The Cost of Being Yourself: Growing Up Neuroqueer and Unlearning the Performance
- Maya Attia
- 15 minutes ago
- 5 min read
What did being a good girl cost me?
I grew up in a traditional nuclear family. Both my parents are of the boomer generation and are quietly homophobic and transphobic, and lack the understanding, maybe the capacity, to really get that autism is a spectrum. My parents believed in anxiety and depression. But if someone was in therapy, they were absolutely in crisis. There was no other option in their minds.
There were many moments of my childhood and adolescence where my parents failed to affirm my authentic identity. I was raised to be a lady. Cross my ankles. Keep my knees together. Wait for a man to initiate a conversation, or a phone call.
My parents were of the mind that gay people were okay, as long as their own kids weren't gay.
And now I have to share a very funny story to further illustrate this. When I was nineteen, I had a close female friend who I occasionally cuddled with. We were super close. One day we were snuggling in my bed and my mother, I still lived at home and mom had, and still has, poor boundaries, knocked on my door. She declared she was coming in to get something, always her excuse to spy on her kids if she thought we were doing something unladylike, which, to her credit, I certainly almost always was, and entered my room. She poked her head around my dresser and saw that there was not one but two girls in my bed. Her daughter. With another person in bed. Much less another woman so casually in bed together. “Good god. How inappropriate”. One of her favorite phrases.
After her amusingly dramatic facial expressions, she proceeded to call me, from the house phone, on my cell phone, demanding to speak with me. Fast forward about half an hour later and I, very amused, walked downstairs to speak with my very concerned mother. We should note that my mother's default is to look very concerned anytime something she disapproves of is going on. Anyway, so she asked, no, demanded to know what was going on and told me what I was doing was absolutely inappropriate. Her favorite catchphrase. I tried to explain the concept of having a snuggle buddy, but to say the least, my mom was not able to understand the concept.
So after that I moved out of my family home. Thank goodness. But the theme of me not being able to authentically be who I was, autistic, some form of queer, gender fluid, not ladylike, continued.
When you're raised this way, expected to perform not only femininity but also traditional femininity, the message that gets communicated is that who you are is unacceptable.
Squeezing myself into who I thought the world wanted
So for years I attempted to squeeze myself into what I thought the world wanted me to be. I tried to dress feminine. Kept my ankles crossed. My hair long. Wore makeup and dresses with tights. No shade on dresses by the way, I totally live in them now, but at the time they weren't my style. I dated and eventually married someone who was the epitome of cisgender heterosexual traditional masculinity. It didn't last. It was my final attempt at performing normativity.
After I got divorced, and by the way, my boomer parents don't believe in divorce, so that was a whole thing, I pursued an exploration of my authentic identity. I was tired of performing, pretending to be someone I wasn't. It was exhausting, masking all the time.
When I was thirty nine, I was diagnosed autistic with a side of executive dysfunction. I argued I also had a full entree of ADHD, but my assessor disagreed. I still think I'm probably AuDHD.
Trying to explain this to my boomer parents
Okay, let's fast forward to trying to explain this to my boomer parents. Firstly, my mom didn't get it. Her understanding was that autism was just seen in men, fair to her, that's the old research, and also that I was normal and wasn't autistic. I was just me. Amusingly, my mother, who is the epitome of a neurotic Jewish mother, doesn't think she has anxiety. Makes me chuckle to this day.
Anyway, so eventually, after being made to understand that anything other than cis heteronormativity was not acceptable, I distanced myself from my parents. If I couldn't relate and at least educate them about myself, how was I supposed to feel close to them? Especially since one of my love languages is sharing information.
I must say that since distancing myself from them, although it makes me sad, I feel less stressed. I have chosen family where I live, around whom I feel seen and heard and who I know I can be my authentic neuroqueer self around. My parents taught me that there was a cost of being my authentic self, despite the irony that my mother always encouraged me to be exactly who I was.
What I want you to take from my story
Whether your story looks exactly like mine or just close enough, here's what I've come to believe. A cost gets paid either way. You pay it in performance, years spent auditioning for acceptance that was never actually available to you. Or you pay it in distance from people who raised you but can't meet you as you are. I don't think there's a version where nobody pays anything.
Three questions I ask myself, and now ask my clients, about the people in their lives who will not update:
Can this person actually hold new information about me, or do they just hold their existing story with more force the longer I push? Some people need time. Some people are never going to move, no matter how much time you give them.
What does closeness with them actually cost me, right now, not in theory? In my sleep. In my nervous system. In how I feel the day after I see them.
Who already sees me, without me having to translate myself first? This one matters most. It tells you where to put your energy instead of where you've been putting it out of habit.
What I do with my clients now
So in my therapy sessions with my clients, my biggest priority is to help you understand yourself authentically. I want to empower my clients to stop performing and just be who they are. There is no template. Every person I work with works differently.
If any of this sounds like your own story
If you grew up performing a version of yourself that was easier for the people around you to accept, and you're doing the slow work now of finding out who was underneath it, I don't think you should have to do that alone. I work with neurodivergent adults, including AuDHD and late diagnosed folks, and my approach centers your actual identity, not a generic recovery template. You can read more on my page for neurodivergent adults.
If your neuroqueer identity also touches how you experience kink, power dynamics, or ethical nonmonogamy, those are specialties of mine too. I'd rather you bring the whole picture than edit yourself down for an intake form. You can explore kink and BDSM affirming therapy and ethical nonmonogamy and polyamory if those threads are part of your story as well.
Ready to talk? Book a free consult here and let's figure out if we're a fit.
Maya Attia, LMFT #139693