I Overcame My Autism and All I Got Was This Lousy Anxiety Disorder
Executive Summary
Sarah Kurchak’s memoir chronicles her undiagnosed autistic life, late diagnosis at age 27, and her journey navigating a neurotypical world while developing elaborate masking strategies to survive childhood bullying, educational mismatch, and societal devaluation of disabled people. Through personal narrative, research analysis, and cultural critique, Kurchak explores how parental acceptance, community belonging, authentic self-expression, and systemic barriers shape autistic experience—ultimately arguing that accepting autism rather than suppressing it is both ethically sound and practically beneficial for autistic wellbeing.
Overview
Kurchak’s story spans from undiagnosed childhood through late diagnosis and into adulthood, examining how her parents’ pragmatic acceptance provided foundation for resilience despite severe bullying and systemic ableism. She describes developing sophisticated masking strategies that appeared successful but caused profound harm, leading to autistic burnout in her late twenties. Recovery came through embracing her special interests rather than suppressing them, and through finding communities where her autistic traits were valued rather than pathologized.
The book challenges pervasive misconceptions about autistic experience: that masking represents success, that “high-functioning” autism is mild, that autistic people cannot lie, that special interests should be discouraged, and that individual self-improvement alone can overcome systemic barriers. Kurchak reveals how these misconceptions actively harm autistic people while arguing for transformative models of support centered on accommodations, community, and authentic self-expression.
Core Concepts & Guidance
Parental Acceptance As Foundation for Resilience
Kurchak’s parents fundamentally shaped her resilience not through fixing her autism, but through refusing to pathologize it. They approached her differences pragmatically, testing accommodations through trial and error rather than forcing normalization: scheduling the dishwasher for times she wasn’t home to manage sensory overload, finding hair salons with calmer environments, preparing her for restaurant outings with advance notice, and constructing a nutritionally adequate diet around her food sensitivities without shaming her. Critically, they framed her differences as simply “how she was” rather than problems requiring fixing, protecting her from public shame while never disclosing her vulnerabilities to strangers who might weaponize them.
This parental approach depended on substantial unearned privileges: white privilege, cisgender and heterosexual identity, middle-class-adjacent stability, and most crucially, two parents able to prioritize her emotional wellbeing. She cannot recommend this pathway as universally accessible, but she distills one principle that transcends circumstance: there is “power in trying and in the love that fuels those efforts” and “power in the act of being on their side.” Her parents couldn’t solve everything, but they provided an irreplaceable foundation—knowledge that she would never be held against or have her struggles weaponized by those closest to her.
She contrasts this with “helpful intervention”—when intervention prioritizes autistic wellbeing (like an occupational therapist who recommends chewable vitamins rather than forcing limited foods) versus behavioral compliance approaches like ABA that eliminate triggers and reinforcers without understanding root causes.
Masking: the Exhausting Performance of Normalcy
Masking involves the profound, often unconscious effort autistic people expend to hide autism-related traits and appear neurotypical. Kurchak describes developing this strategy after severe bullying at age eleven, undertaking what she calls “The Great Jeans Project”—training herself to wear jeans that caused severe sensory processing pain by enduring the discomfort until desensitization occurred. She extended this pattern to every aspect of her presentation: tone of voice, body language, music taste, and hobbies.
This early masking served a measurable improvement in her school experience but came with three critical caveats: the changes are never fully sufficient—once she achieved jeans acceptance, shoes became the next status marker; the uniform appearance masked deeper alienation and suffering; and the results are fundamentally unsustainable, requiring constant maintenance and effort. She explicitly warns against viewing her masking success as a model for intervention, arguing it represents learned self-harm rather than healthy adaptation.
By adulthood, her masking had become automatic and multi-layered. She maintained fake eye contact by looking at eyebrows or teeth, suppressed natural stimming by converting it into socially acceptable fidgeting, rehearsed conversations obsessively, modulated her voice based on her mother’s speech patterns, and managed constant background “tracks” running simultaneously—one monitoring eye contact, one processing conversation, one preventing her from saying “weird” things, another filtering sensory overload.
Research confirms that masking causes near-universal exhaustion among autistic people, particularly women. Study participants report needing to “curl up in the fetal position to recover” after camouflaging. Many report feeling their friendships aren’t real because they’re based on a lie, losing sight of their true identity after playing so many roles. Masking leaves people with less energy for basic tasks like housework, emotional processing, or managing relationships. This ongoing drain is likely partially responsible for high rates of anxiety and depression among autistic people. Critically, autistic adults are nine times more likely to die by suicide than the general population—a statistic directly correlated with masking costs.
