# Chapter 3 - The Anatomy of the Mask * [CHAPTER 3](#chapter-3) * [The Anatomy of the Mask](#the-anatomy-of-the-mask) * [Reflecting on the Need to Mask: What Does Your Mask Protect You From?](#reflecting-on-the-need-to-mask-what-does-your-mask-protect-you-from) * [What Is Masking?](#what-is-masking) * [The Double Bind of Being “Well-Behaved”](#the-double-bind-of-being-well-behaved) * [Masking as Overcorrection](#masking-as-overcorrection) --- # CHAPTER 3 ## The Anatomy of the Mask Undiagnosed and clueless about the root of her challenges, Crystal had to suffer in silence throughout childhood. As her grandfather observed, she was a well-behaved, sweet kid, and a total teacher’s pet. Yet behind her smiling, agreeable façade, she was coping with constant social confusion and loneliness. In classes where instructions weren’t always clear, like science and math, she floundered. At school, she socialized with other girls, but she rarely got invited to sleepovers or outings to the mall or skating rink. She kept her head down around other people, and at home complained of frequent stomachaches and threw “tantrums” out of stress. By middle school, it was impossible for her to ignore how difficult she found regular life. “Once you get to middle school, you have this really complicated class schedule you have to follow. All these transitions, bells going off, everyone switching classrooms every hour, after school-activities, busy busy busy. I don’t do well with shifting gears; it takes a ton of energy for me now and I was suddenly having to do it all day.” Many Autistic people find it challenging to transition between activities. Each change requires a lot of what psychologists call executive functioning, a skill linked to planning and initiating behavior.[^3.1] Most Autistics find it relatively easy to give a task we enjoy our unbroken attention, but we find it challenging to gear shift. Crystal could sit reading a book for hours without interruption, but in middle school classes switched so often that by the time she adjusted to a new room and settled into paying attention, it was time to move again. Middle school was also socially overstimulating: she went from sharing a classroom with fifteen children she’d known all her life to suddenly having to learn dozens of new names, faces, and interlocking social dynamics. Friendship gets way more complicated and fraught as a preteen, and so do all the expectations placed on you. The adults aren’t as kind and gentle as they once were. If you take a long time to figure something out, they assume you’re dragging your feet out of adolescent apathy rather than executive functioning differences. If you have problems making friends, it’s because you’re a moody teen, not because neurotypical conversation rules are inscrutable to you. For Crystal, and for a lot of masked Autistic people, middle school is when a lot of struggles really come to the fore. Then puberty hits, and you have to get used to a shifting and unfamiliar body, and a whole new slew of disturbances follow. All Crystal knew at the time was that the school bells stressed her out and everything was moving too quickly. She felt like she was moving at half speed, while everyone around her was a blur. It was hard for her to keep track of which interests she had faked around which people, and which personality she’d adopted to win over each teacher. She began to burn out, so her cognitive and social functioning declined even more.[^3.2] Now she couldn’t even push herself through the school day. All she wanted to do was find a private place to lie down and vegetate. No one had noticed yet that she needed help. So, she started begging her mom to let her skip school. “It was really hard to convince my mom to let me stay home that much,” Crystal says. “And eventually I hit the limit of how many sick days I could have without getting in trouble. But for as long as I could I got ‘stomachaches’ and stayed home, which really kept me sane.” For Crystal, faking sickness was an essential part of her mask. It could get her out of the overstimulating classroom and provide her some much-needed rest. Mirroring her female classmates and pretending to like what they liked was an act of masking, too. And as school became more and more challenging, Crystal started masking in new ways, like pretending she didn’t care about “boy” subjects like science and math. “There were girls around me who were getting interested in makeup and fashion, dating boys, celebrity gossip,” Crystal says. “I could play along with that too…. The cool vapid girl vibe was a shield for being confused by all the random symbols in algebra that no teacher explained to me and just assumed I’d figure out. Instead of admitting I didn’t understand what the hell was going on I