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Lived experience, Autistic Pride Day Symposium 2024
Kyriakos Gold on unmasking at 48 and being told he does not look autistic enough
In short
In the closing session of the 2024 Sydney symposium, Kyriakos Gold described the daily work of suppressing sensory pain, what unmasking had done to his composure, and the comments that called him a fraud.
Read it instead, 4 minutesThe transcript
The story
Every day there is a moment when Kyriakos Gold, who hosted the session, has to suppress everything, tell himself he can do this and put on a big smile. That is what he told the closing session of the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Sydney, at the end of two days of events in Melbourne and Sydney, and by then he was saying it with tears coming.
Gold told the room that the sound coming from the air conditioning had been hurting his body all day long. He said that he wanted to cry, and that a small tear had been coming through for the last five minutes. He said that when Anita started crying, it had been the most difficult thing. Then he said the words he says to himself, that he can do it, and told the room that this is exactly what happens every day. He described what that does over time, saying “we oppress ourselves to the point that the trauma becomes the norm”, to the point that when you cry, you think that crying is actually okay.
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Sources the story draws on
- Take Off The Mask This Autistic Pride Day (opens in a new tab), Autistic Pride Day (autisticprideday.org; site footer names Aurum Foundation, with the site designed by Just Gold)
- "Putting on My Best Normal": Social Camouflaging in Adults with Autism Spectrum Conditions (opens in a new tab), Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, vol. 47(8), pp. 2519 to 2534 (Hull, Petrides, Allison, Smith, Baron-Cohen, Lai and Mandy); full text on PubMed Central
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