What If Unmasking Is Really a Return to Who We Were Before the World Told Us Who to Be?

I was reading Freya’s (@freyaannray) Substack article about her experience with autism and neurodivergence, and so much of what she described felt similar to my experience, but in my own way, totally different. It sent me down a rabbit hole.

I know I’m neurodivergent. I’ve known for a long time that I experience the world differently. I’m a transpersonal art therapist, and sometimes I think I got that degree as much to understand myself as I did to be of service. I’ve spent years studying psychology, astrology, Human Design, Gene Keys, mindfulness, intuition, energy, and consciousness. Give me a chart, an energetic pattern, an image, a symbol, or someone’s inner world and something opens. Ask me to make small talk and part of me wants to crawl out of my skin.

I have always had a lot of discomfort being in my body, especially with temperature or physical discomfort. Stagnancy is difficult. Boredom is excruciating. Relaxing and sitting still can be hard. I can become incredibly overstimulated, yet I also seek certain kinds of sensory input.

I used to wear really tight clothes and tuck everything tightly into my pants. I still like compression. Apparently the body can want less of some sensations and more of others. And if someone is inconsiderate, I get fucking steamy. 1976, year of the Fire Dragon, reporting for duty.

At the same time, I can move through the world channeling Source sometimes like I am exempt from all of it. When I’m creating, teaching, writing, making art, connecting ideas, exploring consciousness, or having a conversation with actual depth, I can go for hours. It’s ordinary human life that has sometimes been harder.

I didn’t really get other kids. Then I didn’t get teenagers. Then I became an adult and realized I didn’t particularly understand adults either. I had this intense heart, love, and commitment to healing and the collective in a way I just thought everyone had. When I was young, I somehow thought that by 35 everyone got their shit together and things were good. Then I stepped into the spiritual space and basically did the same thing again. Only now I thought everyone wakes up, realizes we have a collective mission, and we create a New World together.

So I spent a lot of my life isolated because I was tough, but underneath that toughness I was incredibly sensitive.

I spent a lot of time observing people and figuring out how they worked, especially what it meant to be a woman. Somehow I eventually became a therapist, and maybe that isn’t contradictory at all. Maybe that is exactly how I got here.

My work revolves around understanding people and creating spaces for people to unearth and honor their uniqueness. Art, Astrology, Human Design, and Gene Keys are languages that help this process. They helped me connect to what I was already seeing and sensing.

After reading Freya’s article, I took a couple of autism screeners out of curiosity. I’m almost 50. I’m not particularly interested in chasing a diagnosis, acquiring another identity, or using anything as an excuse for my feelings, challenges, or behaviors. I basically wanted to know: does this explain some shit?

I scored 123 out of 175 on the CAT-Q, which put me in the high range for camouflaging and masking. Then I scored 105 out of 240 on the RAADS-R, above its commonly used screening threshold for autistic traits. Instead of making me think I needed to figure out whether I’m autistic, the scores made me wonder how much of my life I have spent masking who I naturally am. And is that the last piece of this awakening for many of us?

Even answering the questions was complicated because I’ve spent decades healing, adapting, and learning myself. Sometimes I found myself wondering which version of me I was supposed to answer for. Who I was naturally, who I learned to be, or who I am now?

Because lately I’m leaning toward respectfully not caring.

I care enormously about people. I’m starting do not care about performing the socially acceptable version of myself.

I don’t want to pretend I’m interested when I’m not. I don’t want to sit somewhere physically uncomfortable because leaving might look rude. I don’t want to override what my body is screaming because everyone else appears fine. I don’t want to make myself or my emotions smaller because someone doesn’t understand my intensity.

I think this is difficult to separate from my history. I was adopted, and my mother who raised me is a Libra Sun who was very concerned with appearances. How things looked mattered. How we behaved mattered. There was also a subtle awareness underneath adoption that belonging wasn’t necessarily something I could take completely for granted. Nobody needed to explicitly tell me I could be given back for my nervous system to potentially learn: be acceptable.

I also experienced separation from my birth mother and six weeks of foster care before being placed with my family. I can’t know what my infant nervous system experienced, but my nervous system existed before my autobiographical memory did. What I know is that I ended up with a single mom either way, and resources and regulation aren’t necessarily the same thing.

Then add my intense fear of being publicly embarrassed. Early puberty without much support added another layer. I hated the feeling of being exposed, looking foolish, getting something wrong, or becoming the thing everyone was noticing. My weight became part of that too. At times my body felt like baggage I carried into every room, and I think I compensated by masking even harder. Be funny. Be strong. Be capable. Be helpful. Be warm. Be insightful. Give people enough other things to notice.

Looking back, I can see how body shame, adoption, belonging, and masking may have braided themselves together. I learned to manage how I was perceived in order to feel acceptable.