could flip my hair and say this is so boring, let’s talk about something that matters, like Mariah Carey dating Eminem.” Crystal had already observed that if she asked for help with something that neurotypical people found “obvious,” she wouldn’t get assistance. They’d just find her exhausting, or think she was asking questions just to waste time. But Crystal genuinely didn’t know what role x played in a linear equation. She didn’t understand what “show your work” meant in a math context, so she’d write long paragraphs explaining her thought process in words, and describing exactly which buttons on the calculator she’d pressed. Her teacher took this as some kind of personal insult, and wrote Crystal up for it. She cried in the detention hall the entire time, baffled that her best attempt at showing her work had somehow been rude. There were also elaborate rules about how middle-school-aged kids were supposed to act, but Crystal only ever found out about these rules when she’d broken one of them egregiously. Like the time she wore a painfully uncool tie-dyed T-shirt from JCPenney to school and the other girls wouldn’t quit laughing at it. Crystal says, “I had to become almost a cartoon of vapid femininity to explain why I was so out of it. I couldn’t be good at being a person, but I could be good at being a girl. And my girly-ness could explain why I was so dumb at math and so bad at people. She’s just a ditz.” Timotheus Gordon Jr. tells me that when he was a child, he had to learn to mask his youthful sensitivity and hide his nerdier interests, presenting as tougher and cooler than he actually felt inside. “In my community, crying is a sign of weakness, and I could be targeted for being weak, so early on I had to mask my sadness with aggression and learning how to fight,” he says. “When it came to having interests like social sciences, history, and more geeky stuff like Pokémon, I had to hide it because that was considered to be uncool and a weakness.” As was true in Crystal’s case, gender roles and ableism both conspired and pushed Timotheus to hide the parts of himself that his neurotypical peers would look down on and punish. He could play up his more gender-normative interests, such as his love of football (with all its statistics and player trivia to memorize), but anything that marked him as too sensitive, odd, or not sufficiently masculine was risky. Unlike Crystal, however, Timotheus’s experiences as a masked Autistic are also inseparably tied to anti-Black racism. Though he now has many authentic relationships rooted in like-mindedness and shared nerdy interests, he still has to worry about being perceived unfairly as he moves throughout the world. He doesn’t just have to worry about being seen as weak as he did as a child—out among white people and in white institutions, he has to fear being seen as too aggressive. “Even my mannerisms like speaking bluntly or directly, or matter-of-fact. I still have to mask because I want to tell the truth. But it’s not about what I say, it’s about what people interpret. And I have gotten into trouble because of what people interpret.” I think for most masked Autistic people, there are key moments in childhood or adolescence where we learn we are embarrassing or wrong. We say the wrong thing, misread a situation, or fail to play along with a neurotypical joke, and our difference is suddenly laid bare for all to see. Neurotypical people may not know we’re disabled, but they identify in us some key flaw that is associated with disability: we’re childish, or bitter, self-absorbed, or too “angry,” or maybe we’re just awkward and make people cringe. Avoiding being seen in these ways becomes our core motivation in life, each day a battle between the heavy armor we wear and the embarrassing characteristics that armor was designed to cover up. For me, masking was always about not seeming childish. When I was a kid, I was forever getting corrected for acting like a baby, and that mortified me. When I was disgusted by the textures of the unfamiliar food at sleepaway camp and went into a full-blown, sobbing meltdown over it, I got reprimanded for being a picky eater and a crybaby, and was forced to sit at the table all evening, until I gulped some cold ravioli down. When I failed to learn how to ride a bike at the “correct” age because I had poor balance and motor control, my dad shamed me for my immature clumsiness (perhaps because it reminded him of his own masked motor disability). As an adult, I would cuddle with stuffed animals at night with the blinds pulled down low and my bedroom door double locked, fearing that someone might walk past the house or into my room and discover the terrible fact that holding soft, cute things brought me comfort. The fear of seeming childish