In November 2025, at 35 years old, I was diagnosed autistic. My CAT-Q score—the Camouflaging Autistic Traits Questionnaire—came back 152 out of 175. For context, that's in the highest range of masking behavior. What it means in plain language is this: I had spent 17 years in corporate America performing a version of myself that was constructed almost entirely for the benefit of others' comfort.
The diagnosis was not a surprise, exactly. But the score was. I had no idea how much energy I'd been spending on maintenance. How much of what I thought was just "being professional" was actually an elaborate, mostly unconscious performance.
What surprised me more was what came next: I started understanding my career in a completely different way.
The Masking Tax
Before the diagnosis, I understood myself as someone who worked extremely hard and was sometimes difficult to work with. I was intense. I cared about things other people found easy to let go. I had opinions about detail that colleagues sometimes found exhausting. I would re-examine something twenty times looking for a flaw that no one else had noticed.
After the diagnosis, I understood that behavior differently. That intensity wasn't pathology. It was my natural cognitive style operating under conditions it wasn't optimized for—and compensating through sheer output.
Masking is expensive. Every social interaction requires conscious modeling: what's the appropriate register here? What's the expected emotional display? Is my face doing the right thing? Am I talking too much about the thing I know deeply? That's cognitive load running in the background of every meeting, every presentation, every stakeholder review. And it's load that neurotypical colleagues aren't carrying.
The question that obsessed me after the diagnosis wasn't "what does this mean for the future?" It was: "what did this make me good at?"
Pattern Recognition as Methodology
One of the most documented traits in autistic cognition is enhanced pattern recognition—the ability to identify structural regularities in systems, datasets, and behaviors that others miss or filter out as noise. In design work, this is an extraordinary advantage.
When I'm reviewing a user research session, I'm not just listening for what the user said. I'm tracking the moments of hesitation, the language shifts, the places where the stated preference and the observed behavior diverge. These are patterns. They emerge across sessions, across users, across time. Seeing them isn't something I was trained to do—it's something I can't turn off.
This is how I caught, early in the Microsoft Health Futures project, that clinicians were verbally endorsing a feature they weren't using. The stated preference and the behavioral data conflicted. That conflict was visible in the pattern of the qualitative data before it showed up in the quantitative. We redesigned before we shipped.
Pattern recognition also shapes how I approach information architecture. I tend to experience IA spatially—as a topology of relationships rather than a hierarchy of pages. This comes from autistic spatial processing, and it's genuinely useful for designing systems that need to surface non-obvious relationships between pieces of information.
Systematic Thinking as Design Strength
Autistic thinking is often described as "systemizing"—a drive to understand how things work, to identify underlying rules, to build models. This is sometimes framed as inflexibility or rigidity. But in design, it's the foundation of principled decision-making.
Every design decision I make exists in relation to a system. A button isn't just a button—it's a unit within a pattern language that has rules about hierarchy, affordance, state, and context. A component isn't just a component—it's a node in a design system with implications for maintenance, consistency, and extensibility. Systemizing thinkers make better design systems.
At The Home Depot, working with 2.4 million Pro Xtra users, the systemic complexity was immense. Purchasing flows, account management, contractor-specific features, mobile and desktop parity across a massive product surface. The only way to hold that coherently was to have a genuine model of the system—not just a collection of screens. That kind of model-building is natural for me in a way I now understand has a neurological basis.
Sensory Awareness and UX Quality
This one is less obvious, but I think it's real. Sensory sensitivity—heightened awareness of visual, spatial, and auditory input—is common in autistic experience. Most discussions of sensory sensitivity frame it as a difficulty. And it can be, in environments with too much stimulus.
But in UX design, sensory sensitivity translates to a heightened awareness of friction. I notice when an animation is 20 milliseconds too slow. I notice when a spacing value is visually inconsistent with the surrounding grid even when the numbers look right. I notice when a label is technically clear but somehow tonally wrong. These aren't things I check against a list. They register as something feeling off before I can articulate why. Then I articulate why.
This has made me a more thorough quality reviewer. It's also made me a better collaborator with visual designers—I notice the same things they notice, which creates shared vocabulary where others might struggle to find words for the problem.
What This Means for Inclusive Design
The design industry talks about inclusive design as a process: include diverse users in research, test with assistive technology users, audit for accessibility compliance. All of that is real and important.
But there's another dimension of inclusive design that gets less attention: cognitive diversity in design teams. Most design teams are predominantly neurotypical. This means most design decisions are made by people who share the same cognitive style—executive function that relies on flexibility and context-switching, social processing that happens automatically, attention that tolerates fragmentation.
This cognitive monoculture produces designs optimized for neurotypical experience. The fragmented navigation patterns that make sense to someone who context-switches easily. The social login prompts that assume users model trust the same way. The onboarding flows that assume high working memory. Late-diagnosed autistic designers—and there are many of us, working in plain sight—bring different cognitive needs to the evaluation of every design decision. Not because we're thinking about accessibility. Because we're evaluating the design from a cognitive baseline that's simply different.
The Unmasking
What I've been doing since the diagnosis is gradually retiring the performance. Not entirely—professional contexts have real norms, and I'm not interested in making my colleagues' lives harder. But the specific performance of pretending I don't see patterns I see. Pretending I'm not bothered by things I'm bothered by. Pretending that my intensity about quality is something I should moderate.
What's replacing it is the actual version of how I work: deeply, systematically, with high standards, and with a genuine model of every system I'm working in. That's the work. It was always the work. The masking was just noise around it.
I'm 36 now. I've spent 17 years doing design work at a level of quality I'm genuinely proud of. Some meaningful portion of that quality came directly from cognitive traits that the medical system spent those same 17 years not knowing I had. I don't know what I could have done with all that reclaimed masking energy. But I know what I'm doing with it now: building honestly, in public, without the performance. The design is better for it.