No one is buried under the floorboards

On the fortnight my inbox staged a fight that nobody turned up to

On Wednesday morning my inbox delivered two essays, a few hours apart, whose headlines cannot both be true.

The first, from Stephanie Bealer’s Mind Clinic, was called “The ‘False Self’ Problem”: for late-diagnosed autistic and AuDHD adults whose personality was built from coping and masking strategies, with an authentic self obscured somewhere beneath the layers. The second, from Sven Brodmerkel at Off-Script At Work, was called “There Is No ‘Real You’”—and that, the subtitle promised, is good news, especially for neurodivergent professionals.

A buried self. No self. Same morning, same readership, same inbox. My email client, which has no philosophical commitments whatsoever, filed them side by side and went about its day.

Now, I’ve been caught before by writers who are clever in the headline and something else entirely by paragraph nine. So before forming a view I did the unfashionable thing and read both essays all the way through, prepared to referee the cage match.

There was no cage match. That’s the story.

The fight that wasn’t

Read in full, the two essays spend most of their length agreeing with each other in different costumes.

Bealer, whose headline sounds like the excavation brochure, is careful to say almost immediately that the false self is adaptive, not fake: a survival structure built from years of environmental feedback, deserving of respect rather than demolition. Her unmasking is not a dig; it’s a slow, non-linear evolution, more like grief than like archaeology.

Brodmerkel, whose headline sounds like a wrecking ball, spends his essay defending the very people Bealer is writing for. Masking, he argues, is a shield, not a lie: a conscious tactical choice in workplaces that weren’t built for you. He marshals Sartre, the Buddhist idea of non-self, and Heraclitus’s river to dismantle what he calls the myth of authenticity as an archaeological project, and lands somewhere gentle: authenticity is alignment with your values, context by context. The river changes; the direction of flow doesn’t have to. He even cites the research: Jongman-Sereno and Leary (2019) found that people who rigidly maintained one persona across all contexts often felt less authentic than flexible adapters, provided the adaptations were deliberate and values-aligned.

Strip the titles off and the two essays differ on almost nothing except whether to keep the noun. She says the real self exists and has been obscured; he says the self is a process and the search for a substrate is the suffering. Both agree the mask was survival. Both agree the dig is the wrong frame. Both are kind.

So why did they arrive dressed for combat? Because the feed pays for combat. A headline that says “your careful, adaptive identity deserves patient attention” recruits nobody. “There is a buried you” and “there is no you” both stop the scroll. The gladiator costume is the acquisition strategy; the essay underneath is the retention strategy. I don’t even blame them. I merely note that the discourse now requires writers to pick a fight in the title that they decline, honourably, in the text. And most readers only ever see the title.

The question neither essay asks

Where I part company with both—mildly, respectfully, the way you argue with people you’d happily have a beer with (full disclosure: in Sven’s case that’s not hypothetical; we met through Substack, we talk, and he may yet end up with the questionable privilege of helping supervise my doctoral research, none of which has softened a word of what follows)—is that both essays are still answering the question where is the real one located? Obscured underneath, says one. Distributed across the process, says the other.

I think the more useful question, after forty-odd years of misdiagnosis and a late AuDHD diagnosis of my own, is who pays?

Here is what late diagnosis actually felt like. There was no reveal. No second Lee walked out of storage blinking at the light, annoyed about the decades of rent. What changed was the accounting. For the first time I could see the invoice for the performance: the flat exhaustion after ordinary social days, the recovery time nobody else seemed to need. Winnicott (1965) understood the mask as a defence that keeps someone alive; the masking research puts modern numbers on the toll, with camouflaging in autistic adults travelling reliably alongside exhaustion, anxiety and low mood (Hull et al., 2017). The mask was never the mystery. The bill was.

So my answer to the Wednesday collision is that both writers are circling something simpler than a metaphysics. The real you is not an object under the floorboards, and not quite a river either. The real you is whoever pays for the performance—and I can tell you with some authority who that was, because he kept the receipts in his nervous system for four decades. The diagnosis didn’t hand me back a self. It handed me the invoice, itemised.

Unmasking, on this accounting, isn’t excavation (Brodmerkel is right to retire that metaphor) and isn’t quite self-discovery either. It’s making a position redundant. You don’t dig anyone up. You stop paying for a second employee.

