This is NDR's life kit.

I'm Eric Garcia.

I'm a reporter and author of the book We're Not Broken,

changing the autism conversation.

I was diagnosed with autism when I was a child,

but at the same time I grew up in the 1990s

when autism was still not largely in the public consciousness.

So as a result, I often had to be conscious about

how it manifested around others.

When I was a kid, family members would regularly tell me

to stop tapping or twiddling my fingers in the car

or shaking my feet on the table saying it made them anxious.

I didn't realize it at the time, but I was using self-stimulating behavior

or stimming, which many autistic people use to

soothe themselves or even to express happiness or joy.

Later on when I was a student at Community College,

when I was with a woman I liked, I furiously shook my leg to call myself

and hindsight I realized that was a stim.

But at the time, the woman pointed out the behavior

and challenged me to go a whole week without shaking my leg.

And I did. Little did I know, all of this was what it called masking.

So masking is basically taking some kind of attempt

...