Of course, I didn’t “look autistic” enough for anyone in my youth to catch on. Not even my mother, who taught special education for close to three decades, or the therapist who saw me regularly throughout my formative years. I “passed” as neurotypical until I was 28—long enough, in other words, to learn how to contort myself into someone who fit in. On some level, though, it is difficult to fault the people whose care I was under for not noticing sooner: It’s a widely held belief that autism is much more common in boys than girls. This often translates to screening boys more carefully for autism than girls, and misdiagnosing girls with something else—obsessive-compulsive disorder, borderline personality disorder, depression, anxiety.

By the time I got to high school, I was indeed depressed and anxious, unable to interact socially without sweaty, shaking hands. And high-school girls are especially unforgiving of what I came to think of as my relational “failings”—my inability to produce small talk, my struggle to maintain eye contact, my uncertainty about how many details to include when someone asks me how my day is. Because I don’t naturally intuit cultural expectations for socially normative behavior, I had to frantically learn to mimic how I saw others relating to one another—which not only confused me, but likely made me seem robotic and stiff to the people I was trying to connect with. And those connections, even when they happened on a surface level, never felt real to me: It is impossible to metabolize the love people may genuinely be offering if the person they’re offering it to is actually a façade.

I’ve hungered for deep, meaningful connection with other people for as long as I can remember. I’ve known I was different for almost as long. Being aware of the dissimilarities between me and my peers didn’t make things any easier—the awareness made me hyper-vigilant about appearing “normal,” and so all the more anxious. By age 5, I had begun a high-level construction project, creating a new outward-facing version of myself to fit with the social norms I perceived. These contortions, as involuntary as they came to be, never felt natural. I always knew I was hiding, but did not know how obvious that was to others; I can only look out into the world autistically.

I didn’t know that what meticulously maintained masquerade was really about “not looking autistic.” Or that I would be so literally following the “therapeutic” advice of my childhood therapist: “Fake it till you make it.”

What qualifies as “making it,” though? If I don’t “look autistic” enough, people might think I’m a fraud, and I might not qualify for services designed to support me. My need for structure and routine might be seen as “controlling,” my meltdowns (not to be conflated with “tantrums”) merely the mark of immaturity.