The Concept of “high-Functioning” Autism and Invisible Disability
Kurchak critiques the concept of “high-functioning” autism as largely performative and misleading. She explains that her ability to speak, process information at neurotypical speed, and maintain conversations doesn’t mean her autism is less real or challenging—it means she has learned to hide her needs extraordinarily well. The term “high-functioning” functions primarily as a marker of how effectively someone masks, not as an accurate description of autism severity.
This invisibility creates a particular form of isolation. Shopping requires hours of mall reconnaissance to locate bathrooms where she can cry or shake. Parties involve hiding in quiet corners and texting her mother for pep talks before requiring days of recovery. Constant management of sensory overload and emotional overwhelm happens beneath the surface of what others perceive. When she eventually received her late diagnosis, many people questioned whether it was legitimate precisely because she had succeeded in appearing normal—creating a situation where her successful masking became evidence against her autism rather than evidence of autistic adaptation.
Autistic Burnout and the Recovery Pathway Through Special Interests
In spring 2015, Kurchak hit severe autistic burnout—a state where accumulating stress, masking demands, transitions between jobs, and unprocessed trauma cause a significant shift toward appearing “more autistic.” Symptoms included decreased motivation, loss of executive function, memory problems, lethargy, and decreased tolerance for sensory overload and emotional stimulation. She was making typos in her writing (previously impossible), couldn’t find socks that felt right, had to put her phone on vibrate because notifications overwhelmed her, and felt like she was “slipping.”
To recover, she decided to rewatch all 105 episodes of the 1960s spy show “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”—a show she’d obsessed over as a teenager. She committed to an experiment: allow herself to pursue this special interest without masking, without monitoring how much time she spent, without worrying about boring others. Within a week, she felt noticeably less depleted. She began posting extensively about the show on social media without her usual self-editing anxiety. Throughout this five-week period, she gained two new friends, three paying writing assignments, and a visceral recognition that she’d been wasting enormous energy trying to make herself palatable.
This experience fundamentally contradicted assumptions that special interests isolate autistic people. Kurchak identifies her pattern: Titanic appeared when she first realized she was different; David Lynch’s Dune during peer rejection; indie rock and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. during school breakdown; professional wrestling during early steps back into adulthood. These special interests provided crucial refuge from unrelenting stress. However, she learned early that loving things intensely—especially “wrong” things—was uncool and embarrassing. She spent decades hiding this capacity, experiencing shame for natural autistic hyperfocus. The U.N.C.L.E.-ing experiment revealed that the effort to suppress these special interests was disproportionately draining compared to the actual benefit of appearing “normal.”
Research on special interests is predominantly pathologizing, framing them as problems to “fix” rather than valuable components of autistic life. The DSM-5 lists “restricted interests” as a diagnostic criterion, which has led many experts to advise parents to discourage focused interests to make autistic children “less autistic” and more employable. However, Kurchak argues that embracing special interests has actually expanded her world—visiting Portmeirion, deepening friendships with others who share interests, and discovering that “info dumping” about beloved topics is a legitimate and meaningful form of autistic communication. Special interests provide “a sense of order and control to a world that is often baffling” and crucial escapism during overwhelm. Suppressing interests caused more isolation than indulging them.
Belonging and Community Transformation
Kurchak’s experience working at Chart magazine—a music publication staffed by “obsessive pedants with rigorous filing processes”—provided her first genuine sense of belonging. Unlike high school, conversations felt natural because they centered on shared passions rather than arbitrary social hierarchy. Her colleagues weren’t “cuddly” but they were kind; they had defense mechanisms instead of social skills, and they bonded through sarcasm and shared obscure references. This community didn’t “fix” her autism, but it fundamentally changed her relationship to her own differences. Being around people equally weird normalized traits she’d considered deficits.
Later, creating a wrestling heel character, “Sarah Bellum,” in the Pillow Fight League—a professional pillow fighting promotion with wrestling-style storytelling—became another transformative community space. Initially conceived as an exorcism to bury her painful childhood self, the character became something more complex: a space to experiment with parts of herself she’d hidden. By performing her worst traits intentionally, she could test whether they were actually as unacceptable as she believed. When audiences’ reactions shifted from pure booing to sympathy, she realized Bellum wasn’t entirely loathsome—she was trying her best, funny in her awkwardness, and genuinely loved by her fellow fighters. This public performance allowed her to discover that the person she’d been hiding—flawed, weird, but authentic—could be accepted and even valued. The PFL community became “found family,” and the experience provided catharsis that therapy and late diagnosis alone hadn’t achieved.
