Unmasking for Life: The Autistic Person's Guide to Connecting, Loving, and Living Authentically

Live your best, unashamedly unmasked Autistic life with this invaluable resource featuring tools for navigating friendships, family, work, and love, from the author of Unmasking Autism.

“Unmasking for Life should be read by not only autistic people but their loved ones, to ensure they facilitate a truly fulfilling life.”—Eric Garcia, author of We’re Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation

Most masked Autistics have spent a lifetime being told how to perform neurotypically: how to behave, how to carry themselves, what to feel, and how to live. With his previous book, Unmasking Autism, Devon Price, PhD, has given them the space and the tools to unmask and embrace their neurodiversity. But no matter where you are in the unmasking process, there is still work to be done. Unmasking is more than just a personal process of self-acceptance, after all—it also requires figuring out how to move comfortably throughout life building friendships, nurturing family, pursuing love, finding a means of survival, and expressing oneself on one’s own terms. In order to live a brilliantly unashamed Autistic life, you need more than internal healing—you need practical tools of assertiveness and interpersonal effectiveness, and solutions to the problems of ableism and inaccessibility.

Enter Unmasking for Life, which provides the resources to help you advocate for your needs and invent new ways of living, loving, and being that work with your disability rather than against it. You’ll learn how to develop five key skills for living unmasked in all areas of life:

• Acceptance of change, loss, and uncertainty
• Engagement in productive conflict, discussion, and disagreement
• Transgression of unfair rules, demands, and social expectations
• Tolerance of distress, disagreement, or being disliked
• Creation of new accommodations, relationship structures, and new ways of living

Unmasking for Life will help validate and support you so you can move beyond unmasking your Autism and begin unmasking your world.

Devon Price, PhD, is a social psychologist, professor, author, and proud Autistic person. He is the author of Unmasking Autism, Laziness Does Not Exist, and Unlearning Shame. His research has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and The Journal of Positive Psychology. Price’s writing has also appeared in outlets such as the Financial Times, HuffPost, Los Angeles Times, Slate, Jacobin, Business Insider, and LitHub, and his work has been featured on PBS, NPR, MSNBC, and the BBC. He lives in Chicago, where he serves as a clinical associate professor at Loyola University Chicago’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies.