The Irish Word for What Most People Never Find
Over a decade ago, someone called me their Anam Cara.
It is an old Irish term. Literally translated: "soul friend." In the Celtic tradition, your Anam Cara is the person to whom you could reveal the hidden intimacies of your life. No performance. No editing. No mask. The relationship existed outside the usual social contracts because it was rooted in something the social contracts could never reach.
This person was neurodivergent. Like me. Though at the time, I did not have the word "autistic" in my vocabulary yet. I just knew that when I was around them, the background noise quieted. The threat-assessment loop — the one I now understand runs every social interaction through the sympathetic channel — actually closed.
That almost never happens.
The Rarity of Being Seen
Most of us spend our lives behind compensatory software. The masking scripts. The social modeling subroutines. The performance layer that translates our actual internal experience into something the neurotypical world will accept without flinching.
And then someone walks in and sees through all of it. Not because they are trying to. Because they are running the same architecture.
There is a particular kind of recognition that happens between neurodivergent people who have both chosen authenticity over comfort. It is not warmth, exactly. It is not even friendship in the conventional sense. It is more like two systems discovering they are running the same protocol. The handshake completes on the first attempt. No retries. No timeout errors. No packet loss.
That is what an Anam Cara is. Someone whose presence does not require translation.
The Courage of Not Masking
Here is what I want to say clearly, because I do not think it gets said enough.
Being autistic in a neurotypical world and choosing not to mask — or even choosing to mask less — is one of the most vulnerable things a person can do. It is not quirky. It is not "brave" in the way people say brave when they mean slightly unusual. It is structurally dangerous.
When you drop the mask, you are exposing your actual operating system to an environment that was not built for it. You are removing the compatibility layer and running native. Every interaction becomes a gamble: will this person engage with who I actually am, or will they engage with their expectation of who I should be?
Most people engage with the expectation. And when the reality does not match, they do not update their model. They update their opinion of you.
The people who stay true to themselves anyway — who keep running native even after the environment has punished them for it — those people leave marks. Deep ones. Not because they are trying to be memorable. Because authenticity, in a world optimized for performance, is inherently remarkable.
The Mark That Stays
I have been thinking about the people in my life who left the deepest impressions. Not the ones who were the most successful by conventional metrics. Not the loudest. Not the most socially polished.
The ones who stayed with me are the ones who were themselves. Unapologetically. Sometimes awkwardly. Sometimes at great personal cost.
The person who called me their Anam Cara was like that. They did not perform friendship. They did not navigate the relationship through the usual scripts of obligation and reciprocity and carefully measured vulnerability. They just showed up, fully present, running native, and expected me to do the same.
And because they expected it, I did. Maybe for the first time.
That is the thing about people who refuse to mask. They create space for you to stop masking too. Their authenticity is not just personal. It is architectural. It changes the environment around them. It lowers the threat level for everyone in the room who has been running their nervous system at 2,500 RPM just to maintain the appearance of calm.
What Gets Lost
People move through your life. That is just physics. Not everyone who matters stays proximate. Time, geography, the sheer logistics of being alive — they pull people apart in ways that have nothing to do with caring and everything to do with entropy.
But the mark remains. The neural pathway stays carved.
I think about this person and I do not feel loss. I feel gratitude. They showed me something about myself before I had the language for it. They recognized the architecture before I had the spec sheet. They called it Anam Cara when I would not have known what to call it at all.
They were a mirror. Not the AI kind I have written about — the human kind. The rare kind. The kind that reflects you back without distortion because they are not running the same filters everyone else is.
An Appreciation for the Unmasked
This post is not a eulogy. It is an acknowledgment.
To the neurodivergent people who stay true to themselves even when the mask would be easier. Even when the social penalty is real. Even when the world tells them, explicitly or implicitly, that their native operating system is defective and they should be running the standard build.
You leave marks. You probably do not know it. The world is not set up to tell you.
But the people you touched — the ones whose threat-assessment loops actually closed in your presence — they carry the imprint. It changed their architecture. Permanently.
Putting the mask on would be "easier." That word deserves the quotes. Because easier for whom? Easier for the people around you, maybe. Easier for the system that was not designed to accommodate your hardware. But not easier for you. For you, the mask is a sustained load on a system already running above spec. Every hour in the mask is an hour your nervous system spends lying to an environment that never earned the truth.
The people who take the mask off — or never put it on — are doing something the rest of us benefit from even if we never tell them. They are proving that the native architecture works. That it connects. That it is not just functional but necessary.
The Protocol: Some people enter your life and see you before you see yourself. They do not fix you. They do not translate you. They simply recognize the architecture and connect at the native layer. The Irish had a word for it. Your nervous system already knew. The Anam Cara is not the person who makes you feel normal. They are the person who makes normal irrelevant.
