The unmasked world — what autism reveals
2026
What if the autistic person were not the one who sees the world poorly, but the one who sees it without a mask? An essay on what that presence, too real for the social theatre, reveals about the play we all perform.
Autism is called a disorder, a deficit, a glitch in development. But what if the mistake lay not in the diagnosis but in the address? What if it were not the autistic person who is broken, but a social reality that, to function, demands a pathological degree of fiction?
The World Without a Mask describes an existence of too much reality: a body that receives the world unfiltered, a language that cannot lie, a presence that does not translate. Through school, diagnosis, the mask and work, the book follows this figure with no dressing room in a theatre where the mask stands in for identity. Their mere presence lays bare what no one wants to see: that communication never served to tell the truth, but to maintain the illusion of human fluency. Neither a clinical portrait nor a hero's tale. A cartography.