Recently, I stumbled upon a series of vlogs by a YouTuber named Anna Gabrielle. Anna is a late diagnosed ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder), and the videos detail her journey of discovering her diagnosis and how it has changed her life. Her YouTube account is only six months old at this point but I find her content captivating. In her videos, Anna discusses what her life has been like before and after receiving her autism diagnosis two years ago, the struggles she has endured, and the struggles she continues to endure as a late-diagnosed autistic. I’ve been working my way through her content and have been relating to many of the experiences she has lived through as a late-diagnosed ASD myself. And as I was watching her content, there was one topic in particular that stood out to me, and that was the subject of Autistic Masking, which will be the topic of this blog post.

I’ll come back to Anna and her experiences later. To begin, let’s start with a primer of what Autistic Masking is.

Autistic Masking

From autisim.org.uk: “Masking is a strategy used by some autistic people, consciously or unconsciously, to appear non-autistic in order to blend in and be more accepted in society. Masking can happen in formal situations such as at school or work and in informal situations such as at home with family or socializing with friends.”

Put another way, masking is when you forcibly alter your own behaviors in order to garner a more positive response when socializing with neurotypicals. To autists, it can literally feel like you are creating and embodying a whole different persona of yourself. It’s not that you’ve become a totally different person, but rather the responses that you would normally give or the things that you would normally say and do are forcibly altered from your natural impulses.

This can take the form of many different modifications to how you portray yourself, including things like manually controlling your facial expressions, modulating your tone of voice to be more neurotypically empathetic, forcibly suppressing leg shaking or stimming behaviors, forcing eye contact even if it is uncomfortable, avoiding or forcing yourself to engage in certain conversational topics that you know are more commonly acceptable. That is to say that the autistic mask is the fully embodied persona of who you think you should be as a socially acceptable person in neurotypical society.

In order to respond to this issue, and not necessarily consciously, autists generally turn to their most powerful weapon for reprieve: pattern recognition. Where a neurotypical will attempt to engage more emotionally when faced with social dilemmas, the autist will instead attempt to step back and analyze the behaviors they observe in order to create a mental map of what is ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ behavior in social settings. This leads to the formation of the autistic mask where it’s less ‘I choose to act a certain way because people like me better that way’ and more of ‘I’ve created this internal flowchart of behaviors that I’m going to force myself to follow in order to blend in better.’ The mask is a set of internally defined behaviors that you are forcing yourself to follow against your natural impulses and inclinations, and when you take all of those behaviors one develops over the course of yourlife into account, it literally feels like you are acting out and living as a completely different version of yourself; hence the term masking.

What Does Masking Feel Like

For me, it feels something like this.

Imagine being hyper-aware, on a moment-to-moment basis, of the social cues a person is signaling to you and the cues you’re signaling in return when you’re talking with them. You’re not fully aware of the conversation because you’re constantly devoting some of your mental processing power toward watching for these signals and reacting to them. It’s like you both are and aren’t present for the conversation you yourself are involved in. And because you’re not a socially conscious person, you’ve forced yourself to learn these signals explicitly through trial and error. You’ve forced yourself to become aware of them because, for some reason, you see other people reacting and responding to these signals intuitively. For you, however, it’s like you have to visually inspect every single little involuntary reaction somebody gives off in order to categorize it for later use. Social interactions become less of a genuine sharing of experiences and more of a pathway down a flowchart you’ve constructed for yourself.

It gets to the point where you are involuntarily attempting to keep track of every unconscious communicative signal somebody is giving you. Where are they looking? Do their eyebrows seem animated? What does their lip curvature look like? What is their hand position? Are their hands resting naturally, or are they deliberately positioned somewhere? How about their body position? Do they seem tense? Do they seem relaxed? Can you detect any muscle twitches or muscle tics? Some people shake their legs when they’re lost in thought or relaxed, while others don’t; which category does this person fall into? Are they smiling at you? Is that smile lingering for the full duration of the emotion, or is it being censored in some way? Or maybe they are smiling and engaged with someone else at the table but not you for some reason. How about their voice? Does their voice sound softer compared to their baseline? What about the tone? Does their tone and pitch vary naturally as they are talking, or does it seem flat? And most importantly, whether or not any of these signals have changed since you started talking to them. Whether or not their facial expression has become closed off after speaking to you. Whether or not they keep laughing after you share a story or a detail with them? Whether or not the conversation flows on or stops after you finish expressing your thoughts? Does anybody seem tense around you even if you are not directly looking at them? Masking forces you to keep track of all these things and more every time you’re socially interacting on a level you do not feel comfortable with.

