to see what, exactly, the results are. It's not a debate that can be resolved in principle; you have to look at evidence. That being the case, I'd like to offer my own story. (I apologize in advance for my verbosity. Brevity was never one of my stronger suits.)

My parents always presupposed that I was "broken" and needed to be "fixed" — I think it simply never occurred to them that being different was not the same thing as being bad. My parents tried very hard, for example, to prevent me from stimming. In my younger years, they typically ridiculed me for stimming, calling me names and belittling me... by my early adolescence, their efforts had become more pronounced and proceeded to abuse, some of it exceptionally violent. This did not, of course, prevent me from stimming — autistics always stim. All it did was fill me with a sense of shame for stimming and require me to spend a great deal of time alone, so I could stim unobserved and therefore escape punishment.

I never had much desire to socialize in my childhood, which was probably just as well since I needed so much solitude to stim (my peers, on the rare occasions when they caught me, also ridiculed me for stimming). My parents, however, regarded my introversion and desire for isolation as another way that I was "broken" (which is pretty odd, considering that their own treatment of me was itself in large part responsible for my high desire for solitude). They had a big problem with me wanting to spend so much time alone in my room, reading and the like, and were constantly trying to get me to mix more with other people, even though I had little desire to do so.

By my pre-adolescent years, having failed to batter me or otherwise coerce me into abandoning my solitary, stimming ways, my parents decided to try "family counseling" (the "family" part coming in because my relations with my parents were increasingly deteriorating — go figure). The counseling, needless to say, did not do any good, because the counselors (two of them) also regarded me as being "broken", and didn't even bat an eyelash when I described, in session, how my parents treated me. Even when I told them about my father picking me up bodily off the floor, flinging me across the room, slamming me into a wall, and screaming profanity at me — all for the horrid, horrid, crime of stimming — the counselors didn't even blink. At my young age, I didn't know that any of that was wrong or out of line, especially when the counselors tacitly endorsed it with their silence. I simply thought that that was the way parents raised their children.

By the time I was in high school, between the way my parents treated me and the way it damaged my interactions with my peers (which wouldn't have been very good to begin with), the lesson had pretty much sunk in: I was broken, I was undesirable, I was, in sum, a bad person. The bullying had gotten pretty bad at this point, as well, and, as with my parents' behavior, no one in authority — none of the high school faculty or staff — so much as blinked when it happened, which was essentially every day. So: my parents, my peers, my counselors, my teachers, my principal... virtually all of the human race was either abusing me or essentially saying that abusing me was normal and/or to be expected.

All of this plunged me into a deep depression that caused me to start abusing drugs and alcohol at about age 17, simply to escape the pain. (I don't suppose I should have to add, of course, that I ended up flunking out of high school, despite my high intelligence and my often as not being better informed about the material in my classes than the teachers were.)

College was not something that even occurred to me at this point, so I entered the corporate world. Thinking that perhaps things were different there, I tried, once again, to be myself. No dice. Being myself was punished; putting on the phony mask was rewarded. I spent several years in corporate life, plunging deeper into depression and alcoholism, before deciding to go to college at 23, where I once again thought I could be myself, especially since I went to a small liberal arts college with a very leftist student body, whose members kept going on and on about being tolerant of diversity. Nope, no being myself there, either — despite the much-vaunted liberal doctrine of "accepting people who are different", I wasn't. I was yet again ostracized and rejected by people who claimed to reject nobody. The depression continued to deepen, and the drinking didn't decrease at all, either.

Back into corporate life at age 27 after four years of college, and again, more of the same: concealing my true self was rewarded, revealing my true self was punished. As a result, I ended up having to spend my 9-to-5 workday forcibly suppressing all my autistic symptoms and pretending to be NT, an effort that was exhausting and depressing, and that left me with little energy to do anything else outside of work. I had to spend the bulk of my time outside the office "decompressing" and allowing all my stims and other autistic behavior to come out, and often getting drunk to numb the pain. Even at that, the act didn't really work — people could still tell that I was "odd" or "eccentric", because of course no act is ever perfect, especially not when you're exhausted from having to do it for most of your waking life.

Now, at 35, after spending a lifetime of "faking NT", I fear I may be coming to the end of my rope. The depression is overwhelming, I'm struggling with alcoholism, and after being so thoroughly rejected for so long, it is all but impossible for me to believe that I'm not a terrible person. I have already attempted suicide once and am currently in grave danger of attempting to do so again. I'm physically fit, intelligent, educated, and have many skills to offer an employer, but for all of that, I now find myself looking at the possibility of spending the rest of my life on disability because the strain of "faking NT" may soon cause me to crack. I've been in and out of therapy a fair amount of my adult life — therapists are anxious to "teach me social skills" and learn how to "play the NT game", which is simply another way of saying that they want to turn me into someone that I'm not. Curebie-ism, in other words. And when you think about it, that attitude coming from a therapist is the same attitude coming from everyone else: that I'm not acceptable as myself. (And the really sad thing is, compared to a lot of ACs, I've gotten off light.)

All this, just so the NTs don't have to be uncomfortable with seeing me talk to myself, or drum my fingers on the back of my head, or perseverate on topics that they find boring or weird. Is my mental health — my very life — really worth that? Apparently, NT society thinks it is, and the attitude is so widespread, and has been pounded into my head for so long, that it's extremely difficult for me not to believe it as well.

For those who espouse a pro-fakery attitude, let me ask this: why, exactly, should we sacrifice so much for those who reject us for who we are? If you're going to spit in my face, don't tell me that it's raining.

Frank, Denise, and others have drawn parallels to other groups in society who have been treated this way in the past — blacks, gays, those confined to wheelchairs. (Even women, for that matter.) There was a time when it was considered perfectly proper to keep blacks in their ghettoes, gays in the closet, wheelchair users hidden from view... women in the kitchen. Just so that those who were uncomfortable with those groups didn't have to deal with them. All of that was the easy way to deal with the problem, but it wasn't the right way to deal with the problem. The right way — which, unfortunately, was also the much more difficult way — was to change the society, to liberate those who were being oppressed for no reason.

Women have had their turn; gays have had their turn; paraplegics have had their turn; minorities have had their turn. True, their work isn't done yet, but things are a damn sight better for them now than they used to be.

It's time autistics had their turn.

Autistic Liberation Now!