A page from Frank Miller's "Hard Boiled", showing a totally normal guy.

I've always found it comforting to be able to make sense of systems, and I'd never been able to explain why. Any type of system (what to do at an airport, restaurant etiquette, how to request bills at cafes, the appropriate amount of eye contact to make during conversations...) is a puzzle to be solved, but my favourites involve certainty. Computers, for example, are systems in which there will always be a logical, in-system (barring freak events like cosmic bit flips) explanation for an event. I might not know what that explanation is, but have faith that it exists and I could understand. Engaging with systems like that can be more about enjoyment (and comfort, proficency) than pragmatism.

A big problem with that as a predominant mode of engaging with the world is that being a human means overwhelming exposure to systems I don't, and can't definitively, understand - other people, society, and my own mind. Sitting with uncertainty, avoiding picking the scab of "if I ruminate some more, I can probably figure it out" has always been a challenge. I guess when all you have is a hammer (systems-based rational thinking) everything really does start to look like a nail. So I always felt indefinably out of place. Often had the sense that there was something wrong^[1] with me, which prevented me from engaging with the human experience like others seemed to. It wasn't always that something was outwardly wrong. I could often make the right noises, and perhaps even the right microexpressions. But it often felt like putting on an act rather than simply socialising.

So it shouldn't have been a surprise when, in my early thirties, after a year of taking the idea seriously and obsessively researching, introspecting and easing myself into a tenative (acute impostor syndrome) state of self-diagnosis, I was professionaly diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Yet it was, in a fundamentally affecting way, a surprise. I had fooled myself into thinking that I'd already integrated anything that might have come out of it, but the last couple of months have been humbling. For someone who finds comfort in understanding things, having my self-concept so fundamentally challenged - and at this point in my life - has been quite unsettling.

People have said things like "You're still the same person, nothing has changed". And in a sense that's true. Nothing material has changed. The facts of my life experience and situation, interpersonal relationships etc. remain. The person most surprised by diagnosis was probably me.

In a more important sense it is absolutely untrue, because most of the sensemaking I've done has been thoroughly undone. It apparently hinged on the idea that I was a regular, albeit weird, guy - regular, in that I experienced and related to the world in the same way most other people do (whatever I imagined that to mean. Owning a normal nervous system?), because I had never seriously considered the possibility that I didn't. And now I've been disabused of that foundational assumption, the house built on top of it is starting to get pretty creaky.

The vocabulary of "unmasking" implies (especially to a literal-minded autist) that you receive a diagnosis, "take off" your mask, and find your fully-formed true self waiting underneath. I imagine my experience of this resolutely not happening is representative^[2]. Coupled with this is the problem of atrophied intuition. Decades of masking have hugely reduced my ability to recognise, and propensity to trust, intuition.

Reframing the process from "unmasking" to "unearthing"^[3] has been very helpful.

It's an exciting process too, and the shift in vocabulary helps to draw that out. I'm exploring how much I've lost due to masking and how I might start to reclaim it. Feeling less lost and unmoored, more excited to see what happens.

Amusingly enough, given my discomfort in uncertainty, I can confidently explain a lot of things for the first time.