@salcristina is making a good point. We live in a society that tries to change people to be more convenient to the economy, often to the detriment of community, identity, and peace. I was raised by a mom and dad who are both neurodivergent, so I often did not appreciate how strong these pressures were as a child because I could go home and experience relief from The Horrors for a little bit.
I remember my dad would say stuff every so often like "If everyone in the world liked what I liked, did what I did, thought how I thought, or felt how I felt, everyone in the world would wanna marry your mom. I'm grateful for those who do it different, because they do what I can't and make it easier for me to then do what I can." My mom would often tell me as a child/adolescent that I did not have to do what others did to be good, I just had to do my best. It meant a lot to me then, and it still means a lot to me now.
However, there were complicating factors to this. The Mormon church loves to verbally say that they welcome everyone, that God made everyone different so it's OK to be different, that everyone with any skill or interest or ability is welcome in God's kingdom. Verbally, they say the right words, although behaviorally they do not practice what they preach. My experiences with Mormonism and missionary work were how I learned the painful lesson that I am not always welcome, or wanted, or loved, just for being me. That while God made me a certain way, he wanted me to unmake myself to conform more effectively, more quickly, and with a smile on my face and a song in my heart. The actions of the Mormon church told me that if I was to ever be sufficient I must break myself down, remove my soul from my actions, and then let my soul be replaced with the standardized boiler-plate list of acceptable feelings/thoughts/behaviors that were acceptable to God. This is, ultimately, what led me out of the church, although that is a very complicated story with a lot of room for disagreement about what actually did the job.
The problem for me comes largely from school, and from attitudes around school. If it was just the church and home that taught me how to be, I genuinely believe I'd be a happier, healthier, whole-er version of myself today, but school and the church together provided more input and feedback and reward and pressure than my two l'il parents could keep up with, and I began internalizing from a very young age that productivity and output were the only ways to sufficiently compensate for the burden I clearly was to others. I didn't do it on purpose, or intentionally, but I was burdensome just by being me, I was told. I was loud, I couldn't sit still, I didn't wait my turn to talk, I fidgeted in my chair, my handwriting was godawful, and all of that made me The Worst Thing a person could be, which was a nuisance who hindered the productivity of others. I compensated for being a nuisance by being smart enough to still get work done, meaning that I could really only be criticized for the presentation of my work and not the work itself, but it was still there. Then every Sunday I'd put on a little white shirt and a stupid little tie and go to church where I was told that making up for my shortcomings was "repentance," and that I was right to see myself as a fundamentally broken nuisance. The messaging was everywhere. It was pernicious, it spread from place to place, and it was like Kudzu in that in the time it took to fully kill one plant 10 more plants had already started growing. And like kudzu, I was being overgrown and covered by masses of unwelcome messages that blocked the sunlight from ever reaching my Me, from nourishing me and building me up in the way I needed it to happen.
It got worse as I got older and other kids began to be able to sit still. Then, other kids began to be able to appreciate their bodies. While I don't know anyone who liked the experience of puberty or enjoyed their body 100% of the time as a teenager, I didn't know anyone who felt the way I felt about my body. And because I didn't want to be a nuisance by bothering others with my needs, and because I was already excessively and ceaselessly annoying, I couldn't add to it by being more different and therefore more deficient, so what began as "normal behavior for a child with ADHD and/or Autism" became a sort of half-spiritual half-mental impediment to being fully human in the way others were human. In the ideal version of reality I wish I lived in, I just needed HRT and permission to fidget, but in the reality that includes other people I needed to stay quiet so I wouldn't be such a big fucking target for people who see difference as poison. So I internalized these messages, not because I thought they were good and right but because they kept me safe and alive.
But despite internalizing these messages and feelings, my parents were still there on the front line trying to hack through the rapidly growing weeds of self-loathing. "If everyone in the world saw eye to eye with me, everyone in the world would want to marry your mom," my dad's little philosophical quip, was serving as a sort of anchor that kept the weeds just enough at bay that some of my leaves could get sunlight. My mom would tell me how I could sneakily accommodate myself without letting others know so I didn't have to put a target on my back to keep myself sane. And it kinda helped, but it didn't do as much as I'm sure they would have liked until I stopped internalizing the ableist bullshit and started internalizing their love and care. It happened bit-by-bit after my mission, starting with learning that it was OK to ask for help with tasks my brain found "slippery" (i.e., tasks I couldn't focus on because they were so boring it made my body feel like it was heating up.) This made the process of changing majors easier, it made the process of succeeding within the Psych major easier, and it made it easier to give myself little breaks every now-and-then.
