Unlearning Me

Allow me a moment to slander myself. My own kind, as it were.

Growing up in the 70s and 80s, being autistic meant something very specific. The clearest example I can give you is the movie Rain Man. To the general public, Dustin Hoffman’s character was a best-case scenario.That was the template.

Brilliant, but broken. Lovable, but other. Savant math tricks. Emotional confusion. A person you either protected or tolerated, but never became. And even that was considered compassionate.

Fast forward to now and we know a lot more about autism and the people who have it. We’re late-diagnosing adults who have struggled their entire lives. We’re diagnosing kids and, I hope, giving them the support and structure they need instead of forcing them into a box labeled “normal” while pretending every child-shaped child has the same inner wiring.

I didn’t know then what I know now.

No two insides are the same. I don’t mean that medically. I mean it from the heart. Not the organ -the metaphor.

Autistic representation when I was a kid was just enough for me to identify a few of my own traits… and learn to hate them. I remember a gorgeous angora turtleneck my mother got me. Soft little fibers floating on light. It made me feel so grown up.

It also felt like burning in the fires of hell. No matter how hard I focused on sitting still, on not screaming, on not clawing at my skin — I would eventually rip it off. And usually cry. I just wanted to wear the sweater. Everyone else could wear whatever they wanted.

Not me.

I remember sitting on the edge of my bed as a kid, rocking slightly without realizing it. The motion felt regulating. Like my nervous system had found a rhythm it could trust. And then I’d catch myself and freeze. Because I knew what that meant. I knew who did that.

And I was not going to be that.

If the media was to be believed, autistic people rocked back and forth hugging themselves while repeating the same few words. They screamed if interrupted. They didn’t understand jokes. They couldn’t regulate their emotions. They were burdens. They were tragic. They were less than. And the message was clear: if you do that, you are wrong. Worse than wrong.

So I learned not to rock when I needed to self-soothe. Not just in public. At all. I worked endlessly to suppress all of it. Reading every sign I saw. Repeating lovely phrases. Listening to the same song on repeat for days. (Before CDs, this wasn’t as easy. Too much work to rewind a cassette again and again. Though I did once make a mixtape that was just “The End of the World As We Know It” as many times as would fit. “Psycho Killer,” too. Make of that what you will.)

I laughed at the jokes. I learned the timing. I studied people like a foreign language. I became fluent enough to pass. The tragedy wasn’t that other people believed it. It’s that I did.

The media made autism look horrible. It reinforced that autistic people would never live a normal life. They’d end up institutionalized. Or homeless. Or alone. There were no depictions of autistic women building careers or raising families or being messy and complicated and fully human.

So when I received my dual diagnosis of autism and ADHD a couple of years ago, I had to spend time evaluating my own biases.

It took a long time. It started with admitting I didn’t actually know what autism looked like. It started with realizing that most diagnostic criteria describe what bothers neurotypical people. What society notices.

Eye contact. Tone. Reciprocity. Flexibility. And I had learned to perform all of it.

Mitigate. Mask. Work around. Or more often, deny myself whatever need that behavior was trying to meet.

Eventually, that strategy collapsed. It wasn’t dramatic until it was. A nervous system that had been bracing for decades finally giving out. It forced me to learn about myself quickly.

The research was helpful. Hopeful, even. That part was easier than I expected.

The hard part was unlearning. Unlearning the myths. Unlearning the pity. Unlearning the unease.

Because here’s the part no one warned me about: somehow, without anyone sitting me down and saying so, I had absorbed that certain ways of existing in the world were wrong.

I hadn’t just been taught to hate them. I had been taught to hate myself. No one had to punish me. They just had to reward the version of me that was easiest to manage. The work now isn’t becoming someone new. It’s letting the rocking happen when I need it.

Letting the song repeat. Letting the hyperfixation eat. It’s choosing not to participate in the old joke. It’s choosing not to be my own bully. 

And maybe that’s the most radical thing about this whole process.Not that I learned I’m autistic. That I unlearned the belief that autism is something to fix.

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Cami Kaos is a writer, autistic woman, and former tech community organizer who spent more than a decade building inclusive spaces in an industry that rarely made room for people like her. After burning out from constant caretaking and code-switching, she turned inward—to reclaim the parts of herself that were silenced to make others comfortable. Cami writes about identity, survival, and neurodivergence—not always without apology, but with growing conviction. These days, she’s not interested in holding it all together anymore—just holding what matters. You can find Cami at camikaos.com. Bring snacks.

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