Masking

Maybe you’re wondering how I got to this age without being diagnosed. After all, I’ve been seeing psychologists and psychiatrists since I was in high school. Surely someone should have noticed?

There are several parts to the answer. One is simply that most people, even your average psychologist, don’t actually specialize in autism, and wouldn’t know what to look for. I mean, we had a lecture about it in one of my university classes, and I certainly didn’t have a clue what it really looked like. Another is that, certainly when I was younger, if you weren’t a little boy, even the people who did specialize in autism probably weren’t going to be looking for it. But the part I really want to talk about in this post is autistic masking.

I used to talk about wearing different personalities depending on who I was around. I didn’t really even know which one was me. It took a lot of work to figure out who I was under all those different faces I presented. But that’s only half the story. Most people change the way they present themselves in different circumstances, to a greater or lesser degree. Autistic masking is something else.

It means, essentially, hiding autistic traits and behaviours in an effort to fit into a predominantly neurotypical society. Some autistic people can do it pretty effectively, others can’t. I’m somewhere in the middle – masking well enough to avoid detection¹ but not well enough to avoid being called “weird” for most of my life.²

From hiding responses to aversive sensory stimuli, restricting the movements that come naturally, or staying quiet about special interests so you don’t bother people to learning to copy the behaviours of your others so you can blend in, it takes a lot of processing power. While masking can make it easier to fit in, it can also lead to exhaustion, to confusion, to depression, anxiety, and burnout.³ Especially if you don’t understand what exactly you’re doing, why it’s necessary, or that the rest of the world isn’t doing the exact same thing.

My very first blog,⁴ which I’m not going to tell you the name of because it’s still bouncing around somewhere on the internet and I’m a little embarrassed about it, focussed on what we can learn about human behaviour by analysing TV shows. Not particularly revolutionary TV shows, either. A bunch of procedurals, really.

I thought everybody could benefit from what I was doing,⁵ this little project that brought to light the way I was looking at the world. Fiction was a great teacher for me, especially because I was so at sea when it came to interacting with my peers. Still learning the basics of social interaction, not as a child, but at the age of 24.

I left this post until now because I wanted to make clear the cost of trying to pretend not to be autistic. It’s going through life feeling bruised and raw because you can’t explain to anyone why listening to someone eat feels like being persistently hit and kicked by a very strong toddler, or why you don’t want to go to the party because you’re right in the middle of binge-watching that one show yet again. When you’re concentrating on not letting any of that out, it can be hard to have the energy to do anything else.

That’s why it’s helped so much for me to learn about masking. It doesn’t mean I never have to do it, but it does mean that I understand why I get so exhausted and maybe shut down on the way home from an event. It means that when I mask, I’m aware that I’m doing it, and I can forgive myself for the aftermath.

And maybe, just maybe, it means that sometimes I can make the decision not to mask. Risk being misunderstood in order to show someone a glimpse of who I actually am.

That’s the only way to have a chance at real connection.

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¹ Until now, that is.

² Eventually, I embraced the term. I was proud of being weird. But it still never felt good to be excluded on that basis.

³ Been there, done all of that.

⁴ I wrote it for all of four months in my mid-twenties.

⁵ Maybe they could! I don’t know.

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1. AUTISM IN MY LIFE
2. SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL RECIPROCITY
3. NONVERBAL COMMUNICATIVE BEHAVIOURS
4. RELATIONSHIPS
5. STIMMING
6. SAMENESS AND ROUTINES 
7. SPECIAL INTERESTS 
8. SENSORY SENSITIVITIES
9. SENSE OF JUSTICE AND MELTDOWNS/SHUTDOWNS
10. MASKING← you are here!