As adept we get at hiding our autism, tone of voice is the only thing we can’t control

Tone of voice is the one piece of neurotypical communication that autistics can’t reliably duplicate. We overact trying to mimic it, but we only know if it worked based on someone’s reaction. We can barely hear it in others, and never in ourselves. For me, an autistic woman, it is the most difficult and costly component of my disguise.

One of my cousins, a licensed therapist, was the first person I told about my autism diagnosis, back in 2015. Her prompt acceptance and understanding were a relief, and I’d come to lean on them in the years since. But last night, when I tentatively told her she’d been difficult to be around at a family vacation earlier this year, she disagreed, saying I was the one who had been difficult to be around all this time, and that she’d decided to set some boundaries.

To literal me, this was an odd definition of boundaries, but past telling her I didn’t get it, I didn’t make it a point of contention.

Or did I? Did she take me saying I didn’t understand as an insult? Like I was belittling her for doing it? It wasn’t intentional, of course, but once I factored my tone of voice into the equation, it went a long way in explaining why her version of our interactions was so different. To her, I was rude, cocky, and always had to have the last word, and had been for a long time.

As a kid, my family had been my only safe haven. Around them, I could express my real thoughts, words and actions without judgment. It was the only time I never had to hide my true self. It wasn’t until well into adulthood that I started masking around my folks, figuring they’d done their time dealing with me and deserved better moving forward. I masked for my other relatives, though I saw them infrequently.

The only person I didn’t mask around was this cousin. I had assumed I didn’t need to.

Last night, I found out just how wrong I’d been. She’d been taking my comments and behavior at face value. She had put up with my evident thoughtlessness, for shutting down argument, for casually dropping insulting comments, for years. That it wasn’t my intention meant nothing. I had cut her so often that, by now, everything I did was perceived through that lens.

As awful to me as previous run-ins about my tone with others were, this was much, much worse. I’m kicking myself for not realizing what was going on sooner. How could I have not known this was happening? How could I have been so careless, so unthinking? Why hadn’t I extended her the same service of masking that I did around the rest of the family? While it seems unlikely that every single comment I made to her came off as rude, even intermittent occurrences, built up over years, would be more than enough for anyone to reach their breaking point.

And why hadn’t she confronted me sooner? Now I wonder if she had tried to and I hadn’t understood what she meant. How long had she buried her pain for my sake, for our family’s sake, only to have finally had enough and start pushing back?

All this time I had been hurting her? Making her feel less than? Oh no. No no no. I went back and interrogated every interaction with her I could think of since I was diagnosed and many of them included offhand remarks by me that I had given little weight to. I suddenly realized they had accumulated a ton of it after leaving my mouth and entering my cousin’s ears.

Now that I understand what’s been happening, the enormity of what’s already been done is paralyzing. How I could even begin to make up for it all? One or two inappropriate comments I could apologize for and smooth over, but this? My explanation, that I didn’t know, hadn’t meant to be mean, hadn’t realized I was coming off that way, seemed impossibly thin in the face of what must have been years of harsh treatment.

Telling her I’m sorry now—and I am, more than I can express—is almost certainly too little, too late. Even if I carefully govern my tone from this moment forward, I can’t imagine it will be enough to allay the pain I’ve already inflicted. I can only pray that maybe, some time in the future, she might get to a place where she can forgive me.

And forgiving myself? That’s even farther away.