Masking is hugely mentally draining.

I masked for years but recently (possibly linked to some bereavements in the family, who knows what the actual trigger was if there even was one single trigger) the constant effort required just burned me out. Anxiety spiked, depression symptoms loomed, and I just felt exhausted all of the time.

It sounds to me like the article author calls that social awkwardness not autism, no?

>The key distinctions are that socially awkward individuals understand what they should do socially but find it difficult or uninteresting (versus genuinely not understanding unwritten rules), show significant improvement with practice and maturity, are more comfortable in specific contexts, lack the sensory sensitivities and restricted/repetitive behaviors required for autism diagnosis, and generally achieve life goals despite awkwardness rather than experiencing clinically significant impairment.

It seems to me that this sort of definition would preclude any person having general intelligence such that they are able to learn to mask (or feel like they have to mask less in certain safe areas).

That’s what I’m curious to hear from you and OP…does that make the autistic person less autistic? Or is it a mask?

I—-as a non-autistic person—-have lots of default tendencies which were socially discouraged as a child and which are now no longer part of my self concept. I’m not “repressing” a desire to be awkward, I’ve simply learned to be less awkward.

But my understanding of autism, which is I think backed by the article itself, is that autism exists as a fundamental cognitive process and tends to be pretty stable.

Btw the reason I ask is to learn…as a software dev and manager, several of the people I interact with could probably be diagnosed autistic and I’m always curious to try to understand what that’s like better.

If you teach this to children while their brains are young and have high plasticity, they might "grow out" of many autistic symptoms entirely?

The term I've heard is masking.