Now take all of what I just said and add onto it another layer of hyper-awareness of your OWN body and what YOU are doing in these conversations. Are YOU tense? Are YOU smiling? Where are YOUR hands resting? What is YOUR posture like? Where are YOU looking? Are you smiling with your eyes or just your mouth? Are your shoulders relaxed? Are you sitting upright, or are you reclining? What is all that signaling? What do you want to signal? What kind of energy do you want to project into the room? Are you shaking your leg? Are you tapping your hand? Are you fidgeting with some object? Are you avoiding eye contact? Are you breaking eye contact after initiating it? Are you looking off into the distance to avoid eye contact?

And NOW add on ANOTHER layer to that because social interactions are not simply one-way events. They are a constant flow of give and take, back and forth. Your actions spur a reaction in them; their actions spur a reaction in you. The things you say and do on a moment-to-moment basis may shift the tone of conversation away from relaxed at any moment. While you’re observing them, it feels like they are observing you back even if it may not be true. You feel watched even when you’re not being noticed because if you’re uncomfortable, they’re uncomfortable. If you’re not smiling, they’re not smiling. If you’re tense, they’re tense. You know how they say that dogs can sense your fear, so you have to consciously suppress the urge to tense up or run away. That’s what it feels like for every social interaction with everyone every single day.

And all that time spent running these checklists through your head is less time you have to actually focus on the subject at hand, to actually think about and experience the things they have to say. You involuntarily get shoved out of the conversation every time one of the above thoughts crosses your mind. You can’t help but think about it; you can’t help but feed that hyper-vigilant attention. And every time this happens, you have to force your attention back to the conversation at hand, and usually, by the time you notice, it’s too late, and you’ve missed the joke or, you’ve missed the story, and then you don’t laugh when they laugh, or you don’t react when they react, and then you feel that social isolation again and on and on the cycle repeats, on and on it continues and on and on it feeds into itself.

Are you exhausted yet?

It may be easy to look at that description above and think, ‘Yes, of course you look at those things, everybody looks at those things. Everybody can be self-conscious about themselves when talking to other people. Everyone modifies their behavior in some form or another.’ The difference is that for neurotypicals, modifying or tweaking your behavior only serves to augment your genuine social behavior and natural impulses to suit a particular social situation. For autists, we are actively suppressing our natural impulses in order to blend in. Sure, there are times when you may shut down or watch what you say in conversation. But for the most part, you’re still you, talking about the things you want to talk about, expressing the things you want to say, and doing it in the way that naturally comes to you. For Autists, we are actively invested in projecting this persona into the world instead of our true selves; it is not a genuine reaction but rather a practiced one that has been honed and scripted over years and years of trial and error.

From autism.org: “Although there may be elements of masking that seem familiar to everyone, such as changing how you present yourself in certain formal situations, autistic people have emphasized that masking is different to this. Masking is described as making efforts to manually act in ways that come naturally to non-autistic people, to meet social expectations and blend into society through exhausting effort that can lead to autistic burnout and other mental health issues.”