Later, I learned from extended family that I didn't need to use the same measures to evaluate my performance. I worked as an appraisal management processor for my uncle's company for a bit. They measured performance by measuring what they called "RTC Elimination," a metric tracked by the software they used that counted the number of forms completed, emails responded to, and phone calls made. During my first performance review, they said that my average daily RTC Elimination was about 20, which was less than half of the minimum expected. I heard that and was like "Whelp, I'm SO fired," but my supervisor said "But I see you working your ass off, you're never NOT doing something, so I looked into it a bit more because we're hoping for about 45 RTC Eliminations per day so you not meeting that while still working this much felt weird, and it looks like just about every rural appraisal has landed on your task list. It also looks like you've been handling the rural appraisal documentation well, so we're gonna keep you on that. I'm changing your metric to be 20 RTC/day since that seems to be doable for you given how hard the rural files can be." He was right, of course, That conversation was SO short and SO meaningless to him. It just made sense, I could do work nobody else could do well, so that was my work now. I got a 0.50Ā¢ raise and was made overtime eligible, which meant I got to work on cases for as long as it took, which was great because that's how my brain worked. The reason I took those cases in the first place was because I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on with them, and I just couldn't let the case go until I understood what was happening, at which point I had usually fixed whatever problems the case was experiencing. I got an experiential opportunity of working at my own pace and in my own way and seeing it be appreciated.
After I got my B.A. in Psychology and started graduate school, I started learning more-and-more than by just letting me be me, my energy be my energy, my attention span be my attention span, my mind be my own, I was a better therapist. At my first practicum rotation I learned that by trying to keep my head down and stay quiet and suffer in silence (the thing most ADHD people learn in my experience) I was not learning necessary information. So when I went to my next practicum rotation site I just let my freak flag fly. I did walk-in supervision, I asked questions multiple times, I asked for help like crazy, and I took patients I knew I could do good work with, and IT FUCKING WORKED. My supervisor said I had a "good therapeutic gut," meaning I navigated therapy sessions by following my impulses, telling stories as a form of self-disclosure, taking patients for walks when they needed it, or letting patients take care of their own needs, such as pacing, or swearing, or drawing, or playing with legos, or whatever they needed to make therapy a comfortable and safe experience for them.
At my current place of employment I have finally started to accept that it is not only OK to not conform, but it is good. That by not conforming in advance, by doing what comes naturally to me, by being who I am, I get to be the therapist that some patients have needed their whole life. I have a patient who consistently asks to do telehealth sessions with their camera off, and I am OK with that because eye-contact sometimes feels like the equivalent of touching my brain with a live wire and I know it feels the same for him. When my supervisor said it was "weird" and "risky" I said I knew but didn't care because the alternative was him not getting the care he needed. She said when it was put like that, "camera off" therapy sessions made a lot of sense. He said that by allowing him to have "camera off" therapy sessions it makes it easier for him to open up and share, which makes it easier for him to heal. He also said that by doing "camera off" therapy it makes it easier for him to ask for similar accommodations in class without feeling guilty, because he's able to learn that when his simple accommodation needs are met it helps him do the work he so badly wants to do without as much difficulty. He feels capable and competent when the bullshit social norms are allowed to be ignored.
By being authentically me I make it easier for patients to be authentically them, and that matters when they've been told that who they are is inherently deficient, and that they need to compensate for their natural way of being by torturing themselves at work/school and then using all of their downtime just to recuperate. I joke with my clients that if eye contact was required for me to do therapy with them then I might as well just waterboard them for an hour a week, and they agree. I tell my clients I don't care if they can sit still or not, I care that they heal, that they do what they want to do, that they find meaning in their life. I talk to them about "going off script" because we live in a world that wasn't built for us. We don't have enough money, power, or sex appeal to make the entire country change for us, but we do have the ability to go "off script" when needed. As long as it helps us get our shit done, as long as it helps us do what we want/need to do, as long as it help us stay alive and sane and happy, then who cares about the goddamn script? I know the actual answer to that question is "powerful neurotypicals who hate us," but I don't just dislike their rules, I disregard their rules because I don't make a habit of taking advice from people who hate me.
