The Curse of Authenticity: The Many Masks of Autism

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 there was nothing to discourage the full expression of 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 and blissful; 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 us 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, out of the blue, totally discard and bully me. I would make sure not to reveal too much of the real me that anyone would want 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 that was not made with neurodiversity in mind.

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 was never fully confident the contents of the mask were right in the circumstances. Impostor syndrome was a constant presence. I often felt like a fraud. As I grew older, the mask was informed by my keen eye for observation and a savant’s capacity for pattern recognition. I eventually came to understand from a distance 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.

The mental effort to maintain the façade is what makes “masking” such an emotional burden. 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 refrain that they are “individuals.” The irony is, many so called “individual” neurotypical 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. I suspect neurotypicals don’t see it as clearly because of how deeply internalized and integrated social norms are into their self concept. They are, often to their own detriment, very successful products of social conditioning.

What defines many of us as autistic is the fact we do not readily acquire the cluster of socially conditioned norms, behaviours, and worldview that neurotypicals do, which help a person function effectually in social situations. This inherent resistance to being readily shaped and molded by society is part of what makes autistics so creative, original, and unique. We see things others don’t see, because our perception was not so decidedly narrowed by social conditioning. This explains why people like Beethoven, Mozart, and Einstein, who were clearly autistic, were able to create art and make insights that were pathbreaking. It is why many autistics are extremely sensitive to injustice.

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) — for most autistics, the main motivation for masking is not to manipulate others to get what we want, it is to avoid the harm invited by our divergence 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 who 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 just to survive in the social spaces I occupy. Over time, the imperative becomes a systematic negation, suppression, and ultimately, 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 paradox is the mask is worn to protect the authentic self beneath from psychological harm, but putting it on day after day slowly, incrementally inflicts a deeper wound to the psyche and the spirit. It invigorates feelings of being fundamentally flawed, which completely undermines positive self-esteem. 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 a facet of their 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 as many autistics do. At a young age neurotypicals begin to organically internalize society’s unwritten rules about how to perform, so it becomes easier and less threatening to their psyche when they do so as adults. 

The kinds of personae — the substance of socially acceptable performances — are shaped by the “rules” of a society, which seem to be closer in nature to a neurotypical’s real self. Why? Because the neurotypical seems to more fluidly, readily 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. I was completely unaware there was a social curriculum I did not receive until well into adulthood, when the fact that I had missed those key lessons became undeniable.

For many autistics, assuming they are apprehended in the first place, some social rules may not be internalized because they confront us as fundamentally contrary to our sense of the world. The rudiments of the performance deemed acceptable by society are so often diametrically opposed to the substance of our real selves. Internally, many autistics instinctively want to resist the imperative to “stick to the script” as it were. For me, the prerogative itself feels like an infringement on my autonomy and is a source of deep resentment (hence “Pathological Demand Avoidance”). I often remember the internal voice of my twenties saying, “Why should I have to …?” Alexithymia concealed the deep emotional angst from my awareness until the inner conflict boiled to the surface in the form of a full blown autistic meltdown. This is just one of the many reasons why the energy needed to enact a socially acceptable performance is so much greater for autistics than it is for most neurotypicals. 

The cognitive dissonance and the daily inner conflict raging in our bodies and minds from having to perform in a way that is so discordant with our authentic selves is a significant reason many autistics burn out. The amount of mental 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 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.