Nobody called it autism. Nobody called it anything.

What they called it was “intense.” Difficult. Too much. Not a team player. Doesn’t read the room. Brilliant but exhausting. I heard versions of all of those at various points in my career and filed them under “things you push through.”

That’s the thing about masking — it works. Not perfectly, not without cost, but well enough that the people around you don’t see the machinery underneath. They see the output. The deliverables. The results. What they don’t see is how much processing power went into producing them. How much energy went into watching the room, modeling the social dynamics, translating every interaction before responding to it.

I thought that was just what work felt like.

I thought everyone went home at the end of a long day in meetings and needed three hours of silence to function again. I thought everyone mentally rehearsed conversations before they happened and replayed them afterward looking for the thing they got wrong. I thought the heightened sensitivity to noise, to inconsistency, to environments that didn’t make logical sense — I thought that was just being particular. Having standards. Caring about the work.

It wasn’t. Or rather — it was all of that, and it was also something else I didn’t have a name for yet.

In technology, the wiring served me. Pattern recognition is an asset in systems design. Deep focus is an asset in complex problem solving. The ability to hold an enormous amount of context simultaneously — to see how all the pieces connect — that’s not a quirk in this field. It’s a superpower. I thrived in environments where the rules were logical, the feedback was concrete, and the goal was clear.

The places I struggled were the places where the rules were unspoken. Office politics. Social hierarchies. The meetings where the real conversation happened in the subtext and you were supposed to just know. I developed workarounds for all of it. Systems. Scripts. Frameworks for navigating situations I couldn’t read intuitively. I built a professional life on top of compensations I didn’t know were compensations.

When the diagnosis came, I didn’t feel broken. I felt explained.

All those years of exhaustion made sense. All those moments of feeling subtly out of step with everyone else in the room made sense. The relief wasn’t in the label. It was in finally understanding that I hadn’t been doing it wrong — I’d been doing it differently, with a different set of tools, working harder than most people around me knew.

That’s what autism looked like when nobody called it that. It looked like results. It looked like drive. It looked like a guy who got things done and was hard to read and didn’t always understand why people took things personally.

It looked, from the outside, a lot like success.

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Thin Ice: Survival, Identity, and Learning Who I Was All Along — my memoir of late diagnosis, identity, and what it means to finally understand yourself. Get the book →