Here are some examples of masking behaviors they provide:

• Mirroring facial expressions that wouldn’t otherwise naturally come to you
• Forcing yourself to make eye contact
• Manipulating your speech or tone of voice, changing the phrasing of what you are trying to say, being less animated
• Suppressing neurodivergent behaviors such as leg shaking and stimming
• Hiding reactions to uncomfortable physical interactions, such as shaking someone’s hand
• Planning in advance what you want to say to someone (aka ‘scripting’, and boy, do I do this a lot), which in turn may or may not be difficult to adapt in the moment based upon circumstances and responses
• Asking more questions in order to be more socially engaging
• Not sharing interests out of fear of being perceived as being inappropriate or unusual
• Mirroring dress sense and other elements of appearance to better fit in

What Masking Does to You

Imagine the mental load this imposes upon you. Feeling the need to censor your reactions, your natural impulses, your natural inclinations all the time just to survive. And after years and years of masking, of being in this constant state of heightened vigilance, in this state of needing to maintain a form that isn’t yours, it begins to take its toll. It begins to change you into someone you are not. And more than that, people begin to see you this way. And eventually, you start to become it.

Let me pull a quote from one of Anna’s videos, Paid Employment as an Autistic Adult, in which Anna was talking about how she had just landed a new job after struggling in her search to find stable employment. “I did so well at masking through my interview that they hand-picked me for the team that needed people to be really socially capable because it was one of the few teams that dealt directly with customers… the irony, the irony! It became clear to them and me very quickly that I could not do that, and things went downhill pretty quickly.”

I can just imagine this interview from Anna’s point of view. She goes in there and puts on her best face because we all do when we’re interviewing. The thing is, for Anna, that face includes all the tips and tricks she’s picked up from years of subtle observations of how social interactions go around her. Autists are masters at pattern recognition and when we’re in situations we don’t understand, we become laser-focused on figuring out the things that are eluding us. Anna was showing these employers her mask, which I’m sure on the outside looked very charming, while on the inside, Anna probably knew she was faking every emotional reaction that went with it. Not only that, but I’m sure she was also carefully considering her every word and action as she maneuvered through the conversation as she had done many times and successfully since she ended up impressing her would-be employers wound up with a job in the end and was even given a special position to boot!

From the outside, one may look at this situation as a triumph of social skill, but that’s not the way I see it. I see it as a tragedy of survival. Imagine if Anna hadn’t been found out; imagine if she never revealed her true self. She would have found herself in a position that she never even asked for or wanted in the first place, and her fight for social survival would have ended up trapping her in a position in which she would have to continuously put on that mask every single day just to keep her head above water and survive!

This is what masking does to you. It consumes your life without you meaning it to. You become a slave to choices that you never truly wanted in the first place. You say the right thing, the thing you know people want to hear, just to get to the next day, and then the next day, and the next, over and over again. The mask becomes you, and over time, it becomes harder and harder to take it off. Soon enough, every day becomes a fight for survival just to maintain the safety the mask provides. All of which leads to the feelings of isolation, exhaustion and depression that many autists commonly report.

Autism.org lists additional long-term impacts of masking:

• Distressed behavior, including what are known as autistic meltdowns
• Mental and physical exhaustion which can lead to what is known as autistic burnout
• Mental health issues such as anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation
• Feelings of isolation and disconnection from other people
• Being more vulnerable to abuse for the sake of attempting to blend in
• A loss of sense of self (this is a big one)
• Low self-esteem

Why Mask at All?

One might ask why. If it’s such a strain and a burden upon you, why even bother with all that effort? Why mask at all? Why not just “be yourself.” Well, that’s part of the issue because our ‘selves’ don’t seem to fit in. We don’t laugh at the same things with the same timings other people seem to. We don’t engage in the subjects that other people seem to naturally gravitate to (more on this in a future post). What’s more, is that we’ve become socially conditioned since childhood to weed out these odd behaviors. Imagine trying to converse with people, and most of the time, when you just ‘go with your gut,’ it either kills the mood or ends the flow of conversation. No one wants that, least of all us. Everybody wants to be socially accepted, whether they want to admit it or not. It’s a basic human desire to be accepted by the group. Autists are no different; we have a deep and genuine desire to fit in and be included by the people we are with.

And for most autists, we grew up in social environments that were dominated by neurotypicals. Heck, for most of us, we didn’t even know we were on the spectrum until later in life, way past the point where our social habits and tendencies were already developed. All we knew was that we wanted to fit in, and for some reason, that wasn’t happening. And so what did we do?

