So, of course, I rawly and impulsively replied to the post:

“walking home from croydon to try to regulate my very tired and overwhelmed self on the edge of tears having done a lot for and with our autistic community this autism acceptance week

because it’s needed and because mostly I can but yes it all involved that rapid code switching and I think it was worth it but also it hurt

masking up to be credible enough to speak FOR autistic people in certain spaces that they can’t all access and sitting with that privilege

then unmasking to be credible and authentic enough to hold spaces to speak WITH autistic people well by showing the vulnerability and consequences of being in the first type of spaces and sitting with that personal cost and maybe also that as another type of privilege”

The rollercoaster of working out how to be me as I continue unmasking as an AuDHD woman:

On a good day, I’m deeply intuitive, hyper-focused, strategic and straight-talking. On a harder day, I’m masking back up, translating, panicking, calculating whether I’ve overshared and wondering if the thing I said with passion is being filed away as “Too Much.”

The line between authenticity and acceptability feels razor-thin.

I believe in having a seat at the table. You can’t change the system from your sofa. Power, especially neurotypical power, is excellent at ignoring what it doesn’t even perceive. We don’t know what we don’t know.

Being in the room — authentically, if possible — matters, but it also comes with a viscerally felt cost. Unmasking feels more like unravelling in front of fellow professionals who are often strangers.

Someone recently told me that I “flip meetings” from neurotypical dominance to neurodivergent inclusion and that I reshape neurotypical spaces just by being in them.

That’s high praise, and I was grateful because, although I feel compelled to do this, I’d be lying if I said it was easy — the unwanted post-meeting [not happy] stims and feelings of dysregulation — well-held perseverance sliding into relentless thoughts reanalysing everything I said.

For every meeting I arrive at authentically — and can sometimes flip for the benefit of some of the neurodivergent people there — there’s an aftermath of wondering: Am I being respected or tolerated? Listened to or indulged?

I feel an unspoken pressure to “translate” my (and others’) experiences, so they make sense to people who’ve never had to mask, never felt their natural cadence questioned, never doubted whether they were too loud, too honest, or too something.

I can do that translation. I do it well. But I can also feel the erosion — how a tiny part of me dulls each time I overexplain instead of just being — while also learning to accept that overexplaining is part of my way of being.

My self-confidence can become elusive as I realise how much I’m a verbal processor. Words and ideas sometimes have to come out unfinished and unpolished on a non-linear route to clarity, but as I find that meaning, I know I’ve often lost people along the way.

Another friend commented on my thoughts, acknowledging that masking up gets more challenging and questioned why we should even have to. I get it — “Nothing About Us Without Us — it feels right to aim for radical inclusion, but neurotypicals are not like us and being understood is a two-way process hampered by access conflicts from both sides.

I can’t help but feel that we need to find acceptance via compromise in the middle ground.

According to my coach, I can accept that I’m not “Too Much” — I’m simply enormous, above and beyond — and that’s OK.

Maybe even better than OK.

But should I also accept that my enormous — for others — is genuinely (and overwhelmingly) too much?

I can still feel safe and comfortable behind the mask, and I’m unsure if I fully want to lose it. It helps me navigate that middle ground. It also gives me imposter syndrome: maybe I’m not AuDHD; perhaps I’m just shit.

Dr. Okewale wrote, “Visibility means nothing without voice.” Yes, but as an AuDHD woman, voice means little without safety. And safety — for people like me — is earned in fragments, in the micro-moments when someone sees me not as an outlier but as a leader.

I want to keep showing up and keep trying to flip the meeting, not because it’s easy but because it matters. To do that, I need to pick my battles, and sometimes that means re-donning the mask as a positive protective armour.

It’s about choosing when to be fully myself, even when that self feels inconvenient, even when I’m not sure which version of me is the fake.

What I’m learning (slowly) is that my authenticity isn’t always about radical transparency (and vulnerability) every minute of the day. It’s about building the muscles and dexterity to handle misalignment yet still show up with clarity and care, particularly self-care.

So perhaps it’s about accepting that I’m sometimes “Too Much” (even to feel comfortable with myself) and sometimes not. I’m sometimes simply enormous, above and beyond, and sometimes hiding behind a mask that still feels safer, and that’s OK.

That feels like being me.