Untranslated: The Autistic Heroine’s Journey
On Masking, Refusal, and the Quiet Art of Becoming
Two quotes. A scroll-stopping moment. What began as meme recognition unfolded into a map of survival—an autistic heroine’s journey through masking, solitude, queerness, and the quiet refusal to be consumed.
Introduction: The Spark of Recognition
It was one of those quiet moments—morning tea cooling beside me, notifications long since silenced—when the IG algorithm served up something unexpectedly sharp. A quote, just a few lines, nestled in a square image against a soft background, as if understatement could soften its blow: “I was always ashamed to take. So I gave. It was not a virtue. It was a disguise.” It stopped me cold. Not because it was new—I’d felt it, lived it, even written around it—but because it was so exact. So precise in its cut. A second one followed, not far behind: “Celibacy becomes very easy for a woman when she realises that there is literally no one worth being involved with unless they are helping to improve her life and loving her correctly.” That one didn’t feel like a cut. It felt like a closing. A seal. Not bitter, but certain. A quiet reclamation of space.
I think I stared at the screen for a long while—not reading, just... registering. Letting the two quotes settle beside one another. They were not written in conversation, and yet together, they told a story. Or perhaps not even a story, but the shape of one—the kind that doesn’t announce itself at the beginning, but emerges, pieced together through lived patterns, cumulative betrayals, the slow gathering of self-knowledge. And then it struck me: this is the arc. The one I know from storycraft, from teaching narrative, from watching mythologies spool out over time. This wasn’t just recognition. It was structure. A journey. Not the Hero’s Journey as we’re taught it—grand, external, conquest-driven—but something else. Quieter. Interior. Deeply feminine. Deeply autistic. A shift from hiding to withholding, from performance to presence, from overgiving to the simple refusal to be consumed.
These two quotes—shared like so many digital artefacts in the ether—mapped something intimate and vast. They traced a path I’ve walked more than once. And in seeing their sequence, I began to see myself, again, as someone in motion—not broken, not failed, but in the midst of a narrative arc that had never belonged to neurotypicals in the first place.
Seeing the Hero’s Journey in the Quotes
What struck me wasn’t just the content of the quotes, piercing though they were—it was the arc between them. The silent movement from one to the other. The way they traced a shift that was emotional, yes, but also structural. Narrative. I recognised it immediately, not because I’d seen it expressed this way before, but because I know stories. I know the shape of them, the way we reach for form when life itself feels formless. And this—this was form. Not in the sense of closure or plot or resolution, but in the sense of transformation. The first quote revealed the mask: the learned instinct to give, to please, to disappear gracefully. The second declared the refusal: to give no more, to preserve one’s own life before offering it up to another. Between the two, a threshold. A turning. The kind of deep internal movement that rarely announces itself but rearranges everything in its wake.
In that space between, I saw the outline of a journey I’d walked without knowing it had a name. One that began not with a call to adventure, but with the quiet compulsion to survive—to keep people comfortable, to earn affection by softening every edge, to give until I could no longer remember what it felt like to receive. From there, the retreat. Not cowardice, but sanctuary. Withdrawal not as defeat but as instinct. A sacred no. The kind of solitude that protects what remains when everything performative falls away. And then, perhaps, the possibility of return—not to the same terms, but on new ones. Boundaried. Unapologetic. Whole. Or maybe there is no return. Maybe some of us choose to remain at the margins, where clarity lives.
It mirrored the mythic Hero’s Journey in shape, but not in soul. This was not Campbell’s tale of conquest and external dragons. This was not the triumphant masculine arc of action and acclaim. This was something else—something interior and slow, rooted not in victory but in reclamation. The autistic heroine’s journey, if it can be called that. A path not toward achievement, but toward self. Toward unlearning the performance of acceptability and remembering the body’s first language: stillness, knowing, refusal. It’s not a story about becoming exceptional. It’s a story about becoming real—about stripping away the illusion that goodness lies in self-denial, and discovering, in the aftermath, that there is nothing shameful about needing. That there is power in saying no, and holiness in asking nothing more of yourself than to remain unextinguished.
The Autistic Heroine’s Journey: A Rewriting of the Monomyth
There is a well-known shape to stories, one that Joseph Campbell named the Hero’s Journey—a cycle of departure, initiation, and return. A narrative architecture that has dominated Western storytelling, offering the myth of the lone protagonist who ventures out, overcomes trials, and returns triumphant with wisdom or reward. But for many of us—autistic women, femmes, and others who were socialised into silence, compliance, or invisibility—this model has always rung hollow. Our dragons are not external. Our battles are not public. And the return, if it happens at all, is not to acclaim but to a life finally lived on our own terms. The traditional monomyth does not hold our shape. We need another map.