We masked, we isolated, we shapeshifted in order to fit in. We kept track of all those facial expressions, all those muscle movements, all those social cues for years because we had to. We know now what conversational topics lead to dead ends and which don’t because we’ve hit those walls so many times. We know which of our natural behaviors are and are not acceptable in general society, and we have painfully weeded them out of ourselves in order to survive. Our interactions have long since turned from genuine to surface. We become somebody we are not just to fit in.

Why Unmasking is so Difficult

And so now imagine that one day you find out you’re on the spectrum. Disregarding all of the emotional hardship and baggage that comes with that diagnosis, imagine all of a sudden you have an explanation for why you had masked in the first place. All of a sudden, you have validation for all these behaviors you had that never seemed to make sense to anyone else but that you knew deep down inside were true. Imagine now coming to the realization that you even have a mask, and this is what it’s been like for you for your entire life. And now the question is, can you take that mask off? Can you just one day decide that you don’t want to be this persona anymore, and suddenly you become that true self you’ve been hiding beneath the surface for so long?

Short answer: No

From autism.org: “Especially for people who discover their autistic identity later in life, it is common to have masked unconsciously for many years, meaning it can be difficult for those people to know what kind of a person they would have been and what interests and characteristics they would have allowed themselves to develop if they hadn’t suppressed their autistic traits and natural instincts throughout their life”

And here is what Anna has to say from her video on her Two Year Diagnosis Anniversary: “…and then flowing on from that is the fact that people who did have a little bit of an understanding of autism had a little bit of an understanding, but not enough of an understanding to understand that the mask wasn’t just something I could switch off and I wasn’t just suddenly going to be Autistic Anna and not Masking Anna now. I mean, this was something I had to realize as well.

So one of my friends messaged after I told her of my diagnosis, and she said something along the lines of ‘I can’t wait to see who you are without your mask on,’ and I was like, ‘Whoa, I hadn’t even thought of that, and now I’m freaking out a bit because that feels like a lot of pressure…I don’t even know who I am without my mask on yet!'”

Let me go back to that list of long-term impacts masking has on you and pull out one in particular: A loss of sense of self. Now, you really have to take a moment and think about this one, what it is, and what it losing it implies. Our sense of self is vitally important and critical not just to our social awareness and skill but to our entire lives. Our sense of self is our internal definition of who are in this world. Its presence dictates our behaviors, our wants and desires and without it, we are lost.

The thing is that the sense of self is defined THROUGH your interactions with other people, not in spite of them. And the information you receive from people informs you of who you are and what you are projecting out into the world. And if you’re projecting a persona, then it is the persona that gets mirrored back to you rather than the true you. And slowly over time, you start to become that persona. You quite literally lose a sense of who you are, which is something that can take months or even years to regain.

Another issue with unmasking is one of practicality in that the whole reason you were masking in the first place was to survive in neurotypical society and that doesn’t just go away once you receive your diagnosis.

From Anna’s video: “…it’s hard to just not mask at all when you know that people are looking at you, it’s been such a habitual thing for so much of my life, I can’t just switch it off, it’s not that simple. But also, I don’t really want to necessarily; I want to find some kind of middle ground so that I can continue to move through life in a way that doesn’t make me stand out too much but isn’t exhausting me at the same time…and that’s why I still limit socializing quite a lot because, especially with people who knew me before I got my diagnosis, I can’t not mask in front of them. I have tried, I have tried so hard…and it’s still…it doesn’t feel like something I can control yet. That may change in the future at some point, but for now, there are people I just have to mask around and people I don’t, and it doesn’t feel like I have a whole lot of control over that right now.”

From autism.org: “Autistic people have observed that the positive and negative impacts of masking can create a seemingly impossible choice between fitting in and getting on in life (through masking) and making the best choices for your mental health and access to diagnosis and support (not masking)”

All of which is to say that you can’t just drop the mask even if you wanted to.

