Recently somebody I know told me, “It’s not all about your autism.” I was also reminded that other people suffer every day and that we all struggle. The whole interaction has stayed with me, not just because of what was said, but because it demonstrated the exact communication barrier I spend so much of my time trying to explain.

The conversation actually started because I rang to say thank you. In an earlier message, I mentioned that I had slept for around one hour. To me, I was stating a fact and giving somebody I know a bit of information about where I was that day. I wasn’t asking them to fix anything or looking for sympathy, and I wasn’t trying to turn the conversation into a discussion about how difficult my life was. The person listening interpreted it completely differently and told me I was offloading.

This is where it became incredibly confusing for me because I knew what I meant, but the person hearing it had attached a completely different meaning to the same words. I tried to explain this because it was almost a perfect real-life example of the communication crossover I regularly talk about. I had communicated information one way and they had received something completely different from it.

Once they explained that they had taken it as me offloading, I said that I hadn’t realised that was how they experienced it and that I would be mindful of that and wouldn’t mention something like it to them again. They then told me not to do that and said I should be myself. This left me even more confused because I genuinely don’t know how both things can work at the same time. If being myself means I communicate something naturally as factual information but that same communication is interpreted negatively, what am I supposed to change without changing myself?

This is the kind of contradiction that can sound really small from the outside but becomes exhausting when you experience versions of it repeatedly all your life. If I adapt what I say, I am changing my natural communication to fit somebody else’s interpretation. If I don’t adapt, I risk the same communication being interpreted as complaining, offloading or being negative. Then if I recognise that and say I will change what I communicate to that person, I am told that I shouldn’t change and should just be myself. I genuinely don’t know what the correct response is meant to be because both expectations cannot exist comfortably together.

The conversation then moved onto autism itself, and I was told that I can’t blame everything on autism. I asked what I had actually blamed on autism because I genuinely wanted to understand what they meant, but I didn’t receive an example. This is another area where I think explanation can easily be mistaken for an excuse. Explaining why I process something differently, why a situation has affected me, why I become overwhelmed or why communication has broken down is not me saying that autism removes my responsibility for everything that happens in my life.

For most of my life I didn’t know I was autistic. Before my diagnosis and before I developed the understanding I have now, I thought there was something inherently wrong with me. I didn’t understand why things that seemed simple to other people could take so much out of me, why certain environments affected me so strongly or why I could walk away from an interaction analysing it repeatedly. When you spend decades experiencing those things without an explanation, eventually the explanation you create can become that you are simply the problem.

Understanding that I am autistic changed that. It gave me a framework for understanding my own life and allowed me to recognise that many of the things I had spent years criticising myself for were connected to how I process the world. That doesn’t mean I suddenly attribute everything in my life to autism. It means that when autism is relevant, I can finally recognise why.

It is also a huge part of what I do now. I educate people about autism and neurodivergence through lived experience alongside research, and people regularly tell me that they want to understand more. When somebody actively tells me that they want to learn, I take them seriously, and I explain things when they happen because real interactions often demonstrate these differences far more clearly than a definition ever could.

If somebody spent their life promoting healthy living, discussing exercise, nutrition and the impact of lifestyle because that had become their area of knowledge and something they used to help other people, it would be strange to respond whenever they mentioned it by saying, “It’s not all about being healthy.” Of course it isn’t. They know that. They are talking about it because it is part of their life, their knowledge and what they educate people about. Autism has become part of my life in that way because understanding it changed how I understand myself and has given me a way of helping other people understand themselves too.

I also fully understand that everybody struggles. I have never suggested otherwise. Somebody else struggling doesn’t remove what another person is experiencing, though, and saying that everybody suffers can become incredibly invalidating when it is used as a response to somebody explaining something that is having a serious impact on them. There is also an enormous difference between something being difficult and something becoming debilitating. Everybody experiences tiredness, stress, anxiety, communication difficulties and sensory discomfort at different points, but that doesn’t mean everybody experiences them with the same frequency, intensity or impact on their ability to function.

