If I hadn’t set eyes on the path I’m already on career wise, I think I’d be quite a good actor.
It’s all I’ve done every day for the majority of my life: maybe not to a camera or upon a stage, but I’ve always had an audience. And I perform for them, as well as I can, because I want to see them pleased, no matter how much the idea of being perceived makes my skin crawl. So, I hold their eye contact, not sure if it’s too much or too little or when I should look away; I walk like them, painfully conscious of how I swing my arms at my sides; I talk like them, listening more to how their tone fluctuates than what they’re actually saying to me when we speak.
You don’t need a degree in theatrics to do this. Autism does the trick.
I had the privilege of receiving a diagnosis when I was 12 years old. I was told to sit down, and the news was broken to me like something terrible had happened. But I never really thought much of it. It was just an average Tuesday for me. Truth be told, I hadn’t a clue what being autistic meant, and never sought to change the way I walk or talk or act: never sought to change who I am. But as I grew into a teenager, I was introduced to the wonderful world of stigma and stereotypes, and it made me a lot more conscious of how different I was from my peers. So, I learned how to mask.
I didn’t know there was a term for it at the time. It started small. My mum, of course in what she believed was my best interests, told me to swing my arms when I walk. It didn’t come naturally to me, and still doesn’t, but I did it anyway, trying to satisfy a newly growing desire to fit in. Then I realized that nobody around me was shaking their hands or bouncing both legs or saying the same phrases or noises repeatedly the way I did. Were they never anxious? Were the footsteps in the corridor, the scratching of pencils, the feel of their hair and clothes, not bothering them the way it bothered me? So, no matter how overstimulated or anxious I was, I stilled my limbs and I quietened down, unaware of the terrible effect something that seemed so minor would have on my mental well-being.
You might’ve deduced the definition of masking by now. It’s a strategy neurodivergent (not necessarily just autistic) people use to appear neurotypical by suppressing their behaviours and tendencies, unconsciously or consciously. I’ll be talking about my experience with masking as an autistic person, but there are other, unfortunately less researched, ways of masking in people with ADHD, OCD, and other neurodivergent identities. While they each differ slightly, the goal remains the same: to fit into a society in which we feel we can’t be ourselves when the world is structured around the needs and behaviours of neurotypical people. There are plenty of ways to mask, some of which I’ve already listed, and you may or may not notice you’re doing it. If you’ve forced eye contact that didn’t feel natural for you, stopped yourself from stimming, or mimicked how others walk or talk or stand, you’ve masked before. But there are some other, less talked about ways of masking. For example, I’ve made an entirely new Spotify playlist that is made up of songs all of my friends like so that nobody thinks my music taste is ‘weird’. The problem is, now I have to talk about artists I couldn’t care less about and pretend I’m obsessed. Nobody knows about my interests, either. Not even my parents. There are so many things I enthuse about, things that I’d happily ramble about for hours, but that I haven’t even mentioned before. And on the rare occasion they get brought up in conversation, I play it off like I don’t care. Then there’s rehearsing conversations before they happen; planning out what you’ll say first, predicting their responses and what you’ll say to those. All of these are examples of masking, but that’s not all of it. You might not relate to all or any of these examples, which is perfectly okay. It doesn’t make your experience any less valid, whether you mask a lot or a little or not at all.
Whether you notice you’re doing these things or not, they take energy. A lot of it. Almost every day I come home from school and I’m hit with such a wave of exhaustion that I can’t bring myself to do anything other than lie in bed. It wasn’t that long ago that I came to realise that masking was one of, if not the culprit. And it’s not just exhaustion. The emotions you hold in all day need a way out, eventually. They don’t disappear and refresh the next day. The effort you put into hiding how you feel can turn into chronic stress and contribute to melt downs and autistic burnout, which is that fatigue that can be caused by excessive masking. It makes it a lot harder to manage sensory overload, especially if you won’t let yourself carry out comfort behaviours like stimming, and makes daily functioning and doing tasks difficult.
While not everyone relates to this, a lot of the time, autism comes hand in hand with anxiety, ADHD/ADD, OCD, and a bunch of other mental health conditions. Social anxiety happens to be my bonus freebie. Fantastic. I spend most of the day, every day, worrying about how I look and what I say and how I act. Masking is how I’ve come to cope with it. I’ve made it sound entirely negative so far, when actually it can be a good tool. That is, if you do it healthily. We mask for a reason. It shields us from judgement and lessens our anxiety surrounding the stigma towards autism and ‘stereotypical’ autistic behaviours. Not only that, but it helps us make, strengthen, and maintain connections, and protects us from prejudices in social settings and the workplace. There’s a lot of unwritten rules when it comes to socialising with neurotypical people: like how when they ask how you are, you’re not actually ‘supposed’ to answer anything more than ‘Good thanks, how are you?’. Even if you’re not that good. And that somehow, they know exactly what they think of you before you speak, based off of your posture, clothes, eye contact, etc. The latter is especially tricky for things like job interviews if eye contact is something you struggle with, because if you avoid it, you come across as nervous and lacking confidence, which may not be the case at all. So there’s your example of an environment in which masking might be helpful. But masking so much that you can’t be yourself anymore is what risks impacting wellbeing. So how do you do it healthily?
The key to healthy masking is balance, and I’ll admit, I’m still trying to find that balance myself. I’m not going to tell you that you need to completely unmask and tell everyone you’re autistic. While yes, owning your identity in such a way is great and it’s brilliant if you can do that, it’s just not realistic for many people, and that’s also okay. You should always give yourself the option to mask, when and where you want to (if anywhere), but it’s helpful to try and put yourself in environments and surround yourself with people you feel comfortable unmasking around, too. This may not be a simple task for many people, myself included. It might take time to find the places you’re most comfortable in and the people you can confide in. I’m still working on it. I love my friends, but I don’t think I’m quite ready to be as open about my autism as I’d like to be, even though I know they care. I want to eventually be able to tell them how I feel; why I go quiet sometimes and what it is that upsets me. Having that transparency with your friends, if and when you feel ready, won’t only help you get things off your chest, but it’ll strengthen your relationship with them too. What I’ve discovered, though, is that if we’re going out, I like to go to the cinema because it means I get a break from socialising. And I don’t like the Primark in Liverpool city centre, because the lights are too harsh, it’s sweaty and crowded, and it stinks of eggs. It’s okay to avoid places that make you uncomfortable and opt for places that feel safer for you, even if that means excusing yourself to go to the bathroom or somewhere quieter if things get too much. Learn to accommodate yourself, instead of forcing yourself to fit in.
I’m not ‘cured’ of my masking habits. That’s not what I’m asking of myself. I won’t burn the costume that’s made me feel protected from the eyes of my audience for so long. But I want everyone to know who I am – what my needs are – not those of the persona I’ve been hidden behind. I don’t want to rehearse my lines anymore. I don’t want the voices of those close to me to be drowned out by the doubts and anxieties in my head, because I know who I should be listening to.
So if you can, break the fourth wall every now and then, and give yourself an intermission. You will find that the real you is worth knowing, too.
– A Young Person with Autism