We Need to Talk About Autistic Regression in Quarantine
As someone with autism, I’m nowhere near ready to return to in-person work.
When I started working from home in March of 2020, I didn’t feel quite as awful as many of my peers did. Sure, I experienced the same unprecedented, ever-present anxiety that a previously-unheard-of disease was going to make me die a slow and painful death that everyone else was. But to some extent, being in lockdown felt strangely calming.
No longer did I have to drive every day — something that, although I didn’t live far from my workplace, has always given me anxiety. No longer did I have to deal with the intensely distracting and often overwhelming atmosphere of working in an open office. No longer did I live in fear of the constant possibility of strangers approaching me to make small talk in public.
Because I was spending so much time at home, I no longer had to try to mask my autism or tone down any of the behaviors, like stimming (self-stimulating behaviors such as a repeated movement or sound), that neurotypicals might think of as “weird.”
It has been this way for more than a year now. Unlike some workplaces that realized the benefits of having all employees work from home, the company I work for really enjoys having everyone physically together whenever possible. I understand it; it is a relatively small company with fewer than 100 employees. However, it made me anxious when they sent out an email last September that they would be partially reopening the office.
They had developed a rotation, based on where people’s desks were located, for various people to come in one day a week and still have plenty of distance from others. But personally, I felt like taking my computer into an office when I was doing my work perfectly fine from home was not worth the literal risk of death. I have type 1 diabetes with chronic hyperglycemia, putting me at a higher risk for severe COVID-19 complications.
Luckily, the higher-ups at my company understood my concerns and let me continue working from home every day.
But starting next week, they’re pretty much forcing me to come back.
Most of the employees have been given a schedule to come in on either Mondays and Wednesdays or Tuesdays and Thursdays. I was assigned the former, and I don’t feel ready.
It has been more than two weeks since my second dose of the vaccine, so I should be fully protected by now. Everyone in my department, and about 75% of the company’s employees, have at least gotten their second shot, even if they don’t quite have full immunity yet.
Still, I don’t feel ready to come back to work. I don’t think I ever really will.
These days, I’m not used to spending more than a few seconds outside without my face being covered. I’ve developed a habit of contorting my mouth underneath my mask into positions that would alarm most people. But to me, they feel perfectly natural. In fact, even when I’m at home, I now habitually jut out my lower lip when I’m not using my mouth, in the sort of way that someone might do if they were to fake cry. It just feels more comfortable to me. At this point, I’m almost powerless to stop it, yet I know I have to if I want to appear “normal” at work and in society at large.
I’ve also gotten rusty at social interaction. I’ve had almost zero practice in the past year.
I had just been starting to get good at “peopling” after being abysmal at it for my entire life — mostly because of my undiagnosed autism. Then the pandemic hit. And I went without interacting with people I wasn’t already close to for days or weeks at a time. I’ve noticed recently that I sound awkward on the infrequent Zoom calls I have for work, and I feel that my social skills have worsened since quarantine began.
Thanks to an unfortunate phenomenon called autistic regression.
Also known as autistic burnout, autistic regression involves a person on the spectrum losing social skills or displaying more stereotypical features of autism, like increased stimming.
It usually occurs during a period of transition, such as puberty or young adulthood. Personally, it happened to me in college, when I lived away from my parents for the first time. I was petrified of talking to people I wasn’t already friends with. My already pathetic social skills pretty much reset to zero.
I’m worried that after the year I spent without daily conversations with others, I’ll be even more painfully awkward than I was before the pandemic began.
Also, I haven’t worked at the office since before I realized I needed to transition in order to be truly happy.
Only one of my coworkers knows my new name and pronouns, and that’s because they’re transgender too. Going back to the office and being constantly mis-gendered by everyone around me is going to feel awful in a way I’m neither used to nor prepared for. They will expect me to perform femininity in ways I’m no longer even the slightest bit comfortable with.
I recognize that I’m extremely lucky to have a job at all — especially the same one that I’ve had since before the pandemic — as many autistic people face discrimination and other difficulties in employment. But this is still a serious problem for me.
Plus, finding a job is already hard enough when you’re autistic, let alone transgender, so I can’t exactly quit and just get another job. It doesn’t work like that for people like me.
I only hope that my coworkers will understand my regression in social skills. I’ve heard some of my neurotypical friends say that they forgot some basic social rules, so I hope they’ll be accommodating. It’s the least they can do.