The machine’s tell is the word “genuine”

The other thing my inbox did this fortnight was hold a masterclass in reading surfaces.

Karen Spinner at Wondering About AI ran a proper little study (disclosed methods, disclosed that she built it with Claude’s help, offers you the code) generating 300,000-odd words from Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini and using corpus statistics to find each model’s verbal fingerprints. The findings are a delight. ChatGPT leans on “it’s not this, it’s that” constructions. Gemini reaches for “incredibly” and announces that remote work has murdered mentorship.

And Claude? Claude’s most statistically distinctive habit—more than ten times the rate of its rivals—is the word genuine.

The machine’s most reliable tell is the vocabulary of sincerity. The one word that most betrays the absence of a person is the word we use to insist a person is present. Somewhere, Sartre’s café waiter is taking notes. (I write with Claude, openly, and I am—genuinely—going to have to watch that now.)

But Karen draws the conclusion that matters, and it’s the honest one: every one of these tells is ordinary English, learned from human writing, which means every tell is also somebody’s natural voice. She uses “incredibly” herself and has barely touched Gemini. Sort text by ear and you will, with statistical certainty, accuse real people of being machines.

Which is to say: reading the surface pattern and ruling on the depths misclassifies actual humans. Hold that thought.

The body files under “anxiety”

Because the third essay of the fortnight, from Gaëlle over at Neuroqueer Therapy—on neurodivergence and chronic illness—is about the same error with worse consequences.

Gaëlle’s careful, well-referenced argument: physical conditions cluster in neurodivergent populations at rates the textbooks don’t prepare clinicians for: hypermobility, dysautonomia, immune and mast-cell weirdness, hormonal amplifiers. And when a patient’s presentation doesn’t match the expected pattern—symptoms that fluctuate, span systems, arrive described in a nonstandard communication style—the system’s default filing decision is psychological. Anxiety. Somatisation. Deconditioning. Conditions counted as rare in the general population but common in neurodivergent ones can take years to name, not because the symptoms are subtle but because the pattern-matcher was trained on somebody else.

Same error as the AI-tell hunt. Same error as judging the essays by their headlines. The surface pattern gets read as ground truth, and the person underneath gets the misfiled years. I spent decades filed under a condition I didn’t have, and I can confirm: the filing system hurts more than the fatigue does.

The receipts

So, one fortnight, three arguments, one lesson, and it isn’t “who’s right about the self.”

Surfaces are cheap to read and expensive to be misread by. The headline is not the essay. The tell-word is not the writer. The presentation is not the patient. And the mask—on this, Bealer and Brodmerkel quietly agree, whatever their titles say—was never the person. It was the cost the person was carrying.

No one is buried under the floorboards. There was never a second Lee in storage. There was one tired man doing two jobs, one of them unpaid, both of them invisible, for the better part of forty years—and a series of filing systems that read his surface and ruled on his depths.

The diagnosis didn’t hand me back a real self, because there was nothing to hand back. It handed me the receipts.

You’d be surprised how much of a life you can renovate once you can finally read the invoice.

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The pieces that started this: Stephanie Bealer’s “The ‘False Self’ Problem” at Mind Clinic (the full post sits behind her paywall; I’ve engaged with the free portion), Sven Brodmerkel’s “Dismantling Authenticity (Part 1): There Is No ‘Real You’” at Off-Script At Work, Wondering About AI’s tell-words study “I prompted ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to generate over 300,000 words,” and Neuroqueer Therapy’s “Neurodivergence and chronic illness: beyond the mind–body divide.” All worth your time—especially, as it turned out, below the fold.

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References

Hull, L., Petrides, K. V., Allison, C., Smith, P., Baron-Cohen, S., Lai, M.-C., & Mandy, W. (2017). “Putting on my best normal”: Social camouflaging in adults with autism spectrum conditions. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 47(8), 2519–2534. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-017-3166-5

Jongman-Sereno, K. P., & Leary, M. R. (2019). The enigma of being yourself: A critical examination of the concept of authenticity. Review of General Psychology, 23(1), 133–142. https://doi.org/10.1037/gpr0000157

Winnicott, D. W. (1965). Ego distortion in terms of true and false self. In The maturational processes and the facilitating environment: Studies in the theory of emotional development (pp. 140–152). International Universities Press.