Finding community is qualitatively different from individual therapy in its transformative power. Being around people equally weird normalized traits Kurchak had pathologized. Professional success, acceptance, and sense of purpose emerged not from “fixing” herself but from finding environments where her traits were assets rather than liabilities. This illustrates a fundamental principle: autistic wellbeing doesn’t come from individual self-improvement within systems designed for neurotypical people; it comes from finding or creating systems where autistic ways of being are valued.
Systemic Devaluation of Disabled People and Worth
The author critiques how society ties disabled people’s value to their utility. Parents of autistic children are praised for “how hard we must be,” and disability narratives center on what non-disabled people learned from caring for disabled loved ones—not on disabled people’s own lives and desires. She references the PayNowOrPayLater hashtag in Ontario, showing how even well-meaning advocacy reduces autistic children to cost-benefit calculations. She notes that fear of being a burden motivates some disabled people to seek assisted suicide, and when disabled people are killed by family members, society is asked to sympathize with the killers. The pervasive message that disabled people must prove their value through productivity is psychologically devastating.
Kurchak emphasizes she’s not advocating for avoiding challenges, but rather that earlier late diagnosis would have allowed informed decision-making about her future: “being able to apply an awareness of my autism—and, by extension, a greater awareness of myself—to my choices in life.” She spent nearly three decades unaware she was autistic, making career decisions that were fundamentally misaligned with her neurology. She pursued fitness and media work—industries requiring extensive travel, emotionally intense interpersonal interaction, and rigid schedules—all incompatible with her autistic needs.
Harmful Stereotypes and Misrepresentation of Autism
The 1988 film Rain Man has dominated cultural understanding of autism for over three decades despite being created by non-autistic people, based on a non-autistic savant, and centering a neurotypical character’s growth rather than autistic experience. Kurchak was asked repeatedly if she could count matchsticks or had special talents—expectations derived entirely from this film’s depiction of Raymond Babbitt’s savant abilities. She describes Rain Man as having no authentic autistic presence: “We’re not really present in its conception… We weren’t even in its conception.” The film has prevented non-savant autistic people from being recognized and diagnosed, reinforced narrow stereotypes that exclude most autistic people’s actual presentations, and created a lasting cultural association between autism and extraordinary mathematical/memory abilities.
Practical Strategies & Techniques
Creating Structured Environments for Skill Development
Kurchak’s experience with journalistic interviewing demonstrates how structure and clear purpose can make abstract social skills concrete and learnable for autistic people. When she conducted interviews professionally, she could prepare, take notes, and operate within defined roles and purposes. This made the abstract concept of “asking questions to show interest” concrete and actionable. Transcribing interviews taught her about tone, pacing, and explicit communication by analyzing recorded conversations.
This professional context transformed a confusing social skill into a learnable tool. For practitioners or autistic people seeking to develop social abilities, this suggests that learning within structured contexts with clear purposes is far more effective than abstract social coaching. If you struggle with reciprocal conversation, create contexts where conversation has defined structure—interviews, professional meetings, panels with prepared questions—rather than trying to master open-ended social chat in unstructured settings.
Embracing Special Interests As Recovery and Connection Strategy
When experiencing autistic burnout or exhaustion, give yourself explicit permission to pursue special interests without self-judgment, time limits, or concerns about appearing obsessive. Kurchak’s recovery involved committing to rewatch all 105 episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. without monitoring time spent, sharing about it unfiltered on social media, and allowing authentic passion to drive her activities. This led to measurable recovery within a week, new friendships, and paying writing assignments—all from simply allowing authentic expression.
For autistic people or those supporting them: recognize that suppressing special interests to appear “normal” causes more isolation and exhaustion than indulging them. Build recovery time around special interests, share openly about what you love, and seek communities formed around shared passions rather than forcing yourself into generic social contexts.
Practical Sensory Accommodation and Problem-solving
When faced with sensory overload challenges, engage in systematic trial-and-error accommodations rather than forcing the autistic person to adapt. Kurchak’s parents tested accommodations by: scheduling the dishwasher for times she wasn’t home, finding hair salons with calmer environments, preparing her for restaurant outings with advance notice, building a sustainable diet around her food sensitivities, soaking her hands before nail-trimming, and accepting unchanged behaviors that weren’t harmful to others.
The principle here is: identify the actual barrier, test accommodations options, and accept that some accommodations may need to be permanent rather than temporary training steps. This approach is more effective and significantly less traumatic than forced desensitization.
Building Authentic Relationships Through Shared Passion
Rather than forcing yourself into generic social situations or trying to be interesting through performance, seek or create communities centered around shared intense interests. Kurchak’s transformative experiences happened at Chart magazine, the Pillow Fight League, and through online communities of fellow Prisoner and Man from U.N.C.L.E. fans. In these contexts, her intensity became an asset rather than a liability.
