I’ve recently learned there’s a name for a thing I have encountered all my life and been actually quite traumatised by: The Double Empathy Problem.

In a nutshell, if you’re a neurodivergent person you start from a very young age, before you can even speak maybe, trying to work out how to interact with pretty much everyone else using a system of rules and procedures which nobody ever explains to you and which seem Byzantine and inconsistent. The amount of effort you put into this is exhausting, and yet no matter how hard you try to behave exactly the same way everyone else does, and try to clarify things when you don’t understand, or try to join in with “smalltalk”, most of your interactions are judged as malicious and get you yelled at.

Then you eventually get diagnosed and work out that you basically have complex post traumatic stress from decades of this.

And so you find your people and you limit interaction with people who hurt you. You still have to exist in their world because you have to buy things and pay taxes, but otherwise … you back off for your own sanity because it seems no amount of effort to try and accommodate them will ever be acceptable to neurotypical people.

Meanwhile when neurotypical people encounter you they tell you that you are incapable of empathy, have no theory of mind, and are rude and annoying. They have tried nothing to understand you, and are all out of ideas.

Apparently I don’t understand their social rules, but unlike them I do understand irony.

I’m increasingly understanding why the idea that some of us with neurodevelopmental disorders are considered “high functioning” is basically crap.

Recently, by myself, I managed to unmask pretty much completely and … in that moment had anyone seen me they would not have considered me “high functioning”.

I speak two languages and yet I felt like speaking none. I gave up any pretence of trying to act like *them*, and it was liberating.

And it gave me a level of relaxation hitherto only achievable on amphetamine (I’d dropped into the unmedicated state when I did this).

And that’s when it hit me. There’s no difference in kind between me and a “rain man” stereotype. No. Some of us in infancy are pushed into masking as a necessary but ludicrously expensive survival mechanism and some are not.

And masking works, and they call us “high functioning”, but the cost is astronomical. I realise that now.

I think it’s where the idea of the “savant” comes from as well. As our NT peers develop the executive functioning that we never do, our differences increasingly paint a target on our backs.

And so we try to fina an acceptable way to escape. If adults were going to help us, we wouldn’t have had to start masking in the first place and one of the first lessons many of us learn is that indeed, the adults in our life are just as dangerous as our former friends.

But they mostly approve of book learning. And it gives us a way to keep ourselves apart.

And it hits our novelty and interest triggers.

And thus the path we are on reinforces itself. We spend the following decades using all of our intellectual and emotional capacity to bolster this survival mechanism and turn to things like alcohol or worse to manage the stress.

And then finally, some of us eventually find help. It took five decades in my case. I was exhausted.

To see me now, many would think me “regressing”.

I’m not. I’m just starting to live my truth. I deserve that. I need to rest. I’ve more than earned it.

Profoundly great therapy session. A realisation: have spent my entire life trying to hide who I really am from people who actually LIKE who I really am, and instead strive towards some neurotypical idea of what someone like me SHOULD be, and beating myself up for not reaching a standard I will never reach set by people who I don’t respect and who will never respect me anyway.

And being terrified that my constant failure to reach that standard means my actual loved ones will abandon me because I’m unable to be what I was always told I needed to be.

Simultaneously grossly overestimating my ability to mask myself from people I share my life and bed with, and actually being a bit insulting to them and myself for believing that I needed to do that, because nobody would ever actually want ME.

And I know why I did that. It was something I needed to do to survive a landscape where my synapses would hoard the neurotransmitters needed to prevent my own subconscious constantly whispering self hatred into my thoughts.

But I don’t need that any more. I’ve made them give up their precious monoamines.

And I can be me.

And stop apologising for it.

Because who I am is not only good enough; who I am is loved.

By people I love.

A thing they don’t tell you when you start amphetamine for ADHD, but they SHOULD, is that what they do is NOT make you function like a neurotypical.

What they actually do is turn you into a person with ADHD with greater capacity.

Sometimes MUCH greater capacity.

And there can be a honeymoon phase when you’re all like, “OMG! I’m saved! I can do all the things now!”

And the risk is that you will use the extra capacity to mask harder and engage in more of the same stuff that was causing burnout.

And then 3-6 months later you find yourself in the same place you started but with an amphetamine habit. Also you can sit still.

I see a LOT of people online who hit the point a few months in where they conclude they have stopped working and start desperately doing meds breaks, long supplement recipes, etc to get back the “functionality”.

And these people, more often than not, also seem to have massive internalised ableism. They never accept their own disability, instead thinking it’s their “duty” to use any means possible to “not inflict my shame on anyone else”.

And using up that extra capacity from amphetamine to do that is a nasty trap because you can’t go back. Ever.

You HAVE to accept what you are.

Just seen someone saying they support bans on trans healthcare for under 18s because “let kids be kids”.

By the time I hit puberty, I had KNOWN for a decade.

I also knew that telling anyone would be profoundly dangerous.

So I hid who I was and, am almost grateful that the neurodivergence gave the other kids something else to latch on to. They were so busy calling me a “mong” that they didn’t notice I was trans.

Because that might have got me murdered.

Or pushed me into a position where I felt I had no options other than the same end result.

So I hid it.

And I hid it really well.

And one of the things that happens when a 5 year old child is terrified of their parents, or their families, or the school bullies finding out who they really are is that they end up traumatised.

A 5 year old child. Traumatised and ashamed.

Ashamed because adults openly talked about them.

Or people like them.

And what they said was horrific. What they said made it very clear that they would regard their own kids as subhuman monsters if they ever found out.

So we hid. And an important part of ourselves died in childhood. A light that should have shone, went out.

I’ve tried my best to rekindle it.

I’ve managed somewhat but it will never be right. Not really. I’ve made peace with that.

“Let kids be kids”. Trans kids like me never got to be.

Because of people who say things like that.