Over the summer I worked for an aerospace and defense company as an intern. It was my first “big girl” job and I was really excited to gain some “real-world” experience and have something to put on my resume. I thought I was doing a good job fitting in and trying to get out of my comfort zone, until my boss had scheduled a last minute meeting to meet his boss. This was not something I was looking forward to, especially since it had come as a surprise. I had a full breakdown after I had completely frozen up on the Microsoft teams call. My boss was really concerned and didn’t understand why I had gotten upset. To him it was a casual meeting to tell his boss what I had been working on. But I had felt an intense pressure to make my boss look good in front of his boss, and I am not very good at coming up with things to say on the spot. He was really worried about me, and probably a bit confused as to why something so small had upset me so much. I explained to him that I like to have lots of time to “mentally prepare” for things, especially meeting new people who are important.
I had thought I was good at masking, until I heard some of the feedback my boss had for me. He noticed that I was not very good at eye contact, or introducing myself to people. He had chalked it up to me being “shy.” He would tell people this almost as a warning that I would be awkward and hard to converse with. The more positive feedback included how he appreciated my straight forward and direct communication, and my efficiency and time management skills…soo pretty much any feedback I received about myself was an autistic trait. It was all right in front of them, but no one could quite pinpoint what it was about me that was different.
After reading the paper about infantilizing autism I realized, that they have probably never seen an autistic adult before, much less an autistic women. I resonated a lot with Jill and Jack in the paper and how they had seemingly stayed undetected during work, until something had overwhelmed them. Also, in Milton’s paper Lyte had described, “There was an initial reluctance to believe the need for tests because I had scraped by, doing my best to appear ‘normal.'” During my internship I could hide under the fact that I was just an intern, and a young women who was just a bit emotional. But I am afraid that when I graduate this year and get a real job that I wouldn’t be able to hide it enough to go undetected.
Unruly Bodies 
Women are less likely to be diagnosed, and even with ADHD, we are written off as if our symptoms were never researched or looked at. I know that, especially in the black community being diagnosed with Autism is very unlikely because of the stigma within the black community and having some type of “issue” and also because doctors don’t recognize systems look different in different people. Also, I watch this video and it was talking about how the things Autistic people tend to do was practically beaten out black children and condition them to masks to the point where their symptoms would not be detectable because in the vast majority of the black community don’t educate ourselves on anything that has to do with mentality or disability, so making humming noises to calm yourself down because of sensory overload while the adults are talking would be considered disrespectful and you would get popped in the mouth for that, until you just never did it again.