Maureen Murdock tried to draw one in The Heroine’s Journey, a model that began with disconnection from the feminine, descent into the depths, and eventual reclamation of wholeness. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, in Women Who Run With the Wolves, gave us the image of the wild woman, the descent to the underworld, the psychic death and reawakening. Both understand what Campbell’s arc leaves out: that for many, the truest journeys are subterranean. Internal. Relational. And most of all, cyclical—not bound to linear time, but to something closer to what disability scholars have called crip time: nonlinear, responsive, fluid, governed by need rather than clock.
So here, I offer one version of what I’m calling The Autistic Heroine’s Journey—a narrative pattern that emerged, for me, not from theory but from lived recognition. It is not fixed. It loops and bends, returns and detours. But its pattern is familiar to those of us who have spent our lives masking, enduring, unravelling, and rebuilding. It may not be everyone’s path—but for many of us, it resonates with something cellular.
1. The Ordinary World
She begins in silence. In the curated self. Praised for her manners, her empathy, her helpfulness. She learns early that she must suppress what is strange, inconvenient, or excessive. Her world rewards imitation and punishes intensity. So she gives. She adapts. She becomes what others expect of her.
2. The Call to Mask
Difference becomes danger. The more she reveals, the more she is corrected. She is labelled dramatic, obsessive, inappropriate. So she masks. She scripts. She studies others and rehearses safety. The call is not to adventure—it is to survival.
3. Refusal of the Self
There is a cost. She begins to vanish inside her performance. Her needs go unmet. Her pain goes unnamed. She may achieve outward success, but inwardly she feels hollow, confused, unreal. The mask fits too well. And she wonders if there is anything beneath it.
4. Threshold: The Crisis or Break
Something breaks. It may be a burnout, a diagnosis, a rupture in relationship. It may be slow, or sudden. But the mask cracks, and what lies beneath demands attention. She can no longer sustain the performance. She crosses a threshold—not into action, but into collapse, clarity, or both.
5. Withdrawal to Sanctuary
She pulls away—from relationships, careers, obligations that demanded too much. She chooses solitude over extraction. Celibacy over performance. Stillness over surveillance. It is not resignation. It is reclamation. The beginning of return.
6. Descent and Sorting
In the quiet, she begins to discern: what was mask, what was self? What was trauma, what was truth? She grieves. She rages. She remembers. Perhaps for the first time, she begins to feel—not all at once, but in waves. This is the descent. The sorting. The re-becoming.
7. The Gift: Self-Knowing
She finds language. Not always in words, but in gestures, stims, rituals, refusals. She names herself, perhaps: autistic, queer, nonbinary, disabled. Or she simply stops naming. What matters is not the label, but the feeling of arrival. She is no longer hiding from herself.
8. The Return (Or Not)
She may re-enter the world. Or she may choose a new world entirely. If she returns, it is on different terms—boundaried, deliberate, slow. She loves differently now, if at all. She no longer performs care that harms her. She no longer gives what she does not have.
9. The New Ordinary
Her world is quieter now, but more honest. The old ambitions no longer seduce her. She crafts a life around energy, truth, and connection—not around approval. Her story does not end in triumph. It ends in presence. And that is enough.
This arc is not cinematic. It may never be visible to outsiders. But it is mythic, nonetheless. And for many of us, it is salvation. Not because it promises reward, but because it honours what we were never meant to survive—and shows that survival itself is sacred.
Deep Analysis: Why This Makes Sense
This arc makes sense because it mirrors the conditions under which so many of us come to know ourselves—not through exploration, but through attrition. It reflects not just individual growth, but systemic pressure, cultural scripts, and the long shadow of social survival. For autistic people—particularly those raised as girls or femmes—this isn’t metaphor. It’s method. It’s how we’ve been taught to exist in a world that was never designed with us in mind.
Masking begins before we even have words for it. It’s not deliberate at first. It’s instinctual. A kind of sublimated intelligence—a reading of the room so fine-tuned it could be mistaken for telepathy. But it’s not mind-reading. It’s fear. It’s watching what happens to the child who is too loud, too literal, too much. We grow up inside cultures that worship control—“children should be seen and not heard,” “good girls don’t interrupt,” “you catch more flies with honey.” This is the colonial script of the proper child—docile, deferent, well-contained. And so, to survive, we become what they reward. We smooth our edges. We echo. We don’t ask twice. We don’t cry in front of people. We apologise, and apologise, and apologise.