I will say that again because it bears repeating: I do not make a habit of taking advice from people who hate me. Sometimes those people are right about one thing or other, but I cannot ever give them the benefit of the doubt with that. I don't care if their intentions are good, tbh. I don't care that they don't think they hate me. I don't care if they actually don't hate me. I don't even care if they're just trying to help or whatever, as long as "they" (whoever "they" are in this context) want me to be more "normal" they are rejecting my Self so they are not looking out for me. If the only way they can like me is to give me advice that make me fit into their shitty boxes, I'm just gonna own right now that I can't fit into their little boxes without amputating parts of my essence that I cannot bear to lose, so I do not take advice from them. I do not retaliate, I don't even hate them back tbh, I just let them be who they are and give myself the same permission to be who I am. If they say that who I am is "too energetic, too loud, too inattentive, and too weird," then so be it. I cannot imagine making eye contact with everyone I talk to, so I don't.
Don't get me wrong, I do mask, and masking is essentially putting on the disguise of neurotypicality, but I don't mask out of obligation I mask as a tool to improve my connection to people I ~want~ to connect with. Masking is not a virtue, it's a strategy, and it's a strategy that can be useful as long as you consciously use it to your advantage and don't force yourself to use it through self-punishment and self-loathing. If it ever feels forced, obligational, or torturous, then it can be abandoned in favor of "going off script," paving your own road, charting your own path, doing your own thing.
If your first thought to the idea of unmasking is "No, because if I unmask I can't get anything done and I *want* to get things done" then fine, keep masking for as long as it is helpful, but if your first thought is "No, I can't unmask because then I will not be as productive as I need to be to make up for how annoyingly/cripplingly/overwhelmingly/powerfully autistic/adhd I am" then it may be worth exploring the cost you are paying to be "normal" to others. To put it in other words, it may not be worth it to pay the price of conformity in all situations. If y'all can bear with me for a moment, let's turn your life into a metaphorical house. Saying "sure I can afford a $3k/month mortgage but not if I want a comfortable to live in" is helpful to know. You don't just have to live next door to you, you have to live in you. You get shelter from being yourself, it provides you with warmth, comfort, safety, peace, and a place to store what matters to you. If the cost of living in you means your You doesn't have the internal emotional equivalent of furniture or a T.V. or a closet full of comfy clothes or a comfortable temperature to sleep at then you need to change your budget, because life is for the living and not just for the occupying.
I know I am rambling a fair bit more than usual in this post, and tbf that's partially because this is something that is so new to me that I still have a hard time expressing it concisely. I am still working on allowing myself to be me, even if others say it is "wrong," because it's not deviant to be energetic, it's not sinful to be easily distracted, being forgetful is not something I need to compensate for by spilling my own blood on the altar of productivity. I am not a bad person because I need the lights off in my office in-between sessions. I am not a worse employee because I can't think if I'm sitting in a chair, or because I can't keep track of my schedule without receptionists helping me. I don't have to crucify myself at work, at church, or at home to atone for being born with a brain that was installed upside down and backwards. Hell, even saying that is kinda shitty of me, since it implies that my brain is faulty instead of just different. I don't need to do it all the way other people say it needs to be done, because for every patient who needs a "normal" therapist there is a patient who needs a freak therapist. For patient who needs to be assessed "By The Book" there is a patient who needs to be assessed with extra breaks. For every patient who needs a firm diagnosis there is a patient who does not.
For those of you who made it this far, I want to extend this challenge to you: Be better to yourself. Not in the sense of producing more, but in the sense of living more. Do the things that feel "forbidden," like going to class with sunglasses, or knitting during meetings, or taking a sick day because your socks are too tight and your shirt is too shirt-y. Make your life your home. Be kinder to others, be kinder to yourself, read more Terry Pratchett, and please please PLEASE practice extending unconditional positive regard to yourselves and others.
