I Thought I Was Artistic, Not Autistic

There's a meme that's been floating around for years. You've probably seen it.

I thought I was artistic, not autistic.

Ha ha ha. I used to share that meme as an ally, as someone who thought, yeah, that must be such a relatable mix-up for people, as someone who genuinely didn't know.

Well, I didn't know until this morning. This morning — the morning I'm writing this — I received a formal diagnosis of ASD as an adult, late diagnosed, and the first thing I thought sitting with that news was:

Oh. The meme was about me the whole time.

I want to talk about a quote today. It's one I came across right after my diagnostic, and it stopped me cold.

"If a child can do advanced math, speak three languages, or receive top grades — but can't manage their emotions, practice conflict resolution, or handle stress — none of that other stuff is really going to matter."

I need you to feel what's really being said. Anyway, I'm going to come back to that quote. We're going to sit with it together. But first I need to tell you how I got here, because everyone's path matters, and because you might recognize yourself in it.

The Ally Who Didn't Know

Here's something that keeps happening to me, and I only just got the language for it today. Seems I have a pattern.

I find a community — seems usually a marginalized one, usually one that is navigating a world that wasn't built for them. I feel allied. I want to show up. I volunteer. I learn the language. I learn the mores and folkways, and I become genuinely invested. I become an ally who shows up, a steward, and sometimes even a paid worker in that space. The laborer is worthy of their wages. It's a beautiful thing. But I do it because something in me recognizes that people are people, and it feels right to support, even when I don't quite have the words for why.

And then, sometimes years later, I realize the recognition was coming from the inside.

So this happened to me with the LGBTQ+ community — years of allyship, years of showing up, volunteering, working in nonprofit support, years of feeling this deep kinship with folks who were navigating identities that didn't fit the default. And then: oh. It turns out I'm in that spectrum too.

It happened again with autism. I worked for a job coaching program for close to a year, working alongside autistic young adults, older adults. I was a steward. I genuinely cared about the work and the people. I thought of myself as helpful, as an ally, as someone with the patience and the perspective to really see what's needed.

I never once thought I might be someone in this community. Not one time.

And I guess it's actually a really common experience for those who are diagnosed later in life — especially those with other intersecting identities, and especially those of us who may be deeply empathetic. We spend so long learning to read the room, learning to translate ourselves, learning to be useful to other people — that we become genuinely good at seeing others while remaining completely invisible to ourselves.

You can become an expert ally in community without ever claiming citizenship.

There's actually a statistical overlap between being on the spectrum and LGBTQ+ identity that researchers have been documenting for years. Those on the spectrum are significantly more likely to identify as within the rainbow spectrum than neurotypical people. One thread that shows up consistently is that those of us on the spectrum tend to be less bound by social convention when it comes to identity. We question things. We take things apart. We don't always absorb the default settings.

And as they say — when you meet one autistic person, you have met one autistic person.

Adapters

Ask any behaviorist — ask anyone who works in the field of human behavior — and they will tell you: everyone has adapters.

Adapters are the ways the body finds to release, transform, and regulate energy. It's not a pathological thing. It's not weird. It's universal. Every nervous system needs grounding, focus, recalibration. The question is just which adapters a person develops, and whether those adapters are visible or invisible, celebrated or stigmatized.

For some people, adapters look like running, or cooking, or reorganizing a room when they're anxious, or making lists, or cleaning when they're stressed. Completely normalized behavior that nobody questions because it reads as productive or at least harmless.

For those on the spectrum, adapters often look like what gets called stimming — repetitive movements, sounds, textures, routines. Things that regulate the nervous system. Things that are sometimes visible and therefore sometimes judged.

For me, for a very long time, my primary adapter was creativity. At least I think so. In addition to any physical stims — art, writing, making things, even acts of service. Parrot sitting. Home care. The physical act of creating something where nothing existed before. Transformation of a space. Restoring things to comfort. Even customer service and tech support — I consider that a transformative way of being too.

