I’m pretty open about being autistic. I write about it. I mention it at work. I don’t hide it when it comes up in conversation. People sometimes tell me this is brave, which is weird, because bravery implies I’m doing something hard for noble reasons.
I’m not. I’m doing it because it’s easier than the alternative.
How I got here
I wasn’t always like this. For most of my life I hid it—or more accurately, I didn’t know what I was hiding. I just knew something was off and I didn’t want people to see it.
The shift happened in federal prison, of all places. I had time to read—actually read, for the first time in my life—and I tore through NeuroTribes, Unmasking Autism, A Little Less Broken. Books about autism, about late diagnosis, about masking, about the experience of being autistic and not knowing it for decades.
Something clicked. Or maybe broke. I spent eighteen months processing what it meant that I’d been performing normalcy my entire life without realizing it. By the time I got out, I didn’t have the energy to put the mask back on. I’d seen behind it. I knew what it cost. And I decided—not consciously, really, more like by exhaustion—that I was done hiding.
So when people call it brave, I think: no, I just went to prison and read some books and got too tired to keep pretending. That’s not bravery. That’s collapse in a useful direction.
The selfish version
Here’s the truth: being open about autism makes my life easier.
When people know I’m autistic, they have context. When I’m blunt, they know why. When I miss a social cue, they know why. When I bail on plans because I’m overstimulated, they know why. I don’t have to manage their confusion on top of managing my own brain.
The alternative is maintaining two versions of myself—the real one and the one I perform for people who don’t know. That’s exhausting. I did it for thirty-something years. I’m tired.
So when I tell someone I’m autistic, I’m not being brave. I’m being lazy. I’m offloading the work of appearing normal onto their understanding instead of my performance. It’s a trade that benefits me directly.
The uncomfortable spokesperson thing
Here’s the part I don’t love: when you’re a “high-functioning” autistic person who’s open about it, you become a reference point. People meet you and update their mental model of autism. “Oh, my coworker Josh is autistic, and he seems normal, so autism must not be that big a deal.”
This is a problem. My experience isn’t representative. I can mask well enough to hold jobs, have conversations, write coherently. Plenty of autistic people can’t, or can but at much higher cost. When I’m the example someone thinks of, it can make things harder for autistic people who need more support. “Well, Josh manages fine, why can’t you?”
I don’t want to be a spokesperson. I’m not qualified. My autism is mine—a specific constellation of traits that doesn’t generalize. But by being visible, I become one anyway, whether I like it or not.
The weird irony
There’s something fundamentally strange about using the mask to argue against the need for the mask.
The reason anyone listens to me about autism is because I can communicate clearly, hold a job, write essays that make sense. These are all products of decades of masking—learning to perform normalcy well enough that people take me seriously. If I couldn’t mask, I probably couldn’t advocate. But the whole point is that masking is exhausting and we shouldn’t have to do it.
So I’m using the skills I developed from hiding my autism to argue that autistic people shouldn’t have to hide. The credibility comes from the very thing I’m arguing against. It’s a weird loop and I don’t have a clean answer for it.
Why loud anyway
Given all that—the selfishness, the spokesperson problem, the irony—why be loud about it at all?
Partly because staying quiet doesn’t help anyone. If every autistic person who could pass just… passed, the only visible autism would be the kind that can’t hide. The stereotype stays narrow. The diagnostic criteria stay biased toward what “looks autistic.” Late diagnosis stays common. People keep spending decades thinking they’re broken in fifteen different ways before someone says the word.
I got lucky. I read something and that made me think “wait, that sounds like me.” Eventually I got assessed, and that brought me to developing a framework. But that only happened because someone else was loud first—someone who wrote about adult autism, about masking, about the late-diagnosed experience. If they’d stayed quiet, I might still be collecting diagnoses and wondering why nothing quite fit.
So yeah, part of it is paying forward. Not in a noble way. More like: I benefited from someone else being visible, so I might as well be visible too. Maybe some other 35-year-old reads this and thinks “wait, that sounds like me.” Maybe they get the framework earlier than I did. That would be good.
The part that’s actually hard
Being open about autism isn’t hard for me at this point. What’s hard is the responses.
The people who become instant experts. The people who list everyone they know who might be autistic. The people who say “we’re all a little autistic” and think they’re being kind. The people who treat me differently afterward, or don’t but I can’t tell and spend days analyzing every interaction. The people who clearly think less of me but won’t say it.
Every disclosure is a roll of the dice. Most of the time it’s fine. Sometimes it’s not. And I never know in advance which it’ll be.
But the math still works out. The cumulative exhaustion of staying closeted is worse than the occasional bad reaction to being out. So I stay loud. Not because I’m brave. Because the other option is more tiring.
What I actually want
I don’t want to be an autism advocate. I don’t want to be a spokesperson, or an educator, or a symbol. I just want to exist without hiding, and have that be unremarkable.
The ideal end state is that being openly autistic is boring. Not brave, not notable, not a thing that requires explanation or justification. Just a fact about a person, like being left-handed or having brown eyes. “Oh, you’re autistic? Cool. Anyway—”
And yes, accommodations. We already make accommodations for physical disabilities—ramps, elevators, accessible bathrooms, reserved parking. Nobody argues that wheelchair users should just try harder to climb stairs. We built the infrastructure because it was the right thing to do.
Neurological differences deserve the same. Quiet spaces. Written instructions instead of verbal ones. Flexibility on eye contact and small talk. Permission to leave when overstimulated. These aren’t special treatment. They’re ramps for brains. And they’d help a lot more people than just the ones with diagnoses.
We’re not there yet. So in the meantime, I’m loud. Not for the community, exactly. Not for the cause. Mostly for me. But if the side effect is that someone else gets diagnosed before they spend three decades thinking they’re fundamentally broken, I’ll take it.