Is it bad for autism to be obvious?

Written on 17th Dec 2020 by Alex Lowery

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I’ve come to find that people will often say to autistics, “I never would have known you were autistic if you hadn’t told me. I thought you were normal”. This is often meant as a compliment and in my teens, I very much took it as a compliment. I always tried to hide my autism in public and when it came out I’d feel really anxious. When I was told I didn’t look autistic, I felt proud that my efforts of hiding my autism were paying off.

It also feels like the media often focusses on more obvious autistics when it’s for entertainment purposes and they will use less obvious ones for educational purpose. I also remember when I was younger I did this stimming campaign with Fixers UK. I talked about stimming (the stereotypical autistic movements) on ITV Wales. There was a part when they asked me to walk down the street and they’d film it. They told me my walk looked too autistic and they asked me to redo it. They didn’t even end up using the redone footage. Now I still don’t really know what was wrong with my walk. I was just walking the same as I always do. It didn’t seem particularly abnormal to me. I also find it strange that they didn’t want me to walk in an ‘autistic way’ when I was literally talking about stimming. Isn’t this kind of contradictory of the message? This ties into the belief that it’s better to appear as normal as possible and if it’s obvious you’re autistic then people won’t listen to you.

This raises the question, is appearing autistic a bad thing? Should we always aim to hide it? Is it better to come across as NT? These are questions we will be tackling today.

My view is that there is nothing wrong with autism being obvious. Sometimes being obvious is what makes a person’s true personality stand out and it’s better than if they hide it. If you think about fiction, aren’t the eccentric characters usually our favourites? If you think about characters like Sherlock Holmes, Mr Bean or Jack Sparrow, do we remember them for their normality? I don’t think so. I also find when I watch documentaries about autism it’s the ones that are obvious that leave more of an impression and have far more memorable personalities in my opinion. I used to feel like it was better to hide autism but now I don’t really.

When people keep their traits bottled up inside and try too hard to hide it, it tends to increase high levels of stress and anxiety because pretending to be normal can get exhausting. I would say it’s important to accept and embrace the way God created you and don’t pretend to be something you’re not.

Now of course there are certain things we do need to learn in order to adapt to society’s rules but I don’t think we should stress over it when autism comes out. At the end of the day, normal is a setting on a tumble dryer. What even is normal?

Thank you for reading this article. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

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