Human Design gives me another interesting mirror for this because I am a Splenic Manifestor. Within that system, I am essentially built around autonomy, initiation, and immediate instinctive body knowing. Yet so much of my childhood experience taught me to comply, be acceptable, consider how my behavior reflected on everyone else, avoid embarrassing anyone, and override the first response of my body.

Being controlled is particularly difficult for a Manifestor. As a child, I obviously couldn’t simply move according to every internal impulse. I had very little autonomy other than speech and what actions I decided to take. More and more, I started to suppress both. Looking back, I wonder how much frustration and anger that created and how much of it I learned to suppress in my body. My entire system could be saying NO while I had learned that no wasn’t necessarily an available option.

That anger had to go somewhere. I learned to contain it, intellectualize it, understand everyone else’s perspective, make myself acceptable, or turn it back toward myself. Human Design describes anger as the Manifestor’s not-self theme and peace as its signature, and that has become much more interesting to me through this lens.

Maybe the goal isn’t to snuff out my dragon. I want to invite it to speak. I want to hear the fire earlier, before it is on my breath, in my words, or held inside me.

My Splenic Authority is also located in one of our instinctual survival centers, in the very body I learned to override. One of the systems I’ve studied for years keeps pointing me toward trusting the first knowing. Notice the first tightening. Notice the first no. Inform rather than ask permission. Stop explaining yourself until everyone approves.

This is where all of these threads start converging for me. Is something autism? ADHD? Adoption? Attachment? Sensory processing? Masking? Family conditioning? Human Design? Spiritual sensitivity? Does every experience need to be assigned a name?

Human beings aren’t a list of things that are wrong.

We have never been defective or broken. Maybe these things grew around one another. Maybe I will never know exactly where one begins and another ends. I’m increasingly less interested in identifying the origin of every trait than I am in asking: What have I been overriding that I am finally ready to listen to? To see?

There is also a larger belief this has brought up for me. I feel like if we are awake, we are some degree of neurodivergent. I don’t mean that every spiritually awake person is clinically autistic or has ADHD. I’m talking about something broader. Our nervous systems were not made for this world.

And when I say this world, I mean the systems we built on top of the Earth. The speed, noise, screens, artificial light, productivity, schedules, hierarchy, isolation, constant consumption, social performance, separation from nature, separation from one another, and separation from ourselves. Maybe some nervous systems simply cannot comfortably normalize what was never particularly natural to begin with.

And then there are the particular circumstances we land in. I wasn’t only trying to function in a world that didn’t feel designed for my nervous system. My sensitivity met separation, adoption, expectations around appearance and behavior, and environments where overriding myself often felt easier than disrupting everyone around me. Whatever I arrived here with, I became incredibly skilled at adapting it to the circumstances I was given. Now I’m interested in what happens when adaptation no longer gets the final word.

It makes me think about how many people doing generational healing work identify as the black sheep, the curse breaker, the sensitive one, the weird one, the one who left, the one who questioned everything, the one who stopped keeping the family secrets. It also makes me think about the spiritual language of starseeds, angelics, old souls, intuitives, channels, and people who have spent their entire lives feeling like they landed somewhere whose social customs make absolutely no sense.

Those languages may be describing completely different things. Sometimes they may overlap. I don’t particularly need to prove it. I’m interested in what happens when a framework helps someone recognize themselves.

That is why I still like the tests. It’s why I like Human Design, Gene Keys, astrology, psychology, and nervous-system work. A test doesn’t have to become an identity. It can be another mirror. You can look at something and say, this explains something about me. This helps me understand why certain environments exhaust me. This shows me where I’ve been compensating. This helps me recognize what my body has been trying to tell me. And then you can put the test or diagnosis down.

Lately I don’t feel like I’m becoming someone new. I feel like I’m returning to who I was when I was younger, but with wisdom. There was who I naturally was, who I learned to be, and who I consciously choose to be now.

I don’t want to erase everything I learned through adaptation. Some of it became genuine skill. I have discernment now. Language. Compassion. Communication. Boundaries. Wisdom. I don’t need to become the child I once was, and I don’t have to keep every adaptation that child developed in order to belong.

Maybe that is what unmasking means to me. I can keep what I learned and release what required me to abandon myself. I can listen to my body before it has to scream. I can honor my sensitivity without making it a problem. I can recognize anger as information. I can stop compensating for my body, my intensity, my awkwardness, or the parts of myself I once thought needed to be balanced out by being exceptionally useful, interesting, funny, insightful, or good.

Maybe I wasn’t collecting systems all these years. Maybe I was collecting mirrors.

Psychology. Astrology. Human Design. Gene Keys. Neurodivergence. The nervous system. Intuition. Spirit. None of them need to tell me who I am. They can help me recognize the person who has been there all along.

And maybe unmasking is returning to myself with the wisdom to finally know what I’m looking at.

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