The recent discovery of my autism has forced me to reexamine what my upbringing taught me about success, identity, and worth. I was raised in a Jain Indian American family that expected academic and professional excellence. Those expectations were bound up with casteism, colonial legacies, and a careerism that valued outward achievement above everything else. So I denied my neurodivergence, suppressing a core part of who I am to meet other people’s standards.
Visas and caste set the terms
Careerism among South Asian Americans, and Indian Americans especially, comes from more than cultural values. Caste hierarchy and immigration law shaped it too.
For many South Asian immigrants, legal status depends on professional success in high-status, high-income fields like medicine, engineering, or technology. On an H-1B work visa, falling short can mean losing legal residency. That precarity creates constant pressure to perform and to fit a model minority stereotype that celebrates success and ignores what it costs in mental health and identity.
The pressure doesn’t end with the first generation. Children of immigrants are expected to carry on the family’s professional success as a way of securing its stability and honor. Leaving that path reads as a personal and familial failure, and mental health problems get dismissed or downplayed. The U.S. immigration system hardens these expectations and raises the risk of anxiety and depression.
Caste shapes career aspirations too. Upper-caste families often arrive with an entrenched belief that success is both expected and necessary to keep their social standing. That concern with respectability drives career choices, pushing children into high-status fields that function as an extension of caste privilege.
Lower-caste people, meanwhile, face systemic discrimination both in their home countries and in the diaspora. They often have less access to education and money, which widens the gap in opportunity. Caste discrimination persists in immigrant communities, where upper-caste people dominate leadership positions and others face greater barriers to moving up.
In that environment, autism and other forms of neurodivergence look like obstacles to hide or overcome. Admitting to them counts as weakness, a failure to meet the family’s expectations, and so the culture of denial reinforces itself.
What the masking cost
Growing up this way, I came to believe any struggle was an excuse for not meeting expectations. From a young age, I absorbed careerism, the idea that personal worth is tied to professional success. To succeed, I thought, I had to suppress my autistic traits and match neurotypical standards of productivity and performance. When I hit sensory overload, social anxiety, or burnout, I blamed myself for not working hard enough, without knowing these came from my neurodivergence.
The cost of this kind of internalized ableism is hard to see in aggregate statistics. They don’t show South Asian Americans as unusually distressed—Asian American adults report mental illness at rates below the US average. What they show is a population that doesn’t present for care: Asian American adults use mental health services at 6.4%, against 17.6% of white adults, and South Asian Americans have the lowest utilization rate of any group. The distress is easy to miss even in death: in one county study, 55% of South Asian suicides were recorded under another race or ethnic group.
In my case, the denial meant years of masking, and with them chronic stress, anxiety, and depression. Caught in a cycle of self-blame and shame, I kept trying to meet expectations I couldn’t meet without sacrificing my mental and emotional health.
When I began to accept my autism, I noticed similar patterns in my father. He showed many of the traits I now recognize as neurodivergent. But when a family member suggested he might be autistic, he reacted with anger and denial: “So what if I am? I’m dealing with it.” He had spent a lifetime soaking up cultural and generational pressure. For him, success meant enduring hardship in silence and suppressing any trait that didn’t fit traditional ideals of masculinity and competence. Admitting to neurodivergence, or even to mental health struggles, would have meant admitting weakness, which he had been conditioned to avoid at all costs.
His response showed me the generational divide between us. I had begun unmasking and accepting my neurodivergence; he still held to a belief system that demanded silent endurance and conformity.
Success on my own terms
The idea that autism, or any form of neurodivergence, is an excuse does real damage. It implies neurodivergent people are less capable or less deserving of success. Rejecting it meant defining success on my own terms: weighing well-being, authenticity, and balance instead of performance and productivity alone, and accepting my neurodivergence as part of that.
This hasn’t been easy. Letting go of the careerist mindset I was raised with took time and effort, but my mental health depended on it. Acknowledging my autism let me ask for the accommodations I needed. Setting boundaries around work, unmasking in social situations, and building a life that fits my needs let me reconnect with myself and find satisfaction that doesn’t depend on outside validation.
SAMHIN, a South Asian mental-health nonprofit, offers support groups, a helpline and a directory of providers. That’s a start. The deeper change has to happen inside families, wherever the cost of silence is already visible.