Nobody said anything cruel.
That’s what makes it so hard to explain. You leave the meeting, the dinner, the family call, and something feels like a small paper cut. Almost invisible. You replay it and think: they didn’t mean anything by it. So why does it hurt?
If you’re autistic, ADHD, gifted, or a **lifelong masker **(or several at once), you absorb thousands of these moments. Each one is deniable. Together they teach a lesson: you are too much, not enough, or faking it.
This is a field guide to 42 of them (a random amount, once culled). Every entry gives you what the comment may really be saying, a short script for answering it, and a note on when to skip the reply entirely. You don’t owe anyone a comeback.
Who this is for: the diagnosed, the self-identified, and the people still on a waitlist. You’re all welcome here. It’s also for anyone who doesn’t speak well in real time, or doesn’t want to. Every script works as a text, a typed message, or nothing at all. And if you’re a woman, a person of color, or were diagnosed late, you’ve probably heard more of these than most, and been believed less.
If you only have two minutes: the ten that do the most damage are #1, #2, #5, #6, #14, #20, #28, #36, #40, and #42. Start there, then come back for the rest. And when you finish, tell me in the comments which one landed hardest, and which one you’d add as #43.
Researchers have language for part of this. The double empathy problem, proposed by autistic scholar Damian Milton in 2012, argues that communication breakdowns between autistic and non-autistic people run both ways. Each side struggles to read the other, yet usually only one side is told to fix it. Crompton et al. (2020) later found that autistic people pass information to each other as effectively as non-autistic people do, with the friction showing up mainly across the divide.
Separately, research on camouflaging (hiding your traits to fit in) has linked it to exhaustion (Hull et al., 2017) and to higher rates of suicidal thoughts (Cassidy et al., 2018). Adults with ADHD describe stigma, disbelief, and masking too, and researchers are increasingly documenting it. Research on giftedness is thinner, so that section of this guide leans more on lived experience than on studies.
So when a comment lands, you aren’t only reacting to the sentence. You’re paying the cost of interpreting it, absorbing it, and deciding whether to answer it, all while everyone acts like nothing happened.
Not every hard comment is an attack, and you deserve a way to tell the difference.
*Feedback *is usually specific (”the report was missing the budget section”), about a behavior, open to your response, and aimed at making something work better. A microaggression is usually vague, about who you are, closed to your response, and leaves you feeling smaller. It often shows up as part of a pattern.
Sometimes a person makes a fair point about your impact in an unkind way. Sometimes a comment is both clumsy and worth hearing. You get to sort those out. This list is for the ones that are really about your existence, not your work.
This guide is about small, deniable moments. Some things are not small. If it keeps happening, if it affects your job, your housing, your health, or your safety, or if it comes with control, threats, mockery in front of others, or someone insisting you’re imagining things, it has moved past this list. Document it: dates, exact words, witnesses. Then use formal channels, a professional, or a local support line. Trust your read. You don’t need it to be dramatic to be real.
“Underneath” means what the comment may be communicating, not what the person definitely intends. Many come from love, ignorance, or awkwardness. Some come from contempt. The impact on you is real either way, and you don’t have to settle their motives to settle your response.
Scripts are starting points. Adjust them to your voice, the relationship, and what you have in the tank. They’re short on purpose, so you can say them out loud on a low-battery day.
Every entry has a “skip it” note. Energy is finite, especially for people who spend theirs on masking all day.
**Let it pass.**Save the energy.Ask a curious question.“What makes you say that?” Low risk, and it often exposes the assumption without a fight.**State the fact.**Calm, brief, no defense.Set a boundary.“I’m not going to discuss this.”Delay.“Let me get back to you on that.” You can answer tomorrow, or never.**Exit.**Leave the conversation, the room, or the relationship.
[✨I’ve included a 10-page download of this list at the bottom of this essay for you to use and share]
