Not Smiling, But Masking

A call to unlearn neurodivergent self-abandonment.

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Since I did a TEDx Talk back in September, I’ve been thinking about the act of “masking” and the role it’s played in my life as a late-diagnosed autistic person and an ADHDer.

While I’ve been delighted to enter into an online world of autistic edu-tainment and infographics post-diagnosis, I’ve also been trepidatious around the sound-bitey way masking is sometimes discussed. It’s simplified in order to be accessible. And that makes sense. 

But the more I undergo my own journey of understanding my unique sensorial reality and practice embodying the principles of unmasking, the more I see it as a complex commitment to a certain way of being. Rather than a decisive, one-and-done action that can ever be taken. To flatten it into as much feels like an injustice to the nuance of our experience and a diminishment of what we’re truly up against. In here *points to chest* as much as out there. *gestures at society*

In my talk, I described masking as being akin to “method acting as a ‘normal’ person by camouflaging or repressing one’s autistic traits for other people’s comfort”. I mentioned that it includes acts like mimicry (of other’s facial expressions and body language) and scripting (rehearsing and memorising dialogue and phrases to use in conversation, so you pass as neurotypical).

All of that’s true, but it’s not always what it looks like. Masking can look and feel an infinite number of ways. But if I had to sum up masking in three words? Abandonment. Of. Self. 

Rather than just seeing masking as a “thing” autistic people happen to do, we have to see it as a reaction to the environment it’s found in; one of social power-struggles, mini-tribalism, and innuendo that ableism, stigma, bullying, and ostracisation are innately present within. You either “get it” and are normal. Or you’re not. And that’s the best case scenario.

When discrimination and systemic marginalisation runs so deep that masking autistics like me—those who would have previously been called “aspergers” or “high-functioning” individuals and still often are despite these terms being arbitrary, fallacious, and associated with Nazism in the former’s case—make the call (consciously or otherwise) that in order to survive, they need to mask so well that they preemptively avoid being targeted.

Of course, naming this as a choice we make isn’t about self-blame. Masking is a trauma response; a creative adaptation designed to keep us safe, like any other. Social worker Essy Knopf says, “An overprotective reaction makes sense—at least initially. But what starts as adaptive quickly becomes maladaptive, at least when it comes to achieving autistic social success. Socially shapeshifting in order to present a version of ourselves that is more acceptable to NTs means stymying spontaneity, swallowing our emotions, and stuffing our authentic selves out of view.”

And so, we mask so well that we can’t even pick ourselves in a lineup of fake projections. That we feel the need to become strangers to even ourselves. There’s the masks we put on out there and there’s the masks we put on in here. 

The ones that, after a while, see when we look in the mirror. The ones we see when we close our eyes and imagine our own face. The masks that, through practice, we look at our life and ourselves ~through like a lens. A mask is a matrix of denial. It’s the subjugation of one’s own innate mind-body and experience.

Which makes un-masking the pursuit of rediscovering one’s inherent mind-body and experience. The path to authentic self-knowledge, self-acceptance, and self-expression. And that’s not something with a finish line! It’s not a project you can complete and tie in a bow. Nor can some third party give it a stamp of approval. No end. Only an ever-stretching horizon. 

It’s a disservice to the process of unmasking to consider it something you simply decide to do, and then do it. Like ripping off a bandaid. The reality is, most autistic people like me (having masked for so long, however unsuccessfully at times) will revert to masking in any situation where it feels necessary. Either due to a threat of violence (for people of colour and other marginalised groups this is a crucial aspect of lived experience), desiring to take the path of least resistance, wanting to have a conversation go smoothly, or because they’re interacting with people who have a long-running preconceived idea of their behaviour. And so on.

But more than that, masking is a default state of assimilation via performativity that we automatically enter into. Just as socially-assigned females will typically perform femininity when under another’s gaze. And just like the performance of gender, it’s often so ingrained that the mask doesn’t always drop when our front door closes. And even when it does, as it does for me, that doesn’t mean our self-concept is any less wrapped up in our mask-self. 