For autistic people: join communities organized around what you genuinely love, contribute your specialized knowledge enthusiastically, and allow friendships to form organically around shared passion. For support networks: help autistic people identify their genuine interests and facilitate connections with communities organized around them, rather than trying to teach generic social skills in unrelated contexts.
Strategic Disclosure and Boundary Management
Develop a personal policy about what information you share with whom and under what circumstances. Kurchak distinguishes between lying (which she struggles with) and protective disclosure strategies: strategic use of lies of omission, vagueness, euphemism, and evasion. She describes saying “I’m not feeling well” rather than detailing her anxiety, claiming illness to decline social invitations, and giving fake phone numbers to unwanted attention.
The principle is: you have the right to protect your vulnerability and are not obligated to provide detailed disclosure to anyone who asks. Determine what information serves you to share and what information serves you to withhold, regardless of what others expect or demand. This is not a character flaw; it’s a survival skill.
Key Takeaways
Parental unconditional acceptance and practical accommodations create resilience that survives all other hardship. Kurchak’s parents refused to treat her autism-related differences as moral failures, separated what could be changed from what shouldn’t be, and never weaponized her struggles against her. This foundation allowed her to survive bullying, undiagnosed suffering, and years of masking without internalizing shame about her existence.
Masking appears successful but represents learned self-harm and is unsustainable. Kurchak’s ability to wear uncomfortable jeans, adopt sarcasm, and perform normalcy is framed by culture as a triumph of adaptability. She directly contradicts this, arguing that such masking represents learned self-harm, requires unsustainable effort, and doesn’t actually secure social acceptance. Once one marker of difference is erased, another becomes the target.
“High-functioning” autism is largely performative and invisibly exhausting. Passing for neurotypical requires constant emotional labor—planning routes to bathrooms in advance, practicing social scripts, managing sensory overload in public, and recovering from social events for days afterward. This performance is neither evidence that autism is mild nor that the autistic person is less deserving of support.
Strategic deception and protective disclosure are necessary survival tools, not character flaws. Autistic people can and do learn to lie strategically when survival depends on it—not because of theory of mind deficit but because we learn that radical honesty about vulnerability can be weaponized. Lies of omission, evasion, and strategic vagueness protect both autistic people and those we care about.
Belonging transforms more profoundly than individual therapy or late diagnosis alone. Finding communities where autistic traits are normalized and valued fundamentally changed Kurchak’s relationship to her own differences. This suggests that autistic wellbeing comes primarily from finding or creating systems where autistic ways of being are valued, not from individual self-improvement within systems designed for neurotypical people.
Special interests provide structure, control, and connection—never suppress them. Contrary to medical literature framing restricted interests as dysfunctional, special interests provide autistic people with order, control, joy, and meaningful connection. Kurchak’s recovery from autistic burnout came specifically through allowing herself to pursue The Man from U.N.C.L.E. without shame.
Society devalues disabled people by tying worth to productivity and utility. Even well-meaning disability advocacy reduces autistic children to cost-benefit calculations. Fear of being a burden motivates disabled people toward self-harm. This is not an individual pathology but a systemic message that disabled existence requires justification.
Late diagnosis creates preventable damage but early diagnosis historically meant trauma. Kurchak’s late diagnosis meant decades of forced assimilation into incompatible career paths causing health deterioration and chronic self-blame. However, early childhood diagnosis likely would have subjected her to traumatic interventions and bullying.
Memorable Quotes & Notable Statements
“I’m still here, which is a legitimate accomplishment for someone of my neurotype and age.” — Kurchak reframes survival itself as meaningful achievement rather than waiting for “inspiration” narratives of overcoming.
“There is power in trying and in the love that fuels those efforts.” — Describing her parents’ approach to accommodations, this captures that parental care doesn’t require solving everything or forcing normalization.
“We’re not really present in its conception… We weren’t even in its conception.” — On Rain Man, this articulates how non-autistic people have dominated autism representation and diagnosis, creating frameworks that exclude most autistic people’s actual experience.
“I’m still exhausted, which is a legitimate thing. I’m still anxious, which is a legitimate thing. But I’m also still here.” — Acknowledges that autism acceptance doesn’t mean symptoms disappear; it means they’re no longer framed as personal failure.
“People don’t have to hate you to hurt you. Your secrets probably aren’t safe with anyone.” — From her age-twelve realization about disclosure, this articulates the painful recognition that trustworthiness and care aren’t guaranteed and protective disclosure is rational.
