I asked an AI to generate something that captured how autism feels from the inside. Not a clinical diagram. Not a symbol on a blue background. Something real.
This is what came back. An infinity symbol — the neurodiversity symbol — made of roots, growing out of a forest floor with a waterfall behind it. Organic. Alive. Not clinical at all.
And then I looked at it again and saw what it actually was.
It is a mask.
The two loops of the infinity symbol sit exactly where eyes would be. The roots and branches frame a face. A structure built out of fragments that do not quite fit, shaped into something that almost passes for a single coherent thing.
That is masking. That is what it looks like from the inside. You take all the disconnected parts — the scripts, the learned expressions, the rehearsed responses, the studied body language — and you hold them together in real time, every day, and you present a surface. The mask is not deception. It is architecture. It is load-bearing.
The AI did not know it was making a mask. But the metaphor landed anyway. Maybe that is the point — the pattern is so embedded in the autistic experience that it shows up even when nobody is trying to put it there.
This is my first piece of autism-oriented artwork. AI-generated, yes. But so on point that I had to share it.
The Protocol: Sometimes the image finds the metaphor before you do. The infinity symbol is the neurodiversity symbol. The AI built it out of roots without knowing the weight of that choice. And what came out is something organic, alive, and shaped exactly like what we carry every day. Not missing. Not scattered. Rooted. That is the whole experience in one image.