The communication aspect of all of this is supported by research that increasingly challenges the old idea that autistic people simply have a communication deficit. Research around the Double Empathy Problem suggests that misunderstandings between autistic and non-autistic people can be reciprocal because the two people may be approaching communication from different experiences and expectations. Studies looking at rapport have found that autistic people can have strong rapport with other autistic people and that difficulties can become more noticeable when autistic and non-autistic people are interacting. This shifts the conversation away from automatically locating the problem inside the autistic person and towards looking at what is happening between both people.

There is another area of research that I think is uncomfortable but incredibly important. I have heard autistic people refer to research by saying that “non-autistic people don’t like autistic people”, but I don’t think that is a fair description of what the evidence actually shows, and I would never suggest that all non-autistic people consciously dislike autistic people. What interests me is something much more subtle.

Research has found that non-autistic people can form less favourable first impressions of autistic people, sometimes without knowing the person they are observing is autistic. One study showed non-autistic adults videos of autistic and non-autistic people without telling them who was autistic and found that autistic people were more likely to be judged negatively, with perceived awkwardness and perceived lack of empathy among the reasons given. A much larger systematic review published in 2025 looked across 21 studies and again found that first impressions were generally less favourable towards autistic people. Interestingly, that overall difference was not found when people were judging written transcripts of speech alone.

I find that fascinating because it suggests that the actual words somebody uses may not always be where the problem sits. Tone, expression, movement, timing and other social signals can influence how those words are interpreted, particularly when the person observing them is expecting a non-autistic communication style.

I am not saying that non-autistic people consciously decide to judge autistic people or that every interaction between autistic and non-autistic people contains prejudice. I am saying that stigma and social expectations exist at a level people are not necessarily aware of, and autistic people experience the consequences of those assumptions without understanding why somebody has reacted to them differently.

That puts autistic people in an incredibly vulnerable position because we can enter an interaction believing everything is fine while somebody else has already interpreted something about us differently. We can notice somebody becoming colder, realise that something we said has landed differently from how we intended or discover much later that somebody thought we were rude, negative, uninterested, awkward or difficult when none of those things represented what was actually happening internally for us. Sometimes we eventually find out what happened, and sometimes we never do, so we are left going back over the interaction trying to identify a problem we didn’t even know existed at the time.

Research published in 2026 adds another important layer to this because non-autistic participants were found to be less accurate when reading autistic people than when reading other non-autistic people. Simply having more knowledge about autism or previous contact with autistic people did not automatically remove that difficulty. Somebody can therefore genuinely care about an autistic person, actively want to understand autism and still misinterpret autistic behaviour because knowledge of autism and actually being able to accurately read an autistic individual are not the same thing.

That is why I think one of the most important things anybody can learn about autistic communication is the possibility that their interpretation might be wrong. If I tell somebody that they have misunderstood what I meant, that new information should become part of how the interaction is understood. Instead, autistic people can sometimes find themselves arguing against somebody else’s interpretation of their own intention, which leaves the other person’s reading of us carrying more weight than what we are actually saying about ourselves.

Even something as basic as “Hi mate, how are you, are you alright?” demonstrates this for me. Within mainstream non-autistic social communication, this can often function as a greeting rather than a genuine request for detailed information. For me, the words still carry the meaning of the question. I have to decide whether somebody genuinely wants to know how I am, how much information they expect, whether saying that I haven’t slept is answering honestly or saying too much, and whether this is one of those situations where society tells us that we should talk when we are struggling or one of the situations where I am expected to recognise that the question was largely social.

When I ask somebody how they are, I genuinely want to know. If they tell me they are fine, do they mean it? Should I accept the words they have used, or is there more to it? If I ask again because I care, I might be intrusive, but if I don’t ask again I might appear uncaring. If somebody asks how I am and I answer honestly, I can then discover that they didn’t actually expect the amount of honesty I gave them. None of this means one communication style is inherently better than another, but it does show why presenting the non-autistic style as the obvious or natural baseline creates a problem.