And it worked. My nervous system found a release valve, and it felt win-win. Producing things and connecting with other people in a way that felt safe.

So I always just filed it under artist perks. This is just how creative people are.

What I didn't have was the understanding that the creativity wasn't just a personality trait. It was, at least in part, my nervous system finding its most elegant solution. And like any adapter — like any strategy to tether oneself to the world in a way that feels good — creativity can hold a lot.

Creativity didn't fail me. I just needed more than one tool. And I didn't know that yet.

The Child Who Didn't Know Why

I was that child. Not in the way the quote probably intends, as a warning to parents about misplaced priorities. I was that child in the sense that the description fits.

I was capable. I was perceptive. I was creative, and engaged, and curious, and in a lot of ways, ahead. Only, in my case — advanced English, certainly not advanced math.

And I could not manage stress. Not the way other kids seemed to. I could not always navigate social conflict in the ways that were expected of me. My emotional responses were bigger, or more delayed, or differently timed than others expected. But always honest.

As a child, I was deeply honest — honest in that very particular way. The kind where you say the true thing just because the true thing is true, and you haven't yet learned to weigh it against social consequences.

I reported something harmful that I witnessed as a child, more than one thing. And I told the truth about it to someone who could do something, and that was the right thing to do. A child knowing it was the right thing to do is part of what I now understand about myself.

What I didn't understand at the time was that telling the truth in certain social environments — especially when you are a child, and you are visibly different, and people around you are invested in a different version of events — can set off consequences that last for many years.

Not because the truth was wrong. But because some people would rather punish the person who sees things clearly than reckon with what was seen.

I'm going to come back to that in a future article, with more context and more distance. But I mention it here because it's part of the through line. The child who noticed things. The child who reported them honestly. The child who didn't fully understand yet that the world doesn't always reward honesty — especially from anyone who is already perceived as different.

This child didn't have a diagnosis. She just had her wits about her. She had creativity. She had perception. And she had a nervous system that was doing its very best.

What Masking Costs

First of all — I take umbrage with the term masking. It's become pejorative. And I've seen some people on the spectrum use it to downplay or degrade others on the spectrum. But for lack of a better word, I'm going to use it.

Here's what I want to offer as a reframe. For those of us on the spectrum — especially those diagnosed later, or self-diagnosed, or still questioning — these things are not simply skills you didn't develop. In many cases, they're skills you developed extraordinarily well. They just went in a different direction than expected.

You learned to read the room. You learned to monitor other people's emotional states. You learned to anticipate conflict — which means you sensed it and tried to find a way around it. That's agility. You learned to appear calm when you were not calm. You learned to appear fine when you may have been the opposite of fine.

Masking is genuinely impulsive. It's not manipulative. It's a survival skill. And most of the time it's not done consciously — it just evolves into a technique to keep things moving forward.

It is cognitively and spiritually demanding. It requires hypervigilance. Constant adjustment. Constant presentation. It looks like nothing from the outside. It just looks like a person being a person.

So here is what masking costs: every unit of energy that goes into managing how one appears is a unit of energy that does not go into actually processing what you're experiencing. The effort you spend looking okay is effort you cannot spend becoming okay.

And for those of us who did this for decades without knowing — without a framework for why the world felt heavier than it seemed to for other people, without any language for the particular exhaustion of being constantly translating back and forth — this cost compounds.

This is called autistic burnout. It's real. It's documented. And it looks a lot like depression, or anxiety, or trauma, or simply falling apart in ways that seem disproportionate to what's happening on the surface.

Because what's happening on the surface is never the whole story.

You don't usually hear: you might be working twice as hard as everyone else just to appear as though you're doing the same amount.

You don't usually hear: the effort you spend masking is effort you can't spend recovering.

You don't usually hear: there's a name for this, and a community, and a framework that might finally help things make sense.

