Masking is real, burnout is real — and so is the wiring underneath. True support for autistic people demands we hold all truths at once.
Imagine your life as a theatre performance in which everyone else received the script months ago. They know their lines, their cues, exactly where to stand. You never got a copy. Every evening you walk on stage and improvise — watching, calculating, performing — just to avoid being found out.
For many autistic adults, this is not a metaphor. It is Tuesday.
A 2025 study by Miguel Lois-Mosquera and colleagues, titled “Always Feeling Stuck in the Middle,” attempts to map this exhausting experience. Twelve autistic adults describe, in striking detail, what it costs to move through a world that was not designed for them. The findings are recognisable and, in many ways, deeply validating. But they also raise uncomfortable questions — questions that the neurodiversity debate urgently needs to face.
The hidden labour of looking normal
Sociologist Erving Goffman called it the “personal front”: the mask we wear in public. For most people, this is largely automatic. For the study’s participants, it is an Olympic sport conducted in secret.
The strategies they describe will be familiar to many autistic readers. Scripting — mentally rehearsing conversations long before they happen, to eliminate the risk of surprise. One participant, Victoria, captures the relentlessness of this process:
“I rehearse and rehearse what to say… just to be prepared.”— Victoria, study participant
Then there is the chameleon effect: the complete adaptation of self to blend into a given environment — not out of genuine affinity, but out of necessity. Mary describes it with a kind of weary pride:
“I have become a real chameleon. I can fit into any kind of situation… I have learnt from copying everybody else.”— Mary, study participant
The consequences of this sustained performance are not merely tiredness. They are existential. Participants describe physical crashes — moments of total collapse after social interaction. Olivia admits she sometimes has to lie on the floor just to reset. Frances needs to chew gum simply to stay focused during conversation. These are not quirks. They are signals from a nervous system running far beyond its capacity.
Where the social model runs out of road
Up to this point, the study’s value is clear. But here is where the analysis becomes more contentious — and where the stakes for autistic people are highest.
The researchers frame their conclusions largely through the lens of sociological theory. The implicit argument is seductive: if society were more inclusive, more patient, more neurologically humble, the difficulties autistic people face would significantly diminish. There is truth in this. But it is not the whole truth.
Even in a world of perfect acceptance, an autistic brain processes the world differently. A crowded room remains a cacophony of competing sound, even if every person in it means well. Executive dysfunction — difficulty with planning, switching tasks, managing time — does not dissolve because the social atmosphere improves. The need to recover after social interaction is often not psychological but physiological.
Olivia touches on this when she describes her experience in social situations:
“I feel childish and vulnerable.”— Olivia, study participant
That vulnerability is not only a product of stigma. It is frequently the direct result of a nervous system overwhelmed by sensory input — regardless of how kind the room is. By attributing all difficulty to social context, we risk “defining away” genuine support needs as mere societal failures. That is not emancipation. That is a different kind of erasure.
Whose voices are we actually hearing?
There is a further problem with studies of this kind, and it deserves to be named directly. The twelve participants in this research are, by and large, people capable of deep verbal self-reflection — able to articulate their inner world through interviews, creative methods, and metaphor. Nine of them are women. Almost all are highly educated.
This is not a criticism of the individuals. But it creates a particular kind of echo chamber. We hear the experiences of autistic people who can describe the gate. Jane, one of the participants, offers a striking image of how isolated one can feel even with considerable self-awareness:
“The world is a zoo full of completely different animals… I’m quite out of that zoo, being outside the gates. Going through the gates, it is like people are in cages, not being able to be themselves.”— Jane, study participant
The metaphor is vivid and moving. But it also illustrates a kind of privilege: the ability to stand at the gate and reflect on it. Many autistic people — those with higher support needs, with limited verbal language, with significant challenges in daily self-care — do not have that option. When research and policy are built primarily on the testimony of the most articulate, the result is solutions that serve only a narrow slice of the spectrum.
The middle ground we actually need
The study’s title is “Always Feeling Stuck in the Middle.” There is an irony here worth sitting with: the middle is precisely where the autism debate needs to go.
The field has long been polarised between two inadequate positions. The medical model sees autism primarily as a deficit to be corrected. The most radical version of the neurodiversity model dismisses biological reality altogether and locates all difficulty in a society unwilling to adapt. Both are wrong, and both cause harm.
A more honest position holds two things simultaneously. First: autism involves genuine differences in neurological processing that bring both real strengths and real challenges. These are not invented by a judgmental society. They require concrete tools, appropriate therapy when wanted, and sometimes active protection. Second: society is far more rigid, judgmental, and poorly designed for neurological diversity than it needs to be — and this rigidity amplifies biological vulnerability enormously.
The task, then, is not to choose between acceptance and support. It is to pursue both, without allowing either to erase the other. Andrea, one of the study’s participants, cuts through the complexity with admirable economy:
“Just talk to us.”— Andrea, study participant
That is good advice. And it means listening to all of it — the social experience and the sensory reality, the need for acceptance and the need for genuine, biology-informed care. Only when we hold both can we stop asking autistic people to perform their way through a world that refuses to see them whole.
Reference: Lois-Mosquera, M., et al. (2025). “Always feeling stuck in the middle: Autistic adults’ perspectives navigating social norms and expectations.” Research in Neurodiversity.
The European Autist 