I have always been a socially anxious, awkward, and emotional person. I was diagnosed with autism and at 16 and I’m 26 now. I’ve spent the last 10 years aggressively pushing myself out of my comfort zone in an attempt to escape my own innate social and emotional challenges. I’ve been sprinting as fast as I can away from the emotionally unregulated little girl I was towards what I envisioned as my “true self”. I’ve been convinced my whole life that my future idealized, neurotypical-acting self with no social deficits is my “true self” and that with enough self-discipline and practice I can become her. Identifying with the undiagnosed, untreated version of myself is scary, because it was alienating and painful to be that little girl. But autism doesn’t go away, even if you try really hard to forget you’re autistic.
In the book Brilliant Imperfection, Eli Clare critiques the notion that disability is something people can or must overcome through hard work in order to thrive, and explains that this belief is rooted in the ideology of cure, which doesn’t neatly apply to most disabled people since so many disabilities are congenital and uncurable.
“But for some of us, even if we accept disability as damage to individual
body-minds, these tenets quickly become tangled, because an original
nondisabled state of being doesn’t exist. How would I, or the medical-
industrial complex, go about restoring my body-mind? The vision of me
without tremoring hands and slurred speech, with more balance and
coordination, doesn’t originate from my visceral history. Rather it arises
from an imagination of what I should be like, from some definition of
normal and natural.“
The person I try every day to become never existed, does not exist now, and may never exist. That is a difficult thing to accept in a world where autistic people are punished for not conforming, for being “weird”, “immature”, “off-putting”, “cringe”, etc. I’ve never felt like I was trying to cure myself, but reading Brilliant Imperfection made me realize how deeply my own internalized ableism is rooted in the ideology of cure. This realization has not magically cured my internalized ableism, but it certainly held a mirror up and opened my mind to another line of thinking that I will continue to explore.
Unruly Bodies 
I’ve definitely felt the same way, growing up as I always felt out of place as if I was two steps behind everyone else but I tried so hard to be this “normal” version of myself by masking and contorting into a mold of what I thought was acceptable. But in the end, it forced me to confront what I tried so desperately to change. Now, I am on the journey to get an autism diagnosis, not because I want or believe that this diagnosis will lead to me finding a cure. But because I genuinely want to understand myself better and be comfortable with who I am. I feel like internalized ableism steals so much of oneself and makes you afraid to be comfortable as you are.
I relate SO MUCH to this. I have recently accepted that I am socially awkward and off-putting, and that’s okay. I no longer will contort myself to make myself “acceptable”. learning to accept yourself is one of the bravest things you could ever do. You must exist with yourself, so the only person you should be working overtime to make comfortable is yourself. We must stop pushing to create a false version of ourselves because as we go, we will never think it is enough change, and we will end up losing who we were when we started. We must stop trying to be an idea.