There’s frequently a lot of talk in the neurodiversity community about letting go of masking (when safe and appropriate) and living openly as one’s “authentic self.” Maybe it’s my particular flavor of neurospiciness, but I’ve never quite understood that concept. The term implies that if we could identify and set aside everything society has imprinted on us, what remains would be our true, authentic core. But can we actually do that? Almost all of us have been immersed in social environments since before we developed cogent thought, so how do we discover what existed before we even had a sense of self? This concept may resonate with other neurodivergent folks, but to me it seems not just difficult but impossible.

So I’ve decided I’m not going to strive to live “authentically.” I’m going to live intentionally.

Rather than excavating some pre-social self, I’ve looked at the people around me and identified the values I most admire — the traits that, when I embody them, make me feel genuinely good about who I am. These have become the foundation of my sense of self-worth:

  • Kindness
  • Compassion
  • Dependability
  • Empathy
  • Trustworthiness
  • Rationality
  • Using my intelligence to help people, or at least entertain them — through TTRPGs, storytelling, and conversation

I often feel like I fall short of these values. But I’ve come to recognize something important: I tend to keep a running tally of my individual failures, while the people who know me are seeing the whole picture. My husband and close friends, when I’ve voiced these doubts, have disagreed with my self-assessment pretty firmly. Maybe the scorecard I’m keeping isn’t the most reliable one.

The neurodiversity advocacy message underneath “be your authentic self” is real and worth keeping — chronic masking, done under social pressure and fear, carries genuine costs. But I think the framing does us a disservice. It sets up a false binary between masking and some unmediated true self, when really the alternative to exhausting, involuntary performance isn’t the absence of all adaptation — it’s choice. Knowing which parts of yourself are worth protecting, which adaptations serve you and which ones only serve others at your expense, and building a life around values you’ve actually examined and endorsed.

That’s not authenticity. That’s something better: intentionality. And unlike authenticity, it doesn’t require you to find something that was never lost.