It took living with a partner long-term for me to even notice the extreme cognitive dissonance between my curated self-concept, constructed mentally for myself ad infinitum, and my actual private experience and expression.

Artist and podcaster Louisa Shaeri says, “Unmasking—becoming yourself—is not about what you were doing. When you focus on that, you create more disconnects. Behaviourism is an outside lens. You want to come inside, and do it in your body.”

It’s through getting in touch with our sensorial experience—our ways of seeing and being—that we learn to connect with our truer selves. Shifts in our outward action are the end product of this process of gaining self-trust. Of believing our own version of reality. It’s a practice. An important one, if inconveniently long-term.

Unmasking isn’t just about being authentic. It’s about surviving. Academics like Elizabeth Radulski tell us that the cost of masking is too great to bear, as individuals as well as a society: “Autistic masking and camouflaging—concealing Autistic traits to ‘pass’ as non-Autistic—is linked to negative developmental consequences including stress, mental illness, identity loss, and suicidality.”

As I say in my talk, while the autistics who can’t mask are seen as a threat and subsequently grossly discriminated against, if not outright punished, autistics that can take on the burden through extremely manual, focussed effort and at great personal cost. No one masks without their lives hanging by a thread due to the toll it exacts. No one learns to self-negate and method-act as a different person without experiencing severe burn-out. We autistics are five times more likely to die by suicide. Masking is a public health crisis. The impact of ableism writ large.

It’s benefitted me to learn to see unmasking as a spiral. An approach to life that evolves, unfolds, and reveals new layers of itself. A radical way of being and committing to becoming. And just like un-settling or decolonising one’s mind, the work is never over. We do it on principle. We do it in dedication to the imagined possibilities ahead of us. In dedication to the small shifts. To what could be and is becoming. And in the knowledge that the mantle will be continued to be taken up and the journey ongoing long after we’re dust.

Depending on the contexts that I find myself in, I’m likely to keep dipping into masking for better and/or worse. In meeting new people, in sitting in the doctor’s office, in professional contexts, my goal is to accept that I need to make a friendly ally of masking. To use it to bang on the system as and when necessary.

And yet, in the years since my autistic status was confirmed, I’ve found myself slowly and carefully becoming (to use neurotypical language) more blunt, less smiling, more aloof, less eye contact-giving, more silly, less serious, more passionate, more honest, more argumentative, more joyfully ranty in some moments, more quiet or nonspeaking in others. To see this side of me, fully exposed, has always been a sign of my trust. It’s only right that such trust is earned.

And yet, I commit myself body and soul to unmasking as an act of personal freedom and collective liberation. Join me! Abandon all neurotypical markers of success, social approval, and normalcy, all ye who enter! And step into the void of emergent self-possibility!!

“But how do you begin to unmask?!”

As I’ve tried to illustrate, it’s hard to answer that simply, if at all. Good luck finding one clean “eureka!” moment. For me, it’s about about being brave enough to begin asking the right questions. And letting those questions crack you open. 

Try asking yourself these 10 as a journal exercise, going at your own pace and coming back to them as often as you need. Witch tip: Do it on the Gemini full moon this Wed/Thurs <3

1. What does camouflage mean to me?

2. Why do I see myself—and perform this version of myself—the way I do?

3. What are the sensory experiences, special interests, and values I know to be true? How can my thoughts, words, and actions better align with this these?

4. How important is being visible—being seen and validated—by other people?

5. In what ways do I modify my behaviour to seem more (or even less) neurotypical in order to have this validation met?

6. What are my earliest or fondest memories of aliveness, vitality, and self-belonging?

7. How can I commit to seeking out and embodying those feelings again now? 

8. Am I in a rush to unmask? Why/why not?

9. What small, do-able, imperfect actions can I take regularly to increase my self-accord?

10. If my younger, pre-masking version of myself could speak, what would they tell me? What permission would I like this version of myself to give my current self now?

Xo Jerico

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