Chapter 9, "Living With a Mask On." My name is Alyssa. I'm a Lutheran pastor serving two churches in the Pacific Northwest. And I am autistic. I grew up in a small, close-knit family. Our main social interaction was at church. I lived in a medium-sized town and went to a medium-sized elementary school. We all knew each other, and I think people thought I was a little weird.

I was bullied a little bit, but I had so much support at home and from what few friends I did have. I had enough people who loved me and thought I was awesome, and that was enough to counterbalance it. I also had a really great mindset to the point that I would just look at them and think, why should I care what they think about me? They're just stupid jerks.

It got a little bit harder as I got older. My high school was much bigger than my elementary school and middle school had been, but I made it out OK. Then I went off to college, and nobody knew me. I had a lot of social struggles. I made one friend my entire freshman year, and she transferred at the end of the year. That was really tough.

Sophomore year, I was able to make an acquaintance who had a whole group of friends I could hang out and go along with. I wasn't especially close to any of them, but it was social contact, and we shared a lot of interests. So that was good. Going into junior and senior year, they always were roomed in a cluster, which meant that they needed a certain number of girls to fill out the women's cluster. And I got to be one of them. They accepted me, so that was great.

I graduated from college. The academic side of school had always been really easy for me. I tended to get along with teachers as long as they gave me clear parameters of what they needed me to do. I did all the homework on time, always got good grades, always followed the rules. I was the good student. Because of how successful I was, I slipped under the radar.

Going away to seminary. After graduation, I moved home and worked for a couple of years. Then I went away to seminary to train to become a pastor. There is a psychological evaluation you have to go through before they let you into seminary. I was still hiding things, so I told them some of my symptoms like I'm not very good in social situations and a couple of other things.

Her response was, why do you feel you're not good in social situations, as if this was a matter of me being shy or having an emotional issue instead of me literally not being able to pick up on social cues, reading facial expressions, and understanding tone and body language. It was uncomfortable, but at the same time, I was just glad she didn't peg me and find out that I was autistic.

At that time, I think I had a lot of internalized ableism. I was afraid of being labeled. I spent so much time just trying to be normal and hoping nobody would notice how odd I was. I think it was probably obvious that I was a little out of step socially with everybody else. But I was trying to mask it all on my own without telling anybody.

I had really bought into the idea our culture has that everybody should be able to do the same amount of things and that if you're not capable of doing that, then you're just lazy and bad. So I would regularly push myself to the point of mental and emotional collapse and then beat myself up for how lazy and selfish I was. I didn't realize it at the time, but I had developed clinical anxiety due to my paranoia about passing as normal.

All that said, like I noted, I made it through the interview and went away to seminary. In the Lutheran Church, you got a master of divinity as a practical degree and not an academic one. So instead of writing a thesis, you spend a year as an intern in a congregation. Because I'm not very good at picking up vibes and social cues, I missed a lot on my first internship.

Among other things, when we were doing interviews with pastors and intern committees of prospective churches, I missed that every one of my classmates had pegged that there was something weird in the dynamics for the church that I ended up going to. I didn't notice anything unusual, so I offered to go to places that were often more difficult or had more complex dynamics than others.

As a result, I ended up in spots that weren't all that great. Where I went, neither of the two pastors were very good with social situations-- not autistic, just bad at them. Additionally, neither of them had been with their congregation for very long or had worked in one where there was multiple staff. They were used to being the only person in the office and doing everything themselves. They didn't know how to work together, much less what to do with an intern. They only had me because the congregation had a history of taking in interns.

There's a committee of laypeople who are supposed to help guide the intern, me. But I got off to a really bad start with them, and they just thought I was horrible. Because of the things I already mentioned, in addition to my supervisor getting so caught up in his own issues, none of us in the office realized there was a problem.

So the intern committee interpreted everything I did in the worst possible way possible. Halfway through the year, there was an evaluation, and I thought I was doing fairly average for someone halfway through the internship. There were some things I needed to work on and others I was very good at. So I was really taken aback when the intern committee said that I was failing in all but three categories out of 30 or 40. It completely blindsided me.

At that point, because it was completely blowing up in my face, I confessed to the seminary that I was pretty sure I had autism, and my struggle reading social cues had a lot to do with it. They told me that I needed to resign from the internship midway through because they couldn't guarantee I would pass.

After that, I would come back and would have three options. One, I could either pass, in which case I could go on to complete the seminary training. Two, I didn't pass, in which case I would have to do another internship. Or three, I fail, in which case I was never going to be a Lutheran pastor ever, end of story.

They recommended to me that I resign right then and there, go get a formal diagnosis, and upon doing that, they promised me that they would hook me up with a better situation and a congregation and supervisor who knew I was autistic and would be willing to work with me. So I did that. I went home and got a diagnosis.

I started with a therapist that I found in town after googling local therapists and asked for a diagnosis. He said he didn't know much about autism and couldn't do that. But listening to my story and watching me talk about my story, he told me that he was pretty sure I had PTSD. I sort of dismissed it, although looking back now, knowing more about PTSD and especially complex PTSD, I think he might have had a point.

Regardless, in that moment, I moved on, found a doctor who specialized in autism, and got a diagnosis from her. I spent three hours with her doing various evaluations and came out with a diagnosis not only of autism, which I knew about, but also anxiety and face blindness, which were both surprises. I spent some more time at home, went back to the seminary, did my last year of classes, and then did another internship, which I passed.

I think the main difference that second time around was in my attitude. Instead of being afraid to tell people I have autism, I discovered through the whole process that most of the people who are going to be jerks are going to be jerks no matter what. The difference between people knowing I'm autistic and not knowing I'm autistic is that when they know I'm autistic, I can explain what I'm really thinking and feeling instead of them just thinking that I'm trying deliberately to be a problem or a jerk.

Fast forward to today, and I would say that I'm doing pretty well. I spent five and a half years in rural North Dakota serving two different churches. Now I'm back in the Pacific Northwest and happy to be closer to home. The world is stressful, but I have found a place to belong where I can do good work and have a supportive community. In my spare time, I even go around giving talks about autism and my story.