I’ve been consciously masking since the summer I turned twelve, when my group of “best friends” turned on me for being … me. Up until then I had no reason not to be my brainy, artsy, introverted, precocious, reserved, (undiagnosed, at the time) autistic self. I was free to be who I really was. It’s why I always look back on my early childhood as carefree; as the best years of my life.
That summer something shifted. I know now what that was. Back then I only knew there was something wrong with me. The gang of turncoats who went on to bully me for the whole of seventh grade would help me fill in those blanks. I talked funny, like a nerdy robot. The earnestness of my interest in music and art was “gay.” My being the smartest kid in class made me a goody goody, which wasn’t cool, apparently. And so on, and so on. Grade seven was the loneliest, darkest, most horrific year of my childhood. I remember almost nothing of that year, it was so traumatic.
Then I got a lucky break. A fresh start. My mother moved to another part of town. I would start grade eight at a new school. I had a chance to make new friends who wouldn’t abandon me for being me. I would make sure not to reveal too much of the real me to reject. The mask would make sure of it. Like millions of lower needs, high IQ, high masking autistics, I learned at an early age that masking, suppressing my authentically autistic self, was the best way to survive in a world made by and for neurotypicals.
The mask worked like a charm, but it was exhausting to maintain. It never came naturally and it was always fraught. When I was young, I never really knew if the contents of the mask were right in the circumstances. It was always my best guess. As I got older, the mask was informed by a keen eye for observation and a savant’s capacity for pattern recognition. I eventually came to know how neurotypicals behave and had deduced fairly well what they expected socially without really knowing why, or being able to relate to their motivations and intentions.
This is a big part of what makes “masking” so difficult. My autistic mask is not the same as the ego persona a neurotypical adopts. The neurotypical’s persona springs from a more well-developed sense of and connection with their identity, which is partly informed by a growing awareness of one’s place and intentions in the wider world but is also strongly shaped by social conditioning. The identity of neurotypicals is more socially-determined than most are able to recognize or acknowledge. As adults, many high masking autistics are confounded by the oft repeated neurotypical assertion they are “individuals.” The irony is, many of their so called “individual” traits are extremely common. They are the main source of emotional and psychological torment for autistics subjected to them. What one neurotypical wants in a society, the substance of their worldview, is the same as what many neurotypicals want. Neurotypicals don’t see it as clearly because of how deeply internalized and integrated these norms are into their self concept. They are, often to their own detriment, perfectly successful products of social conditioning.
What defines many of us as autistic is the fact we did not acquire the cluster of socially conditioned norms, behaviours, and worldview of neurotypicals, which help them to function well in social environments. This is a large part of what makes autistics so creative, original, and unique. We see things others don’t see, because our perception was not effectively narrowed by social conditioning. This explains why people like Beethoven, Mozart, and Einstein, who were autistic, were able to create art and make insights that were pathbreaking.
The downside is that, wherever we autistics go, we never fit in socially — unless we are masking. As children and teens we were subjected to ridicule and scorn for being ourselves, and this shaped our profound feeling of being different from others. It is very alienating to be autistic in a neurotypical world. For many autistics, the mask is fashioned in response to the neurotypical social space they are forced to survive in. Unlike the borderline personality — a misdiagnosis often attributed to high masking autistics (especially women) — the autistic’s main motivation for masking is not to manipulate others to get what we want, it is to avoid harm from being divergent from the common sense of “normal” (flawed and fictitious as it is). We mask to remain as invisible and as safe as we can because, in order to learn, work, or experience life we must go into a world that mostly rejects who we are.
Beneath the mask is the authentic self that is neither socially defined nor ego-driven; it is the pure self most autistics strongly identify with. For me, donning the mask is psychologically damaging because it requires a conscious erasure of my authentic being from society to gain acceptance. It is the systematic negation, suppression, and abandonment of my actual self. Beneath the mask is an authentic person who feels hurt and neglected by the conscious effort to keep him locked away from the outside world. The mask is worn to protect the authentic self beneath from psychological harm, and it came at an enormous psychic, spiritual cost. I didn’t fully understand the profound, adverse impact of this suppression until decades after I first started masking.
Many autistics struggle with the fact that a persona, rather than the authentic self, is what most neurotypical people present to the outside world. Neurotypicals generally learn to move seamlessly between their persona and their fully real selves as necessary, without feeling aggrieved by or exhausted by the enforced performativity. It’s a social necessity neurotypicals don’t tend to see as such a threat to their being like many autistics do. At a young age neurotypicals begin to internalize society’s unwritten rules about how to perform, and it becomes easier for them to do so as they grow into adults.
The kinds of personae — the substance of socially acceptable performances — are shaped by the “rules” of a society, which tend to be closer in nature to a neurotypical’s real self. Why? Because the neurotypical seems to more fluidly, organically internalize and integrate social norms into their self concept. Many autistics like me, failed to register these important social constructs as they came of age. For many autistics, assuming they are apprehended in the first place, some social rules may not be internalized because they immediately confront us us as contrary to our sense of the world. The substance of the performance — the persona — deemed acceptable by society is so often diametrically opposed to the substance of our real selves. Because of this, the energy required to enact the performance is much greater for most autistics than it is for most neurotypicals. Only extremely introverted neurotypicals would be able to relate to how exhausting the mask is for autistics.
The cognitive dissonance from performing in a way that is so discordant with our authentic selves is a big reason many autistics burn out. The amount of energy and the lack of self integrity involved in effecting the ruse is spirit crushing. It is at the heart of the anxiety and depression many high masking, low needs autistics struggle with as they proceed white-knuckled into the neurotypical world and attempt to achieve the same vocational or life goals as a neurotypical. Maintaining the balance between functioning well enough in social encounters to acquire the basic necessities of adult life while maintaining integrity to one’s authentic, autistic self is extremely difficult. It sometimes feels impossible. The mask is a compromise we feel compelled to make with the world; one that requires active self-negation to make a living, to avoid persecution in an allistic, ableist society, to keep doors open to psychologically enriching, self actualizing experiences.
The challenge for many autistics is not to lose compassion for oneself for donning the mask. The fact we need to put it on betrays an environment that does not feel safe for our authentic selves. Most social spaces don’t want authenticity, especially of the autistic variety. The key for autistic well-being is to find social spaces — no matter how small or rare — where it is safe to be who we really are.
The problem is that, for autistics who have the cognitive capacity and sufficient executive functioning to turn natural talents and abilities into a viable economic existence, few vocational environments meet this criteria. Not all of us have talents that lend themselves to careers in academia or the arts; vocations where aptitudes unfold in solitude and authenticity is fundamental to success. Some of us happen to be good at things that force us into workspaces where the career trajectory is too often determined by a person’s ability to conform to the dictates of an organizational culture, which far too often act as a barrier to our success (or, in my case, to their advancement). There is no accommodation that will ever allow me to perform or demonstrate my skills or abilities as a neurotypical does. I must be allowed to do so as I am.
In an ideal world, an autistic with well-honed vocational abilities would be free to be as good at what they do, to succeed and make a decent living as a result, without also having to mask as a good neurotypical. In an ideal world, autistics would be free to exist in social spaces without being scorned, mocked, shunned, or otherwise alienated for being who they are. But that is not the reality. The reality is, because autistics identify so profoundly with their authentic selves, which aren’t buried under the prerogatives and dictates of society in their teens, they are forced to mask if their aspirations and intentions require they enter the neurotypical social gauntlet. Not only is the prospect oppressive to our authentic selves, it is also psychologically damaging for the masking needed to pull it off.
edmund k. saunders 
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