Stripping the Mask Off

This whole piece was inspired by a Tori Amos concert. Or concerts. But I must admit, I’m not Tori’s biggest fan. Not her music anyway. But the way she shows up? The way she inhabits her body? Endlessly beautiful. And is she Autistic? I’m not here to own an identity for someone else who hasn’t said it out loud. And, sure, not all people with synesthesias are autistic. But…..
Shall we continue?

One of the things allistic people often misunderstand when they watch autistic artists perform is how true the performance is.

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They see intensity and assume exaggeration. They see control and assume technique, they assume trying.

They see a person inhabiting grief, joy, rage, longing, terror, devotion, or desire and imagine that the artist is manufacturing an emotional state for the audience.

But sometimes the stage is not where autistic people become more dramatic. It is the only place we are finally allowed to stop making ourselves smaller. For most of our lives, many of us are taught that our feelings are too big.

We cry too hard. We love too much. We become too excited.

We care too intensely. We take things too personally. We grieve too long.

We are too angry about injustice, too devastated by rejection, too moved by beauty, too attached to what matters to us.

Our feelings do not always arrive in polite, socially proportionate bits. They can move through the whole body. They can reorganize the day. They can make language disappear. They can make the distance between ordinary life and catastrophe feel very small.

And the world rarely responds to that intensity with tenderness.

It responds with correction.

“Calm down. Lower your voice. You are overreacting. It is not that serious. You are making everyone uncomfortable. Why are you still upset? Why do you care so much?”

Eventually, we learn that the problem is not simply having feelings. The problem is allowing other people to see their actual size.

So we become skilled at masking. We turn devastation into “I’m fine.”

We reduce delight to a closed mouth smile.

We translate fury into careful, measured sentences or we turn it on ourselves and our bodies.

We learn to contain ourselves before someone else contains us.

This is often called emotional regulation, although it may have very little to do with regulation. It’s mirroring or allistic regurgitation.

Sometimes it is concealment. Sometimes it is self-erasure.

Sometimes it is the lifelong practice of making an entire internal weather system look like partly cloudy skies.

And then there is art.

A stage.

A rehearsal room.

A microphone.

A camera.

A canvas.

A dance floor.

A blank page.

A character whose grief is allowed to be enormous.

A song that requires us to break open.

A scene in which shaking is not embarrassing, sobbing is not manipulative, rage is not inappropriate, and devotion is not too intense. Where we are supposed to feel the intensity of being seen while being honest.

For once, there is somewhere for the whole feeling to go.

For once, the assignment is not to contain it. The assignment is to reveal it.

And people applaud.

That may be one of the most painful and beautiful things about being an autistic artist. It is often the only time we are appreciated for turning ourselves inside out. We rip open our souls and share them with strangers, while the people who are closer see the real performance.

The same intensity that makes us too much in a relationship becomes magnetic beneath stage lights.

The grief that makes people withdraw from us becomes a performance they call transcendent.

The passion that embarrasses others in ordinary conversation becomes the reason they buy a ticket.

The sensitivity we are told to manage becomes the instrument through which everyone else gets to feel.

They call it raw, vulnerable, fearless.

They tell us they could feel everything. (You’re welcome).

What they may not understand is that we feel everything too.

We are not necessarily summoning an emotional state from nowhere. We are not simply studying the appearance of feeling and reproducing it convincingly.

Sometimes we are finally opening the door to a room we are required to keep locked in ordinary life.

The performance is true because the feeling is true.

Craft may be what makes it possible to survive telling the truth.

It gives form to something that otherwise has nowhere to go.

It creates a container strong enough to hold the feeling without requiring the feeling to become smaller or we forget the container even matters. Maybe it doesn’t.

There is a particular kind of loneliness in being loved for your emotional depth only after it has been transformed into something we’re supposed to pretend is fake.

People may love the song about your grief more than they know how to sit beside your grief.

They may admire the monologue built from your rage while finding your actual anger threatening.

