My Thoughts on Masking
I am rereading the book Unmaking Autism: Discovering the New Face of Neurodiversity, by Dr. Devon Price. I read this book shortly after it was published, and this was one of the many resources that I read that led me to seeking my own autism diagnosis. Reading it through a second time, the content is hitting even harder now that I have more knowledge of self. It has also caused me to do a lot of thinking on the topic of “masking” and my own experiences with it. Masking is a term used when autistic people make efforts to suppress their autistic traits in order to appear more neurotypical. This can take a tremendous amount of effort on the part of the individual, and has shown to take a toll on mental health. My own experience with masking feels very complicated. I have been thinking about ways that I tried to mask that didn’t work that well, how I adjusted my approach, and how I got better at it. I can see how in some ways, masking reduced my social anxiety, I can see how it negatively impacted my mental health, and I can also see ways that I have refused to mask and found ways to be more authentically me.
Over the years, I have had autistic people tell me they felt like there was something wrong with them, that they felt inhuman, that they felt they were aliens, that maybe they were one of the fae, etc. For myself, as a teen, I felt that I had just been raised in the wrong era. If I had been born in an earlier time, I felt like I would do much better and was often described by others as being an “old soul.” Because of this, I read a lot of historical fiction and tried to model myself after women of bygone eras, even going so far as to practice walking around my house with a book on my head to improve my posture. Having excellent posture and manners in the ‘90s grunge era however did not make me more popular or blend more with my neurotypical peers, but solidified the impression by my peers that I was “stuck up.”
In college, I found a different masking strategy. Early on, I began working for my college’s international program’s office. My job in part was to take students who came to the university to study English on field trips so that they could learn more about American culture. I then acted as interpreter for them by explaining American cultural norms to them. In order to do this, I had to study American culture well enough to be able to explain it to someone who was not from here. This also allowed me to ask other Americans questions about unwritten social rules without being “weird.” Instead of asking questions like, “Why do we do XYZ?” I could ask questions like, “How do you explain to an international student why we do XYZ?” This helped me gain information not just for my students, but for myself as well. As an autistic rule follower, this worked well for me, and by the time I graduated from college, socially I was unrecognizable. I was still autistic, and most of my friends were either international students or engineers, but I was much better at masking and felt less socially anxious once I knew the “rules” better.
After college, I transitioned to working in education and disability services. I struggled to make friends with my colleagues, most of whom were neurotypical women. At the elementary school where I worked, the other teachers would sit at the opposite lunch table if I was there first. At my next job, I was not invited to after work get-togethers. I invited everyone to my baby shower and only a couple of co-workers showed up. I experienced one rejection after another and would cry at night because I didn’t know what I was doing wrong and why no one wanted to be friends with me. This is when I started masking in ways that negatively impacted my mental health. I stopped doing things like sharing ‘fun facts,’ which was fine in school, but apparently not in the workplace, I modified my eating habits to fit in, pretended to be interested in things that I wasn’t, tried inviting myself to social events afterwork, but it was clear that no matter what I did, I was not welcome in the ‘in-crowd.’
While I tried fitting in in some ways, there were other ways that I have refused to mask over the years. For example, while I stopped sharing fun facts, I refused to follow the unwritten social rule that women and girls should act less knowledgeable than they actually are. This has led to me being called “arrogant” among other unpleasant adjectives. When I was told that I should let my male supervisors think that my ideas were theirs, my answer was, “Hell no!” This did not make me successful in that particular workplace, but it was better for me to go elsewhere. For someone like me for whom knowledge acquisition is a special interest, masking that I know things would be like denying my entire personality, and I am not willing to be inauthentic in that way. I am an info dumper who reads a lot. That is a core part of who I am. I think for many high masking autistic people, they spend a lot of time trying to find the balance of where masking makes life easier, and where it is too much or intolerable. It is not always easy to find this balance, and even when you do, it doesn’t take much to throw it off again.
The last thing that I have been thinking of when it comes to masking, is how important it is to find a place where the mask can come off completely. This means finding people who love you for who you are. I have been fortunate that my spouse has been this person for me, but I acknowledge that many autistic people do not have the same level of acceptance in their lives. As a therapist, I try to provide ‘unconditional positive regard,’ for my clients, while also helping them find people who fully accept them. In a perfect world, this would be easy to find, but unfortunately, it is not a perfect world and ableism is rampant in our society. If you are reading this, you can be the person who accepts and appreciates the autistic people in your life, regardless of your, or their, neurotype. The phrase “autism acceptance” is tossed around a lot, but these are not just buzzwords. Actual autism acceptance is imperative for the emotional health and wellbeing of autistic people.
Two hands holding a black mask of a face with background blurred.
