Embracing my inner ugly duckling.

We can be ugly ducklings. We don’t need a story about where we turn into swans so we can be tolerable. Sometimes I catch myself trying to be a swan. I know, from experience, that this allistic-privileged world only wants swans or pretty ducks. They don’t want ugly ducklings, awkward people who don’t follow their norms that don’t have something else that compensates for it. 

So we try to be swans. We try to overcompensate, allow ourselves to be autistic but only the palatable kind. The quirky successful professor. The tech genius. We try to be enviable and cover up the ugly parts, the parts we’ve been taught to disown. 

But what if being an “ugly” duckling is fine. What if “ugly” is just in the eye of the perceiver and the perceiver is a biased allistic society that only values its own ways. Many of us have trauma due to being autistic growing up in this world. We all deal with it differently. 

My default strategy had been to be autistic but hyper successful and ultra independent. Can you guess what the downside to that is? Covering up a disability by exploiting the spikes of your spikey skill profile? Yes, you guessed correctly: burn out. 

Can you guess what my healing path is? Yep, it’s rest, acceptance, grace, slowing down, breathing, allowing, embracing, grieving. Allowing the ugly duckling, allowing myself to be an autistic person who is not enviable, who hasn’t compensated enough, who isn’t passing as allistic or someone an allistic person would want to get to know. My autism is out there, in your face, on my linkedin page. It is not “pretty”, it is honest, unfiltered, unenviable, “unsuccessful”. 

The reality is that even if I tried to keep up with my overcompensation strategy, I would’ve never been able to accomplish it. The spikes on my spikey skill profile are thin and specialized, sure, I can overcompensate in my career but not in my fashion or small talk skills. I would eventually lose anyway. So why not embrace what I am without the fight?