They may praise your vulnerability onstage and ask you to be less sensitive backstage.

They may call your performance brave while punishing the same emotional honesty in ordinary life.

They love the open wound when it is framed as art.

They love the emotional enormity when it is choreographed, lit, edited, scored, and delivered from an appropriate distance.

They love what pours out of us as long as they do not have to live beside the person who contains it.

This is the contradiction.

Our intensity is pathologized until it entertains someone, calls someone to feel themselves in a theatre created for that purpose. It’s almost as allistic people need that container to access what autistic people know every day.

Our sensitivity is treated as weakness until it creates beauty.

Our capacity to become wholly consumed is considered unhealthy until it produces excellence.

Our refusal to feel halfway is exhausting until it moves an audience.

Then, suddenly, the thing we have been told to control is the thing everyone came to see.

This is why autistic performance can feel so startlingly alive.

The stage may be one of the few places where the external expression finally matches the internal scale.

Outside of art, many autistic people are constantly translating.

We are adjusting volume, expression, timing, posture, eye contact, language, movement, and tone. We are trying to communicate an internal reality through a narrow range of socially acceptable signals.

We are deciding how much truth another person can tolerate.

We are editing in real time.

Onstage, the equation changes.

Intensity becomes legible.

Big feelings become useful.

Repetition becomes rehearsal.

Obsession becomes dedication.

Sensitivity becomes artistic perception.

The ability to notice everything becomes detail.

The inability to look away becomes commitment.

What is treated as pathology in one setting becomes talent in another.

But the artist did not suddenly become more emotionally capable under the lights.

The audience simply became more willing to receive what was already there.

Maybe this is why applause can feel so powerful. Maybe this is why we cry during a curtain call.

It is not only praise for the work.

It can feel like permission and being seen deeply.

Yes, cry that hard. Yes, care that much.

Yes, show us the part of you that everyday life keeps demanding you hide.

We love you this way.

And then the performance ends.

The lights come up.

The artist leaves the stage and returns to a world where the same intensity must once again be moderated.

Where grief needs a reasonable timeline.

Where excitement must remain proportionate.

Where anger must be carefully packaged to be considered credible.

Where love must not become overwhelming.

Where an emotional response must match what everyone else has decided the situation deserves.

The audience gets to leave carrying the catharsis.

The artist has to return to containing the source.

This is not to say every autistic artist experiences performance this way. Autism is not one emotional profile, and autistic art is not a single phenomenon. Some autistic artists approach performance through precision, analysis, embodiment, technique, or play. Some feel deeply while performing. Some feel almost nothing until afterward. Some use art to access emotion, and some use it to organize emotion.

But for many of us, the assumption that performance must be less true than ordinary life gets the relationship backward.

Ordinary life is often where we perform. We perform calm. We perform proportion. We perform flexibility. We perform being unaffected. We perform the version of ourselves that other people find easiest to be around.

Art may be where the performance finally stops. It may be where the face, voice, body, and feeling align. Where we no longer have to pretend that the thing did not hurt that much. Where we do not have to apologize for being altered by what happened. Where we can show the ecstatic scale of joy without becoming self-conscious.

Where we can admit that love feels like devastation, that beauty can be physically painful, that longing can reorganize the entire nervous system.

Onstage, the truth is not that we are pretending to feel more. The truth may be that everywhere else, we are pretending to feel less.

So when an autistic artist turns themselves inside out in front of you, do not be too quick to call it transformation. Do not confuse containment with emotional truth or performance with emotional invention.

You may simply be witnessing a person in one of the only places where the full size of their inner life is not treated as a problem.

One of the only places where exposure becomes excellence. Where overwhelm becomes art. Where the very thing that has made them difficult, dramatic, oversensitive, obsessive, or too much is finally recognized as something valuable.

For a few minutes, the world does not ask them to calm down. It does not ask them to make the feeling smaller. It does not ask them to come back when they can explain it more reasonably.

It watches them break open.

It calls the breaking beautiful.

And then it asks them to do it again.

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