This is where masking becomes even more complicated.

For many people diagnosed later in life, masking wasn’t a conscious decision made after discovering they were autistic. I spent decades building ways of navigating the world before I understood why I needed them. You learn through experience what responses seem acceptable, how much information people apparently want, when speaking honestly creates a reaction you didn’t expect and what version of yourself appears to make interactions easier.

Those tools protect you. They help you move through environments that were never designed around the way you process the world, but understanding that you are masking doesn’t suddenly remove them. In some ways, it can create another layer of processing because you can now see yourself doing it while still knowing why it developed in the first place.

That is what I mean when I often describe it as living in two worlds. I can know what my natural response is while simultaneously calculating the response that is more socially accepted. I can hear the literal words somebody has said while also trying to work out whether there is another meaning underneath them. I can want to communicate honestly while experience is reminding me that honesty can be interpreted through somebody else’s social expectations.

This recent conversation demonstrated that perfectly. I believed I could communicate openly because openness had been encouraged between us. I said something naturally, discovered that it had been interpreted as offloading and immediately adjusted my understanding of what was safe to share with that person. When I said I wouldn’t mention something like that again, I wasn’t trying to punish them or make a dramatic point. I had simply learnt something new about the interaction and adjusted accordingly, which is something I have spent most of my life doing.

Then I was told to be myself.

This is where the conversation around masking becomes much more complicated than telling autistic people that they should unmask. I do mask and I understand more now about why I do it, but when I try to communicate more honestly and naturally because society increasingly tells autistic people that they should be themselves, I can be chastised for how that natural communication is received. Experiences like that don’t teach me that unmasking is safe. They remind me why the mask was created.

Research into autistic camouflaging reflects this wider experience. Reviews of dozens of studies have connected masking with social pressure, acceptance, rejection, identity difficulties, exhaustion and poorer mental wellbeing. Research has also shown associations between camouflaging and suicidal thoughts and behaviours, alongside factors including unmet support needs, defeat and feeling trapped.

I want to be very clear here because suicide is way too complicated to reduce to just one explanation. I am not saying masking causes suicide. I am saying that for me personally, the constant processing involved in living between these two worlds contributes to the suicidal mindset when I am already overwhelmed and exhausted. Having to continuously translate myself, being misunderstood despite explaining myself, questioning whether I can communicate naturally around somebody, and constantly reassessing which parts of myself are safe to show takes a psychological toll.

Understanding why it happens doesn’t make that toll smaller. Sometimes understanding autism means I can now see the mechanism while it is happening. I can recognise the misunderstanding, recognise myself starting to change what I say, understand why my brain has started analysing the interaction and recognise the moment where another experience gets added to all the previous experiences that taught me to mask. I may understand it intellectually while still being completely drained by living through it.

This is also why I think about autistic children so much. I am 47 years old, and I understand that I am autistic. I have spent years learning about autism and now educate other people about it, yet an interaction like this can still completely knock me for the days. A child may have none of that understanding yet, and could be trying to navigate the same communication differences while also dealing with the sensory demands of a classroom, noise, smells, movement, changing routines, instructions, social hierarchies and the pressure of learning.

When communication breaks down in those environments, we still overwhelmingly focus on teaching the autistic child how to adapt. We teach social skills, appropriate behaviour, expected responses and ways of fitting into a communication environment built around non-autistic expectations, while spending far less time teaching the people around that child that they can also misread autistic communication. If communication really is two-way, education has to reflect that.

This is also where stigma becomes much more complicated than obvious prejudice. Somebody can genuinely believe they are accepting of autistic people while still carrying deeply embedded expectations about how somebody should speak, respond, show emotion or behave during an interaction. Those expectations come from living within a society where non-autistic communication has largely been treated as the baseline, so people may never have had a reason to question them.

The research around first impressions interests me for exactly that reason. I am not using it to say that non-autistic people secretly dislike autistic people. I am using it because it demonstrates that autistic people can be perceived differently before autism has even consciously entered the conversation. Those perceptions can then influence the interaction while the autistic person has no idea that anything has changed.

