For almost the first 22 years of my life, I never knew I was autistic. I’m 25 right now.. and after over 3 years of self-identifying as autistic, I got my official diagnosis last year.

After someone I was dating at the time told me about Autism and suggested I was autistic, it all finally clicked. My whole life, I’d felt so different, but I’d never known why. Now, I felt like I was finally getting these much needed answers.

But the more I learned about Autism, the more apparent some other things became to me: I didn’t know myself and I didn’t know how to love myself.

See, I realized that I’d learned to subconsciously mask my autistic traits so that I could fit in and appear ‘normal’ to my peers. In the Autism community, this is known as masking, and it’s why so many autistics don’t realize they’re…