DISCLAIMER: Please note that the following post describes my personal experience. Remember that every autistic person’s experience is different. I encourage you to seek out the stories of other autistic people to get a much more comprehensive understanding of the diversity of the autistic community.
“Masking” is perhaps one of the most important concepts when it comes to attaining a modern understanding of autism. And yet, it is still a term that remains largely absent from most mainstream discussions about autism.
If you are looking for a scientific deep dive into masking, there is no better book to recommend than “Unmasking Autism” by Dr Devon Price. If you prefer an online resource, this article does a great job of explaining the concept as well.
In case you are not aware, I am not a scientist. But I am autistic. So, what I thought I’d do in this post is share my own experiences with masking, the effects it has had on my life, and how I have been trying to unmask since learning that I am autistic.
Setting the stage
I find it difficult to tell when exactly I started masking. You see, when you grow up not knowing that you are autistic, masking is something you start doing without being aware of it.
The starting point of all masking is others singling you out for being “different” in some way. For me, this was already the case in primary school. I was a very withdrawn child who preferred sitting under tables reading the children’s encyclopaedia for the 26th time to making friends in the playground. I was also sensitive to a lot of things and quite fearful. Other children noticed this, of course, and it was pointed out here and there, without ever escalating to all-out bullying, however.
I believe that I started masking around the time I enrolled in secondary school. In this environment, my differences became increasingly apparent and especially during my first year, I remember feeling increasingly targeted because of them.
It was during this time that I first felt as if I was “performing” during social interactions. I started copying mannerisms and phrases from people who I perceived to be successful in this area. This notably included my dad.
This is a realisation I have come to only quite recently. Ever since my teenage years, I have been aware that my personality when interacting with others was quite different from my personality when I was alone. But I never knew why it felt this way. It was only when I started learning about autism and masking that I began to understand.
The personalities of my parents are quite different. My dad loves talking to people and is very outgoing. When I was in secondary school, he was incredibly popular among my classmates, to the extent that there was even a running gag that people only came over to my place to hang out with my dad. In response to that, I started acting more like my dad around others. I copied his body language, his way of talking, and even certain expressions he used word-by-word. At the time, I was not aware that I was doing this, but looking back at it now, it is clear as day to me.
Aside from deliberately doing certain things, I also started suppressing things that came naturally to me. “Why can’t you stand still?”, “You are walking weirdly,” “Can you stop gesticulating this much while talking”: All of this falls under the category of stimming. Autistic people need to stim to regulate their nervous system. I unknowingly sacrificed this regulation in order to accommodate those around me.
This was not the only thing I did at that time. Part of my mask was also to join certain hobbies. Even if I had no idea that I was autistic at the time, my autistic brain still assured that they were not quite your standard teenager hobbies: Among other things, I joined a political party and a musical theatre group where I was the youngest member by several decades.
What did I get out of these hobbies? Mainly, they provided a social setting in which some of my oddities were excused, mostly due to my young age. This specific type of masking actually has a name within the autistic community: The Foreigner Strategy. Basically, it describes a strategy by which autistic people choose to join communities where they are in some way the odd-one-out, either through their age or their cultural background. It often works as a masking strategy because whenever social differences arise, they are attributed to differences in age/culture/language rather than you just being a weird person. It is named after its most extreme form, in which autistic people move to another country to escape stigma at home. If you want to learn more about the Foreigner Strategy, check out this video.
You might think that having hobbies cannot possibly be a bad thing. But what I have come to understand is that it was in these environments that I started people pleasing. It was rewarded, after all. Don’t ever say anything against anyone and you will be held in high regard – especially in the political world. And if, like me, you spend a lot of time worrying about your social skills, this quickly becomes addictive.
Can you feel the burn of the spotlights?
As the years went by, masking took over ever greater parts of my life. Because my brain was focussed on appeasing everyone around me, I started saying ‘yes’ to everything. Increasingly, I found myself in positions that overwhelmed me, necessitating yet more masking in order not to “blow my cover.”
By this point, I had already started to develop signs of alexithymia, or emotional blindness. This means that it was not even a case of me not wanting to do these things, but I had simply become unable to tell what I did and did not want. A dense fog descended on my emotional world, as I became more and more alienated from myself. Effectively, I was not really a person during these years. I was a bunch of trauma responses in a trench coat.
When you read the life stories of late-identified autistic people, you can’t help but notice a repeating pattern: Masking seems to work rather well for a lot of people for some time, but eventually, everything comes crashing down.
For one, masking utterly destroyed my self-confidence. The number of opportunities I passed on, the number of things I never said, the stuff I put up with even though it made me physically sick. As I got older, I also increasingly felt that I had squandered my potential. In my head, I was still trying to live up to this projection of myself, this amalgamation of received ideas and outside expectations.
Why did I hold on to this guy for so long? I guess he just seemed so real. He did so many things – too many, admittedly – and to be fair he did many of them really well. People loved this guy. He was outgoing and never said no to anything. He was accepted. But in the end, he stole my life.
In the long term, masking obliterated my sense of identity. This is perhaps the most devastating effect it had on me personally. In my first post about my autistic journey, I spoke about how for the longest time I felt like a mere observer of the life that was going on around me. The choices I took felt void and I had become a stranger in my own mind.
My mum recently told me that there was a point during my teenage years when my dad actually feared that I would become a hermit. I find that quite amusing, but I also know that this was indeed something I genuinely considered at multiple points in my life. The more I felt that I was simply unable to establish proper relationships with others, the more I considered fully detaching myself from the world. I was convinced that I would not really be missed anyway.
