Dr Hannah Belcher on breaking the taboo around loneliness, feeling like an ‘alien’ among humans, and finding fellow autistic people... 

Being autistic in a non-autistic world can be a lonely experience. Many autistic people have told us that they want to socialise and meet people, but are not sure how to. Many have active social lives, but may find it difficult to meet people they truly connect with. Unsurprisingly, this can have a negative effect on autistic people’s mental health.  

With this in mind, we caught up with one of our recent mental health conference speakers, Dr Hannah Belcher. Hannah is a post-doctoral researcher at King’s College London, and was diagnosed as autistic in 2013. Here, she writes about feeling lonely as an autistic person in a non-autistic world, the relief of finding fellow autistic people, and why it is important that we talk more about the ‘L’ word.  

I am not someone who looks lonely. I have friends and family around me, and yet for most of my life, I have felt deeply alone.

For my entire life I have instead felt like an alien species struggling to appear like the ‘humans’. Since I was three and too scared to speak in case I said the wrong thing, I have been unconsciously developing a complex mask to hide my autistic traits, appear ‘normal’, and avoid being bullied or judged by others. It is very difficult for a child who is constantly masking for survival to develop a strong sense of their true self at the same time. Instead, they often end up taking on the judgements of others about themselves and internalising them as their own.  

I didn’t realise this until I completely burnt out as an adult and realised how much of an empty shell I felt. I didn’t know who I was or even what I really liked. I didn’t know back then that this was a symptom of my loneliness.