This is not merely social. It is deeply gendered. Girls are expected to be relational, emotionally fluent, innately nurturing. But autistic communication is often direct, nonlinear, metaphorical, or shaped by deep internal logic that doesn’t track with the norms of the neuro-majority. When we speak plainly, we’re rude. When we pause to process, we’re cold. When we stim or disengage, we’re read as disinterested or defiant. And so we adapt. We become the high-masking achievers, the caretakers, the chameleons. We offer perfect scripts at the cost of our inner voice.
But every mask comes with a cost. There is no such thing as seamless performance. Sooner or later, the mask begins to eat into the face. The exhaustion accumulates, the sensory system burns out, the confusion between true self and social self collapses into something unmanageable. Often, this is what people call “burnout”—but it is not just tiredness. It is rupture. For some of us, the collapse becomes the call. Not a call to heroism, but to stop. To refuse to keep going like this. It’s not wanting to die, exactly. It’s knowing you cannot survive like this much longer. The rupture is the adventure. Or rather, the undoing of the adventure we never consented to.
And so, for some of us, celibacy, solitude, withdrawal becomes not absence but agency. A line drawn. A boundary not made of words, but of absence. Not because we don’t love. But because we do—so much so that to continue performing love in a way that costs us ourselves becomes untenable. This is the moment when property refuses to perform. When the good girl walks off script. When silence becomes not a symptom but a choice. We stop participating in relationships that harm us. We stop contorting ourselves to fit the cultural lie that love must hurt, must be earned, must cost you your peace.
What emerges is not always grand. Sometimes it’s as quiet as a journal entry, as small as one person you don’t have to translate yourself for. But that is the beginning of sovereignty. Not the kind marked by crowns or victories, but the kind that comes from belonging to yourself. From knowing that you are not here to be digested. That your worth is not tied to how well you disappear for others. From no longer needing external validation to feel real.
And yet, we have so few models for what autistic partnership—or even autistic solitude—can look like. Love stories rarely feature us unless we’re tragic. Or magic. Or saved by neurotypicals. The cultural scripts aren’t written with our rhythms, our relationalities, our truths in mind. So we write our own maps. Sometimes in friendship. Sometimes in chosen family. Sometimes in quiet non-romantic intimacies that stretch across time and distance in ways others might not understand. And sometimes, we stop looking altogether—not out of despair, but out of discernment. Because what we’ve built with ourselves is not a substitute. It is the real thing.
This arc, then, is not just mine—it is ours. It is a pattern that makes visible what the DSM, the diagnostic manuals, the medical records cannot: that autistic survival is not just about persistence, but about refusal. About the sacred act of stepping back from a world that demands we give until nothing remains—and choosing, instead, to remain. Quietly. Radically. Unapologetically. Ourselves.
Final thoughts …
And so I find myself returning to those two quotes—memes, really, the kind people scroll past in silence or repost with a nod of recognition. But what struck me wasn’t their virality. It was their truth. These fragments, so often dismissed as trite or oversimplified, can—when encountered at the right time, in the right state—crack something open. They work like glyphs: compact, evocative, portals rather than pronouncements. What they offered me wasn’t new information, but orientation. They didn’t teach me what I didn’t know. They showed me what I had always known—just not yet named.
This is the quiet magic of narrative reframing. When you begin to see your experiences not as isolated incidents, but as part of a larger arc—something with shape, with motion, with internal coherence—it shifts everything. The shame softens. The confusion starts to lift. Because what once felt like failure begins to reveal itself as survival. As adaptation. As the necessary, if painful, contortion of someone trying to stay alive in a world that never learned to see them. And from that recognition, a different kind of story can begin—not about fixing or overcoming, but about reclaiming the thread.
For me, that thread winds through masking and rupture, through withdrawal and return, through celibacy as boundary and solitude as sanctuary—until, at last, it brought me to the threshold of my own becoming: a tender, aching reintroduction to queerness, to femme embodiment, to the unspoken parts of me that had waited so long to be named. It is not a triumphant arc. There are no dragons slain. No kingdoms won. And yet, it is heroic. Because what could be more defiant—more sacred—than refusing to be consumed? Than saying no and meaning it? Than stepping away from the noise, the expectation, the unrelenting performance of personhood, and choosing instead to be whole. To be unfinished, yes. But intact. Untranslated. Untranslatable.
This, too, is a story. Not the kind we are taught to tell. But the kind that saves us, quietly, again and again.