You still need it, and that is part of the tragedy here. It would be nice and convenient if you could simply flip the switch and become your true self, but it really truly doesn’t work that way. And aside from that, dropping the barrier, the shield that protected you for so long is a scary thing. Exposing yourself to the world, all that criticism, all that rejection, is a frightening prospect. And I wouldn’t blame anyone for not wanting to go through that all over again after the world forced you to adopt the mask the first time around. So, even if you do want to go through with unmasking, change is hard and painful, and one must be aware of and accept that it will absolutely not be something that heals overnight.

And finally, I’ve found that there is a certain momentum to life, both social and practical, and getting back to a place and a life that you feel is truly your own requires some amount of arresting this momentum or, at the very least, redirecting it. Especially when it comes to your social relationships, there will necessarily be a period of adjustment that involves some amount of giving up what you already have in order to gain something else on the other side.

I think one saving grace here is that neurodivergents tend to seek one another out and if you’re a high masking autistic, chances are that you have found at least one or two people in your life who understand the struggles you’re going through and would be tolerant of you as you go through this exercise. I’m certainly grateful for the people in my life who have been patient with me as I’ve made attempts to go through this myself, as painful as it has been.

How to Unmask and What That Feels Like

I’m torn on writing this section because I do not have a complete answer since I am in the process of figuring this one out for myself right now. However, I feel that for the sake of completeness and closure I will present my current thoughts and approach for how to be comfortable with dropping the mask.

Short answer is… you’re just going to have to accept that there are things outside of your control.

You didn’t choose to be this way, none of us did, but this is who you are, and part of finding your true self is living authentically. And part of that journey is accepting that some things in your life are just going to be harder for you than for other people. And while you can put your effort toward fighting that uphill battle just to be on level with everybody else in the world, another way you can go is to foster your natural sense of self and accept that it won’t be an easy or straightforward journey.

I think that part of unmasking is having the courage to lower those defenses and allow people to see you for you, even if that makes them and you uncomfortable. At the end of the day, you have no control over how people see you, how they feel about you, or how they treat you. That is for them to decide, not you. All you have to decide and all you have control over is how you present yourself to the world and how you react to how the world pushes back.

How this feels can sometimes be anguish or shame or guilt or fear, but other times, it can be joy or contentment or fulfillment or peace. Mostly though, I think it’s worth it for the security. There is a certain level of security in knowing that your decisions are the ones you made for yourself and not for the sake of accommodating or pleasing others. There is a certain level of control that comes with that security, even if it’s not complete control or complete security. Personally, I don’t believe it is possible to love another person unless you love yourself first. By extension, it’s not possible to provide security for another person unless you are able to provide it for yourself first. And all the things money can buy will never truly bring the level of peace and contentment that comes with self-love and self-acceptance.

And for me, that’s worth it.

Closing Thoughts

For the autists reading this, allow me to state that none of this is your fault. Nobody chose to be this way, and if you’ve been masking for your entire life, it’s likely nobody ever even knew it or was there to help guide you through it. Security is a core vital human need, and we do what we have to in order to survive. As long as our energy is focused on that survival, there really isn’t all that much for anything else. Masking may be what is causing you trouble now, but it’s also the thing that kept you alive, so it is entirely up to you how much, how fast, and if it’s worth it for you to take off your mask at all. You’ll have to make that decision for yourself, and hopefully, you have people who will be there and support you along the way.

For the non-autists reading this, you may be wondering what you can do to help. Honestly, I don’t know if there is much to do except be patient and continue to treat us like we’re people too. Part of having the peace of mind and security in knowing you can show your true self is knowing that there are people out there who will still be with you for you. That the acceptance they show is intrinsic to the quality of the relationship and nothing else. And so it’ll be awkward, and we’ll make mistakes, but please be patient with us as we are trying to be patient with ourselves.

And finally for everyone, I hope that this article helped you gain a better understanding of one of the many challenges that the autistic community faces on a daily basis, and that with that understanding comes a level of empathy and acceptance for all of us.

For more content on autism as well as other neurodivergent topics, please subscribe to my newsletter below. If you keep reading, I’ll keep writing.

By: Ellipsis