Participant ID: P19
Pseudonym: Rose
Age: 24
Gender: Non-binary (she/they)
Occupation: Library assistant
Living situation: Lives alone in a basement suite in East Vancouver
Relevant context: Late-diagnosed autistic (age 22); previously diagnosed with social anxiety and depression
Interview date: 2025-12-12
Interview length: 36 minutes
Interviewer: R1
Location: Library staff room (Rose's choice — sensory comfort)

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I: Thanks for meeting up, Rose. Tell me about yourself.

P: Yeah. So I'm 24, I use she or they pronouns, I'm a library assistant at a branch in East Van, I've been there two years. I'm autistic. I was diagnosed at 22. Before that I had been told I had social anxiety and depression since I was, like, 14, and I was on a bunch of meds that didn't really work. The autism diagnosis kind of reframed everything for me. So I'm — I'm in a kind of reorganisation phase of my life since the diagnosis.

I: When you hear loneliness, what comes to mind?

P: The cost of masking. That's the answer. So masking is the autistic word for performing neurotypical behaviour to fit in. I had been doing it since I was a small kid, without knowing what I was doing. And I would come home from school, then later work, and just collapse from the exhaustion of having pretended to be a normal person all day. And the collapse was lonely because nobody could see what I had been doing. Everyone thought I had been "fine". So I was alone in the labour of pretending. That's my loneliness. The hidden labour of masking.

I: How does it feel?

P: It's a specific kind of tired. It's not just physical, it's like — my brain is sore. After a day at the library I cannot speak for two or three hours. I sit in my apartment in silence. I cannot make decisions about, like, what to eat. The masking depletes a resource I can't get back quickly. So my body is lonely too, in a way. Sensory-deprived in some ways, sensory-overwhelmed in others.

I: Is it different from being alone?

P: For me they're really, really different. Being alone is restorative. Being alone is what I need. Loneliness is when I'm with people and pretending. So the categories are almost flipped from what most people describe. The thing other people find isolating — being alone — is what I need. The thing other people find connecting — being with people — is what isolates me.

I: That's an important distinction. Tell me about a recent example.

P: A work Christmas thing. Last Saturday. I forced myself to go because not going makes things weird at work, and I am still working on, like, my career and being seen as a team player. I went for two hours. I masked the entire time. I made small talk. I laughed at jokes. I asked people about their families. And the whole time I was — there was a screaming inside my head. And I came home and I lay on my bathroom floor for an hour with my noise-cancelling headphones on. And I cried. And I was — yeah, I was very lonely. Because I had just spent two hours being a person who is not me, in order to be acceptable to people who would not like the real me.

I: Have you found things that help?

P: A few things. There's an autistic women and non-binary people group I found online through a UBC researcher. We meet on Discord once a week. The conversations are wild — like, we don't do small talk, we just info-dump on each other about our special interests for like two hours. It is the only space where I feel like I can be a whole person.

I: Anything else?

P: My library job has accommodations. I have a designated quiet zone for breaks. My manager knows about the diagnosis. She lets me schedule meetings in writing. So work has become less depleting than it was, which has helped a lot.

I: What didn't work?

P: A lot of things. Most therapy didn't work because most therapists were not trained in autism and were trying to fix anxiety and depression that were actually downstream of being autistic and unable to mask sustainably. I tried so many — like, exposure therapy made things worse. Group therapy was a nightmare. CBT was — I would do the homework and feel worse about myself. So most of the help I was offered was wrong.

I: Have you found the right help now?

P: Yes, actually. I see a therapist who is autistic herself. That has been completely different. She gets it without needing me to explain. So that's been important.

I: What does your loneliness tell you?

P: That I was raised in a world that does not accommodate brains like mine, and that the cost of fitting in is being lonely in a particular way. The diagnosis was helpful because it put a name to it. The next stage is figuring out how much masking I have to do versus how much I can stop. I am trying to unmask, slowly. It is — it is scary because I have built my whole life on masking. Without the mask I don't know who I am.

I: Do you think of yourself as a lonely person?

P: I think of myself as a person who has been profoundly lonely for most of my life and is just now, in my mid-twenties, starting to find people who actually understand me. I think of the loneliness as something I was forced into by a world that didn't fit. I'm hoping it gets better. The Discord group helps. The autistic therapist helps. I'm dating someone who is also neurodivergent which has been — yeah, that has been really nice. We have been together for four months.

I: Anything that helped that surprised you?

P: TikTok, weirdly. Late-diagnosed autistic TikTok was actually how I first started suspecting I was autistic. So the algorithm did one good thing in its existence. The community of late-diagnosed autistic people on TikTok is — they explained me to myself in a way nothing else had.

I: If you could change one thing?

P: I would want neurotypical people to understand that asking us to mask all the time has a measurable health cost. There is research showing autistic burnout from chronic masking is a real thing. It needs to be in the public conversation. We are not just shy. We are not just rude. We are working twice as hard as you to do half the things, and the toll of that is real.

I: Anything I haven't asked?

P: Just — I want to say I'm not unhappy. I am, on the whole, the happiest I have ever been. Late diagnosis has been a gift. The loneliness is the past, and some of the present, but I have hope. Which is new for me. So I want that in the record. There is hope.
