Anxiety Isn’t “Autistic” — It’s What Rejection Feels Like
Autistic Anxiety Arises from Rejection, Not Wiring
Ask most people why we autistic folks can get so anxious, and they’ll give you a quick answer that feels like common sense: because autism and anxiety go together. It sounds tidy, almost clinical. Autistic people are wired to be anxious, end of story.
That explanation is everywhere. Parents repeat it. Clinicians diagnose around it. Articles publish it. Autism research often pathologizes it as disorder — through cure-focused studies or prenatal screening agendas — or worse, threads it into eugenic logics about which kinds of minds should be allowed to exist. This isn’t neutral description. It’s a story about worth and about who gets written out of the future. And autistic communities know it. We have lived that erasure while also naming, again and again, that our anxiety is a response to being pushed out, not proof of an internal flaw. The idea has settled into public knowledge so deeply that questioning it feels almost ungrateful — as if we’re refusing to accept a fact that was handed down by science.
But what if it isn’t a fact at all? What if autistic anxiety isn’t hardwired, but hard-lived? What if the real driver is rejection?
Plain-Language Anchor Look at the landscape of autistic life. We are more likely to be isolated at work. More likely to be restrained or silenced in care settings. We are told our friendships don’t count, our needs are too much, our joy and interests are too weird. We are more likely to be bullied in school — even by our teachers.
I remember one day during my time in grade-school — an ordinary moment that became social rejection in disguise. I was in the the intermediary math class and had just demonstrated mastery of division tables in front of the class, having watched every kid who went before me stumble. The teacher immediately promoted me into the advanced class.
The advanced teacher greeted me skeptically. I was suddenly very nervous, not knowing these kids or the teacher. She immediately put me through the same oral quiz I had just aced. I froze. I couldn't even speak in the moment, much less recall anything. She told me I wasn't ready and instructed me to move back to my previous class.
That kind of dismissal doesn’t just sting in the moment. It leaves lasting marks.
Anxiety, in that light, isn’t a personality quirk. It’s vigilance. It’s the body bracing for the next exclusion because the last one never stopped echoing. It’s waking up already scanning the room for signs you won’t belong.
Psychologists call that anxiety. Autistic people call it survival.
Evidence Without Disguise A 2025 study of nearly 700 young adults (published in Research in Autism) found something striking: childhood abuse and household dysfunction did not explain the link between autistic traits and anxiety. Social exclusion did. Being bullied, alienated, stigmatized or restrained was the bridge between difference and distress.
The researchers framed it as a “mediator.” We recognize it as reality.
This matters, because while autistic communities have been saying for decades that rejection and stigma erode our mental health, the general public still assumes the opposite: that our anxiety proves autism is broken on the inside. That belief keeps responsibility off society’s shoulders. If anxiety is innate, nothing needs to change except us.
Why the Public Gets It Wrong Public knowledge is shaped by repetition, not by truth. When clinicians, educators and journalists describe autistic anxiety as a built-in feature, people absorb it as obvious. No one pauses to ask whether the data ever supported that claim. And no one pauses to ask autistic people directly.
So rejection gets erased twice. First, in our daily lives, when we’re shut out of classrooms, jobs or friendships. Second, in the stories told about us, where exclusion isn’t named as harm but folded into a pathology equation.
The result is a myth that sounds compassionate but isn’t: autistic people are anxious because we’re autistic. Autistic communities have long resisted this myth — through advocacy, writing and community testimony — naming our anxiety as a rational response to exclusion while watching the public recycle it as inevitability.
Naming the Harm Here’s the mechanism: rejection produces anxiety. The beneficiaries are the non-autistic majority, who never have to question whether they’ll be included. The missing piece is recognition that autistic fear is a rational, protective response to a world that tries as a matter of course to push us out.
When research reduces exclusion to a percentage of variance, it misses the ethical weight. When the public treats our anxiety as inherent, it misses the injustice. Both frames land in the same place: autistic difference is the problem, not the rejection that meets it.
This is how harm reproduces itself. Through frames that sound neutral, even sympathetic, but shift blame back onto the people already excluded.
Better Questions If exclusion is the driver, then the real work is not inside autistic people. It’s in the structures around us.
- What if schools measured belonging, not just attendance?
- What if workplaces tracked inclusion, not just accommodations?
- What if clinicians stopped labeling autistic vigilance as a disorder and started naming it as a wound of rejection?
These are not tweaks. They are reversals. They take the spotlight off our bodies and put it on the systems that decide whose bodies count.
A Different Ending Anxiety isn’t an autistic default and doesn't have to become our destiny. It’s what happens when rejection becomes routine.
The myth says autism carries anxiety inside it. The truth is that society lays anxiety on top of us, layer by layer, until it feels like part of our skin.
We are not anxious by design. We are anxious because exclusion keeps teaching us to be.
So stop asking autistic people why we worry so much. Start asking why the world gives us so much rejection to worry about.