Counterintuitive Insights & Nuanced Perspectives
Masking “success” Is Evidence of Harm, Not Health
Common wisdom frames masking as admirable adaptation and evidence of autistic resilience. Kurchak completely inverts this interpretation. Her ability to mask so effectively is not a triumph; it’s evidence that she successfully taught herself self-harm, suppressed her authentic identity, and internalized that her natural ways of being were unacceptable. The measurable school improvement that resulted from jeans-wearing was purchased with ongoing pain, and once achieved, merely moved the goalposts—shoes became the next status marker.
The narrative that frames masking as success misses the fundamental problem: masking is not a skill to celebrate, it’s a trauma response to hostile environments. Truly successful intervention would make masking unnecessary, not more effective.
Special Interests Are Not Symptoms to Suppress; They’re Survival Mechanisms
Medical and educational literature frames “restricted interests” as a symptom requiring intervention. Parents are often advised to discourage narrow focus to make autistic children “more employable” or “less autistic.” Kurchak reveals that this represents a profound misunderstanding: special interests aren’t disordered; they’re survival mechanisms that provide order, control, joy, and meaning during overwhelming chaos.
When she finally allowed herself to pursue The Man from U.N.C.L.E. without shame, she recovered from autistic burnout within a week, gained new friendships, and secured paying writing assignments—all from simply allowing authentic passion. Suppressing special interests caused more isolation and mental health deterioration than indulging them. This inverts the standard intervention logic: the goal should not be reducing special interests but facilitating connections to communities organized around them.
Belonging Transforms More Than Individual Therapy or Diagnosis
Kurchak received late diagnosis at age 27 and began therapy, which provided frameworks for understanding her life but didn’t fundamentally change her coping strategies or sense of self. What actually transformed her was finding communities where her traits were normalized and valued. Being around equally weird people normalized traits she’d internalized as defects. Professional success emerged not from “fixing” herself but from finding environments where her traits were assets.
This suggests a radical reorientation of how we think about autistic support: the problem isn’t primarily autistic neurological difference, it’s the absence of environments designed for autistic ways of being. Individual therapy focused on “improving” the autistic person is less transformative than facilitating connection to communities where they’re valued.
Critical Warnings & Important Notes
Dangers of ABA and Behavior Modification Approaches
Kurchak raises critical concerns about Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) and similar behavioral interventions, using a hypothetical example that illustrates the fundamental problem: when a child throws tantrums when lights turn on without warning and his mother cuddles him in response, standard ABA recommends eliminating both the trigger (lights going on without warning) and the reinforcer (cuddling), replacing them with “appropriate behaviors.”
This approach prioritizes behavioral compliance over understanding root causes. It never investigates why the child experiences distress. Did the intervention alleviate his fear or merely disguise it? Is the goal genuinely making his life easier or making him easier for others? She contrasts this with “helpful intervention”—an occupational therapist who, rather than forcing autistic children to eat limited foods, recommends chewable vitamins and acknowledges swallowing difficulties as legitimate. ABA teaches autistic people to hide their actual needs rather than to develop genuine coping mechanisms.
Mental Health Crisis Risk and Suicidal Ideation Among Autistic Adults
Autistic adults are nine times more likely to die by suicide than the general population. Kurchak experienced suicidal ideation during her Las Vegas crisis, when a sudden sensory overload change triggered a catastrophic panic spiral about burden, deserving abandonment, and running out of time. She articulated the fear that her sensory processing issues were “getting worse” and her world would “only get smaller from here.”
This isn’t merely individual anxiety; it reflects the cumulative effect of masking, autistic burnout, systemic devaluation, and the absence of support infrastructure. For autistic people or those supporting them: recognize suicidal ideation as a potential response to unbearable internal experiences and systemic abandonment, not as a character or neurological flaw.
The Damage of Voyeuristic Disclosure Demands
When Kurchak published her article challenging vaccine-autism myths, she was demanded to provide increasingly explicit details about her bodily functions, sensory overload experiences, and perceived failures to “prove” her autism was severe enough to speak on the topic. Non-autistic parents used her disclosed vulnerabilities to minimize her credibility or to argue they had it worse.
This illustrates how disclosure of autistic people’s vulnerabilities can become ammunition rather than connection point. For autistic people: recognize that disclosing vulnerability to people with less social power can result in that information being weaponized. You have the right to protective non-disclosure. For people supporting autistic individuals: resist the impulse to demand detailed disclosure about struggles, bathroom habits, sensory processing experiences, or other intimate details. This is voyeuristic and represents a form of boundary violation enabled by power differentials.