“New beginnings” is not a concept which fills me with excitement. Last weekend I burst into tears because the coffee shop in my local Waterstones had been renovated whilst I was away on holiday. “Why can’t everything just stay exactly the same FOREVER?????” I texted my mum plaintively from the floor of the public toilet I had retreated to to recover from the shock.

Starting university was no exception to my difficulty with change. It's normal to be anxious about moving out and starting something new, and I truly believe there is no-one on Earth who genuinely enjoys Freshers' Week, but for us students on the autistic spectrum, for whom routine and stability is crucial, university life presents a particularly unique and frequently overwhelming series of challenges – especially if you’re hell bent on pretending to be “normal.”

When you hear words like “Asperger’s” or “autistic spectrum”, I am not the kind of person who comes to mind. People’s mental images fall into two categories: the genius but solitary savant, or the “low functioning” version characterised by regular meltdowns and limited communication skills. Rain Man or The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night Time. Both of them are usually men.

Whilst there are many people with autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs) who present similarly to both of these characters, our narrow perception of what is really a broad and varied spectrum is painfully limiting. As well as being pushed to an unhelpful and dehumanising extreme, the image of ASDs most people have is heavily gendered. Misleadingly referred to as “the extreme male brain”, the research, diagnostic criteria and writing on the disorder is all weighted towards the typical male presentation leaving many autistic women like me to slip under the radar and become masters of disguise. Until something like a surprise coffee shop renovation sneaks up and catches us off guard, that is.

The defining characteristic of AS is that I process information and social situations intellectually rather than intuitively. This doesn't really sound like such a big deal in isolation, and it's incredibly hard to explain to people how exhausting it is. The best analogy I've managed to come up with is this: imagine that breathing does not come to you naturally. For every single breath you take, you have to consciously tell your body to inhale and exhale. Imagine you have to do this for the rest of your life without ever letting anyone notice; you have to do everything just as normal, except that whilst all the people around you breathe with ease, you must constantly remember to keep pushing the air in and out of your lungs.

I've learned to do this very well. People are generally very surprised when I mention I'm on the spectrum. “You don't SEEM autistic”, they will often say, probably the most bittersweet compliment in the world; you seem just like us, and well done to you, because how terribly undesirable you would be if people could tell what you really were. It's both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, I manage to avoid drawing this kind of unwanted attention to myself. On the other, I am expected to constantly perform a normality which I find exhausting and at times impossible.

This is a daily reality for many women and girls with undiagnosed or high-functioning autism. The efforts we take to blend into the background unsurprisingly result in alarmingly high rates of depression and anxiety. Over the course of my two years at Cambridge I've slowly become more accepting of my disability and learned how to make student life work on my terms, but only at the cost of a wave of anxious breakdowns so increasingly immobilising that I was eventually forced to intermit.

The really painful thing about my experience, and the experiences of so many young women whose brains mirror mine, is how easy it all should have been to avoid. How different things would be if there was just a little more awareness about how Asperger's manifests differently for us; just one bestselling novel with a character I actually related to, just one article which interviewed one of us instead of a scientist who talks about autistic people like curious lab specimens, just one less meme on my Facebook feed where my neurology is treated as the butt of a bad joke.

Hiding it hasn't worked for me so far, though, and this year it nearly killed me. So this column is my attempt to create a little bit of that awareness and give some insight into the challenges and the pleasures of an incredibly misunderstood and unfairly maligned disorder, and make other students out there like me feel a little less alone. I'm writing it from back in that renovated coffee shop; it turns out the new place does much better coffee. I guess some new beginnings do turn out for the best