There is another interaction that has always stayed with me. After showing a group of people the documentary I feature in, there was silence immediately afterwards and I asked what everybody thought. The first response was that I was very honest. There was nothing malicious about the comment, but it stayed with me because honesty itself had stood out as something notable.

The more I understand non-autistic communication, the more I see how much of it can rely on implication, social convention and meanings that sit beyond the literal words. A non-autistic person might ask how somebody is without wanting to know, say they are fine because that is socially expected or say “we should meet up” without the intention of making an actual arrangement. I am not describing that as dishonest. I am saying it is a communication style containing social layers that I have spent much of my life learning to recognise.

This is where the messages society gives autistic people can become incredibly contradictory. I already mask because experience has taught me to, while at the same time I am increasingly told that I should communicate openly, talk about difficulties, ask for what I need and be my authentic self. When I attempt to do that, and my natural communication is then judged through non-autistic expectations, I am effectively being told to be myself until being myself becomes uncomfortable for somebody else, or doesn’t suit societal norms.

That is not a small contradiction for somebody who has spent decades thinking that who they are is the problem.

Before understanding autism, I thought I was inherently broken. Now I understand much more about why I process things the way I do, and I have turned that understanding into something that helps other people. Autism is part of my life, my education, my art, my projects and the way I make sense of experiences I previously had no explanation for. Talking about it does not mean I believe everything is caused by autism any more than somebody who dedicates their life to physical health believes every conversation in existence is about exercise.

What affects me is when somebody who has actively told me they want to understand and has heard me explain these things then interprets that explanation as me blaming autism. It makes me question how much I should explain next time, whether the openness I thought existed actually exists and whether I need to put another layer of the mask back on.

This is how the autistic person can continually end up at a disadvantage without either person necessarily recognising what is happening. We are living within the dominant communication system, so we are generally expected to learn how it operates. We learn the scripts, observe the social rules, modify our behaviour and develop strategies for communicating within it. When we misunderstand non-autistic communication, that misunderstanding can be attributed to autism. When a non-autistic person misunderstands autistic communication, it still ends up being interpreted as something the autistic person communicated badly.

I don’t think the answer is that autistic people should stop adapting or that non-autistic people need to start communicating exactly like autistic people. The answer is recognising that both people are participating in the interaction and neither person’s interpretation should automatically become the truth.

The person who told me that “it’s not all about your autism” probably has no idea how much that conversation affected me, which in itself demonstrates part of what I am trying to explain. I rang somebody to say thank you, mentioned that I had slept for an hour and ended up defending how I communicate, explaining why autism was relevant, being told that I was blaming things on autism without receiving an example of what I had blamed on it, deciding I should adjust what I share in future and then being told that I should be myself.

I am still left with the same question. How?

If somebody genuinely wants an autistic person to be themselves, there also has to be a willingness to understand that their authentic communication may not always look or sound like non-autistic communication. When something doesn’t make sense, asking what the person meant is far more useful than deciding what they meant for them.

Autistic people have spent generations learning how to understand everybody else’s communication whilst being misunderstood. I don’t think asking for some of that curiosity in return is unreasonable.

The research referred to throughout this article includes studies on neurotype matching and interpersonal rapport, first impressions of autistic people, non-autistic perceptions of autistic people, autistic camouflaging and mental wellbeing, and autistic suicidality. This includes Crompton and colleagues’ research into rapport between autistic, non-autistic and mixed-neurotype pairs; Alkhaldi and colleagues’ study Do Neurotypical People Like or Dislike Autistic People?; Wanigasekera and colleagues’ 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis of first impressions towards autistic people; Sheppard and colleagues’ 2026 study examining how accurately non-autistic people read autistic individuals; Zhuang and colleagues’ systematic review of camouflaging and mental wellbeing; and research examining camouflaging, unmet support needs, defeat, entrapment and suicidality in autistic people.