If by any chance, you who is currently reading this feel this way, I would like to take this opportunity to address you directly. All others may skip this paragraph, as this is intended for a specific sort of person in a specific sort of life situation: I understand what you feel, and it is a terrible injustice that you have been made to feel this way. No being should ever have to go through that. But please know that your thoughts are deceiving you. I know from my own experience that just me saying that will probably not do much for you. And there is not much I can do to convince you. However, it is my hope that by being honest and open about my own struggles, you may recognise some of your own in mine. And if you do believe that I am being honest, then I simply ask that you also believe me when I tell you that there is much, much more love in your life then you may realise. You are loved and you are capable of love. Whatever happens, never lose faith in this truth. There are very few absolute truths in this world, but this is one of them and I am willing to die on this hill. You have survived up until this point and that in and of itself is an achievement. It is worth going on. You are worth it all.
The air outside the theatre is alive
After processing the fact that one is autistic, many autistic people wish to unmask.
Before we can truly start this process, however, many of us first have to face a very difficult question: Who am I without the mask? This question can throw you for a bit of an existential loop. However, I know now that for me, it was essential that I confronted it.
There can be no unmasking without first letting go of the mask. Before we unmask, we need to first accept our autistic selves. The best way to do that, for me, was to read and listen to the life stories of other autistic people. The label “autistic” remains associated with a significant amount of shame, particularly also for women. At the end of this post, you will therefore find a list of resources all produced by autistic women that I have found incredibly helpful.
But what does my personal unmasking process look like?
I started by looking back at a time before I started masking, i.e., my childhood. What sorts of things was I doing at that time? What were my interests? One answer came to mind almost instantly: I loved reading, particularly fiction. I never really stopped reading as I got older, but definitely not to the extent I did as a kid and especially after secondary school, I started reading less and less fiction.
So, one of the first things I started doing was shifting my focus back to reading fiction. I have been doing this for a while now and I can already tell you that it has brought immense joy into my life. Getting back into fiction reminded me of my deep love for storytelling, something I had started neglecting because the mask was dictating different priorities to me.
Another thing I did was acknowledge my true needs. For me, this included admitting that on most days, I like to stay in. I like to attend social events occasionally, and if I am in the mood for it. But I need time to decompress in order to function properly. This sounds incredibly innocuous, but this was not how I was living my life for many years. And it ended up burning me out.
For me, unmasking also includes being more outspoken about my beliefs and values. Like many other autistic people, I have a very strong sense of social justice. The continued inaction over the climate crisis infuriates me, I could talk for hours about how capitalism is destroying the very soul of humanity, and I am utterly repulsed by the continued exploitation of the global south by the imperialistic policies of the countries of the global north. I have recently started voicing some of these beliefs more openly and not only is it helping me overcome my people pleasing tendencies, but it is actively restoring my self-confidence as well.
Language also plays a part. A few months ago, I published a post about my love for the English language and why I consider it my first language. At the time when I wrote this post, I was not yet “out” as autistic, so I would like to take this opportunity now to add that dimension to that post. I love speaking English because it is the language in which I had to mask the least. English always felt like “my” language, a safe haven I could retreat to and breathe freely. I can feel myself when I speak it. Conversely, Luxembourgish – the first language I learned growing up – has been tainted by years of masking. It feels artificial to me and to some extent it even triggers me because it reminds me of the times in my life when I felt the most distant from myself and the world.
Unmasking is a very personal process. It includes learning to trust yourself again, rediscovering what made you you in the first place, and becoming confident enough to set boundaries where necessary. It is also important to recognise that this is a long, and perhaps even a lifelong, process. I can tell you that I still feel a lot of uncertainty. I have started taking decisions that I would never have years ago, and that in and of itself is a good thing, but do I still question those decisions? Of bloody course I do! But I believe a big part of this is accepting that uncertainty and just going with what feels right.
Friends can help with this. True friends that is, and I am very, very fortunate to have a bunch of those in my life. Therapy can be another big help, especially if you manage to find a therapist that specialises in working with autistic patients (in an ideal world, they would be autistic themselves).
Masking is a terrible thing. It ravages the autistic mind and, if left unchecked, can lead to anxiety, substance abuse, depression, and – in the very worst cases – suicide. The suicide rate among autistic adults is frighteningly high and I feel that it is important to stress that it is not their autistic minds that kill these people but the discrimination and stigma that continue to disenfranchise us. At its core, it is, as so many things are, a profound issue of social justice.
By sharing my story, I hope to inform non-autistics and encourage my fellow autistic friends who may be struggling in many different ways.
Resources, produced by autistic women
Podcast
The Squarepeg Podcast (hosted by Amy Richards, who discovered that she was autistic at the age of 37 and now interviews fellow autistic women and non-binary people who share their stories)
YouTube Channels
I’m Autistic, Now What? (hosted by Meg, who is both autistic and ADHD. Great mix of informational and entertaining content all centred around the autistic and ADHD experience)
Mom on the Spectrum (hosted by Taylor Heaton, a late-identified autistic woman and mom of two. She has a bunch of videos with very practical advice, super helpful!)
Woodshed Theory (hosted by Claire, who puts a lot of emphasis on authenticity and open conversations)
Yo Samdy Sam (hosted by Samantha Stein, who is both autistic and ADHD. LOADS of very high-quality info content. Sam has also published an incredibly useful workbook which I have listed below)
Books
Strong Female Character by Fern Brady
Camouflage: The Hidden Lives of Autistic Women by Dr Sarah Bargiela and Sophie Standing
So you think you’re autistic: A workbook for the confused person who’s just trying to figure things out by Samantha Stein
Websites and social media accounts
Embrace Autism (perhaps THE online resource for all things autism founded by Dr Natalie Engelbrecht and Eva Silvertant)
Neurodivergent Lou (Absolutely brilliant Instagram account that probably provides more and better information about autism than most “official” resources)
just thoughts 