I'm saying it now. I'm saying it for myself. It's still becoming real for me. It's basically day one.

The Childlike Quality

There's one more thing I want to name before the affirming part.

I have always had what people describe as a childlike quality. Not childish. Childlike.

Ironically, as a child, people said I was mature and adult-like. Go figure.

Childishness is about immaturity — avoiding responsibility, tantrums, not having developed past a certain point. Childlike is something else entirely. It's endless curiosity. It's the ability to be genuinely delighted, sometimes so much you can't help yourself. It's taking seriously the things that adults have agreed to stop taking seriously — like calling something out when it's not okay, calling someone in when they need some care and consideration. It's asking why when others have stopped asking.

Even in my darkest times, I have that quality. And I just always have. For most of my life I filed it under being creative, being artistic — because artists are allowed to be childlike. It's even romanticized.

But that framing was not incorrect. It was just incomplete.

What I'm now coming to see is that this quality is in many people on the spectrum. It's related to how we experience time, novelty, and intensity. The world does not get less vivid for us in adulthood. The sensory experience doesn't dampen. Emotional responses don't flatten. Things continue to matter extremely — in ways that are sometimes inconvenient, but are also very real.

The quality that looks like perpetual wonder — it's also the quality that made me good at working with people others had written off. It's the quality that made me a good ally before I even knew I was in these communities. It's the quality that made me want to make things, always, and help make things better.

I never want to lose that quality. I just want to understand it better, and work with it, instead of wondering why I can't just be like other people.

What this space can be.

As a site contributor, here's what I want this space to be.

I am now, as of today, a newly diagnosed person on the spectrum. Late diagnosed — though I say "newly diagnosed" because it feels more accurate. I was questioning and self-identifying for about two or three years before today. And so today is both a confirmation and a beginning.

In the evaluation, it came to my attention that I have a lot of strengths — things I never considered to be strengths, because the people around me rarely named them as such. Logical and analytical thinking. Not in the traditional mathematical sense, but in computing, troubleshooting, solutioning. Whether it's downsizing someone's home, optimizing pet care, security for a home, leaving a space better than I found it, solutioning in customer service, in tech support, helping others with job placement. Being present — truly present — so that animals are comforted when they're not feeling well. That's what made me such a good pet sitter and home carer for so many years.

Using creativity as a healthy release. Loyalty to the people I choose. These are real strengths.

And so I wanted to find resources, build supports, build tools. For the last couple of years I really didn't have any goals, because I was getting beat up pretty badly, and I still am. But somewhere in there I decided to try. To self-advocate. To see if it was possible.

And so some of my goals are: I want to find resources and share them. I want to build tools to help with those supports and share them. I want to make apps and guides and content that would have helped me — and that might help you or someone you love. Help people navigate a world that was not designed with our particular nervous systems in mind.

And I'm going to do that using the skills I already have. Creativity. Analytical thinking. The ability to take things apart and understand how they work. These childlike qualities that refuse to accept that this is just how things are.

And I'm going to do it safely, and pace myself, and be as gentle as possible.

It's the work that matters. Not the face behind it.

What you will hear in my voice is someone doing this in real time. Building in public. Not from the other side of recovery. Not having figured it all out. Just right here, where I am today. The day I got my diagnosis. Day one. Already building something. Because that's what my nervous system knows how to do with big feelings.

Make something.

This space exists because I needed it to exist, and it didn't yet — at least not in the form I needed.

If you are on the spectrum, questioning, self-diagnosed, newly diagnosed, late diagnosed, an ally, or just someone who has always felt like the map didn't quite match the landscape — you may find what I share here to be comforting or helpful. That's my hope.

Subscribe, share this with someone you think would benefit from hearing it. And if that meme hits different after reading this —

Maybe it was always about you too.

So yeah. I thought I was artistic, not on the spectrum. And it's a revelation to realize I'm both. And the journey unfolds from here.

— Spectra · spectrumaffirming.com