[CW: Internalized Ableism/Anti-ND Sentiment]
I'd think my image, self-esteem, and relationships with others would improve tremendously if I learned how to act neurotypical, but I don't even know where to start.
I feel like I have to first acknowledge the fact that I don't think right at all. I want to have the thought process and behavior of a neurotypical person, but I don't know how to perform that.
I first got diagnosed with autism as a child, and the psychiatrist who gave me that diagnosis made me feel a lot of relatibility to this condition I had never heard of before this time. As a child, this led me to believe that this matter was good to view from the angle of "I'm not inferior. I'm just different!", but now I no longer view my neurodivergence that way. I now acknowledge it as my worst flaw.
Effectively, I want to get to a point where any future psychiatrists I encounter will have a hard time detecting autism within me. I also have ADHD and bipolar disorder, and having those stacked on top of something I already deem horrendous makes me feel triple terrible.
As someone who never got diagnosed as a kid and masked heavily as a result, your successes at being “normal” will never reach you because it’s not authentically you doing them. The failures still reach you, though. It will burn you out eventually regardless.
Masking is a tool and if you need to do it you need to do it. But if you’ve built your life up to not need it, I wouldn’t recommend it. I’ve also heard it’s harder to mask once you’re unmasked than it is to do the other way around.