I wore a mask for about fifty years and didn't know it was a mask. I thought it was my face.
That's the shortest way I can explain masking. I was only diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) at 50, during a breakdown in the COVID years. Before that I just knew I was weird. Tics, habits, obsessions, passions that ate whole months. And I knew I was very, very good at hiding most of it when other people were around.
So, what is autistic masking? It's hiding the autistic parts of yourself and performing the non-autistic version, to fit in or stay safe. Researchers also call it camouflaging. Most of us start as kids, long before anyone has a name for it, and a lot of us keep going on autopilot for decades.
What does masking actually look like?
The research version comes from a 2017 study by Laura Hull and colleagues, "Putting on my best normal", where 92 autistic adults described what they do. Two big buckets came out of it. Masking, which is hiding: holding in the stims, sitting on the reactions. And compensation, which is the work you do to make up for what doesn't come naturally, like learning social rules by study, the way you'd learn a second language.
Here's what it looked like for me, as best I can reconstruct it now:
Scripting. I rehearsed conversations. In the car, in the shower. What I'd say, what they'd probably say back, a joke for when it went quiet. If the other person went off-script I'd get a little lost and cover it with energy.
Eye contact on purpose. I'd look at foreheads, eyebrows, the bridge of the nose. Close enough. Nobody ever noticed. I kept track of it the whole time, though, like a background app eating the battery.
Borrowing people. A laugh from one person, a phrase from another, the way somebody stood at a party. I collected them without thinking about it.
Sitting on the tics. I held them in until I was alone. Then they'd come out, sometimes a lot.
And then the big one. I could run a room. Meetings, pitches, a crowd of strangers. I co-founded a web agency in Vancouver and spent years being "on" in front of clients and staff. People thought I was a natural. I was working harder than anyone in that room, and I went home wrecked.
Why do autistic people mask?
In the Hull study, people said they did it to fit in and to connect. That rings true. It's also about not getting hurt. If you got laughed at, bullied or told off enough as a kid for being "too much" or "weird," you learn fast which parts of you to put away.
Some of it isn't even a decision. By the time you're an adult, the mask is muscle memory. That's why so many of us got missed for so long. If you hide it well enough, the people around you see a quirky guy who's maybe a bit intense. Doctors too. I explain more about that in why nobody saw my autism for 50 years.
Is masking bad for you?
Not in every moment. Sometimes masking gets you through a job interview or a funeral, and you choose it, and that's fine.
The problem is doing it all day, every day, for decades, without knowing you're doing it. The Hull study participants described exhaustion and a shaken sense of who they really were. Other research has linked camouflaging to worse mental health in autistic adults, including a 2018 study that found it tied to a higher risk of suicidal thoughts. That's heavy. It's also one of the main reasons I'm writing this.
For me, the bill came due as burnout. I wrote about what that did to me in how masking broke me.
There's another cost nobody talks about much. When you mask with everyone, nobody ever meets the real you. You can be liked by a whole room and close to nobody in it. That's been my life, more or less. If you've ever wondered whether being the life of the party is its own kind of mask, I chewed on that in this post.
Can you tell if you're masking?
Hard to see from the inside. A few questions that would have tipped me off, if anyone had asked:
- Are you completely drained after social stuff, even when it went well?
- Do you plan out conversations in advance?
- Do you feel like a different person alone than with people?
- Have you ever not known which version of you is the real one?
There's a research questionnaire for this, the CAT-Q (Camouflaging Autistic Traits Questionnaire). Embrace Autism, an autistic-run clinic in Toronto, has a free version online with an explanation of the scores. It's a screener. A diagnosis takes a proper assessment.
The book that named it for me
If you read one thing after this, make it Devon Price's Unmasking Autism. Price is an autistic social psychologist. It's the book I wish someone had handed me decades ago. Some clinicians push back on its take on self-diagnosis, and that's fair to know going in, but on masking itself it's dead on.
Unmasking Autism
Devon Price
My take. The book I wish someone had handed me decades ago. Written by an autistic psychologist, about the mask most of us didn't know we were wearing.
Good to know. Very identity-affirming. Some clinicians push back on its take on self-diagnosis.
As for taking the mask off after five decades, that's slower and messier than the internet makes it sound. I'm still doing it. Notes on that are in taking off a 50-year mask.