I Hid My Disability During My Internship at a Special Needs Center
I pretended to be “normal,” but I shouldn’t have had to.
“Why do you want to work at the Center?” my interviewer asked. “Do you have experience working with special needs?”
Not “people with special needs.” Just “special needs.” Like people’s disabilities exist independently from them. Like their disability is more important than who they are as a person.
“Yes,” I said without missing a beat. “My mom was a special ed teacher at the high school I went to, so sometimes I would hang out with her students. And I was in a creative writing class where we worked to write stories with them. So I do have experience with them. I’m not uncomfortable with them, you know.”
My interviewer smiled to herself as she jotted that down. Evidently, she was impressed, because I got the job. Or, a part-time unpaid internship that I needed for college credit. I would be running social media for a nonprofit daycare center for children and adults with special needs who couldn’t take care of themselves on their own.
I wasn’t lying when I said I was comfortable with them. I was lying by omission when I implied that I was not one of them.
I only learned that I was autistic three years ago when I was twenty-one. Once I was diagnosed, everything just sort of fell into place. Every awkward encounter or social blunder finally made sense.
Of course, since I am female, my autism didn’t quite present itself in the same way we typically think of autism. I am not a boy obsessed with trains, like the images our brains normally conjure. My behavior was quiet, and my special interests mainly included books, writing, and various TV shows.
I always tried to tone down my autistic features, even when I didn’t know they were autistic. I just thought of them as weird.
Even after my diagnosis, I was embarrassed to let people know. Which is why I didn’t tell anyone at the Center (which is what I’ll be calling the place I interned at. I’d rather not bring attention to them).
My internship entailed making a post on the organization’s Facebook, Twitter, and/or Instagram pages every weekday. I would also sometimes write posts for the Center’s blog, which I’ll get to in a bit.
The Center had different classes based on different skill levels or “functioning” levels. They all had different activities such as reading secondhand library books and watching donated movies on VHS. I was to take pictures of them doing fun activities, as well as promote upcoming fundraising events for the Center.
The website also had a blog, which I wrote a post for every month during my semester-long internship. The topics were all related to being special needs parents, so I was to write them for the family members of the students at the Center. Since I have no children, let alone special needs children, I had to research a lot of information for these posts.
A couple of examples of the posts I wrote included “When Your Child with Special Needs Wants to Date” in February and “Springtime Activities for Your Special Needs Child” in March.
My research led me to a lot of autism warrior mommy blogs. Those mothers who think they know everything there is to know about autism just because their child is on the spectrum. Sometimes these moms literally abuse their child, and the kid doesn’t have the vocal capability to defend themselves.
I could, of course, provide some of my own expertise when it came to certain subjects, mainly autism. For example, in the spring activities post, I wrote about sensory bins, and I was able to explain it in a way that neurotypicals would understand.
However, I didn’t want my autism to become known. Although the teachers and workers at the Center knew that it was a spectrum, they still believed that neurotypicals were inherently better than people with autism. I could sense it. In the same way that my gaydar helps me look out for homophobic straight people, my autistic radar helps me search for those to whom I should never alert my condition.
Maybe my coworkers suspected it, based on how awkward I am as a person. Maybe they figured it out because I brought the exact same thing for lunch every day. There were a couple of instances where I may have accidentally outed myself.
One day I was researching for the Valentine’s Day-themed blog post and I discovered a documentary called “Autism in Love,” following the journey of four adults on the spectrum as they navigated romance. I expressed to my interviewer, the marketing director for the Center, my interest in seeing the documentary.
She said something like “sounds cute,” but then went back to her work. I couldn't help gushing about this film. That day I immediately went home and bought it on iTunes and watched it. I highly recommend it. I have never seen people talk so openly about what it’s like to be in love when you’re on the spectrum, and they did an amazing job of it.
It was a bit hard to refrain from talking about it at work the next day, but I knew I would give myself away.
About a month later, I was looking up springtime activities and started talking to my coworkers about sensory-friendly days at movie theaters. To make movies more enjoyable and accessible for those on the spectrum, they turn the lights in the theater up and the sound down. I was excited that they did that. Movies are typically too loud and bright for me to fully enjoy them in the theater, but I had never been able to express why until reading about it.
Again, I was gushing to my coworkers about how important it was, but they already knew. They all worked with people with special needs. They probably thought it was weird that I was acting like this was a special interest of mine.
Not that they knew about special interests. They seemed to only know about those on one end of the spectrum, the ones who will never be independent.
They don’t know that people with autism are in their midst every day, in their families and friend groups. We exist. We long to live in a world where we don’t have to hide who we are in order to be accepted.