wounded me in a profound way, as it does many Autistic folks. One of the major ways abled society dehumanizes the disabled is by calling our maturity into question. “Adults” are supposed to be independent, though of course no person actually is. We all rely on the hard work and social-emotional support of dozens of people every single day. You’re only seen as less adult, and supposedly less of a person,[^3.3] if you need help in ways that disrupt the illusions of self-sufficiency. Needing help with toileting, for example, reminds abled people of the fact that they once wore diapers, too, and that one day they might need diapers again. People who need help toileting are vulnerable, and reliant on others. That fact distresses and repels the nondisabled, and they cope with their hard feelings by framing those who wear diapers as essentially different from themselves. They’re perpetual children, inhuman incompetents, not someone to empathize with. My own “childishness” reminded allistic people that much of what we call maturity is a silly pantomime of independence and unfeeling, not a real quality of unbreakable strength. Abled people hated seeing my awkward softness and confronting the fact they might be sensitive and needy in their own ways, too. So they acted like I was invisible, or that my childlike habits were perverse. I learned that feigning maturity would be my sole salvation, the only way to ensure my humanity got recognized. As I grew older, I overcorrected for secretly being “childish” and “embarrassing” by adopting a façade of jadedness and hyperindependence. Though it manifested in a slightly different way than it did for Timotheus, I made it my goal to always seem tough. I made fun of my friends, rolled my eyes a lot, and acted like I was too cool to care about anything. I tore down other people for liking “babyish” things, like boy bands and cartoons. I refused to cry in front of anybody, and resented anyone who did express emotions openly. I told myself I’d never get caught being a baby ever again. That commitment meant never asking for help at all. --- If you’re a masked Autistic, or suspect you might be, you probably can recall experiences like Crystal’s, Timotheus’s, and mine. I think examining the origins of your mask can help you identify some of the deep-seated fears that drive your need to wear it. Are you afraid of seeming stupid? Or childish? When you were young, did people accuse you of being cruel? Did you come to believe you were finicky, or selfish? Autistic people frequently are stereotyped as immature, unintelligent, cold, or out of touch. And each of our masks helps to cover up the Autism stereotypes we felt we needed to resist the most. Behind each mask, there sits a deep pain, and a series of painful beliefs about who you are and what you must never allow yourself to do. Consequently, a big part of unmasking will mean facing those qualities you loathe the most in yourself, and working to see them as neutral, or even as strengths. Here’s an exercise to get you thinking about where your mask comes from. Many of the negative qualities associated with Autism that we explore here will come up again later, in exercises focused on reexamining your self-concept and practicing unmasking. ### Reflecting on the Need to Mask: What Does Your Mask Protect You From? 1. Try to recall a time early in life when you felt intense embarrassment or shame. Describe that situation here. 2. When you recall this experience, what emotions do you feel? 3. Complete the sentence by checking off as many adjectives as you like: * “In that moment, everyone could see that I was `_______`.” * `____ Selfish ____ Robotic` * `____ Awkward ____ Immature` * `____ Childish ____ Disgusting` * `____ Self-absorbed ____ Embarrassing` * `____ Cold ____ Clueless` * `____ Stupid ____ Cruel` * `____ Weak ____ Pathetic` * Other: `_____________________________________` 4. Of the words listed above, which one is the most painful to hear associated with you? 5. List some actions or habits that you associate with that word. 6. Complete this sentence: I pretend to be `__________` so that people will tolerate me, but deep down I know that I’m not. * `____ Independent ____ Happy` * `____ Cool ____ Confident` * `____ Generous ____ Caring` * `____ Mature ____ Organized` * `____ Warm ____ Smart` * `____ Impressive ____ Powerful` * `____ Helpful ____ Worthy` * Other: `_____________________________________` 7. Complete the sentence: * “If I want people to like me, I can’t let them find out that I `__________`.” > To download this chart, go to http://prhlink.com/9780593235249a003. Now that we’ve explored what Autism really is, gotten the chance to meet some masked Autistics, and reflected on the social and structural forces that drive the need to mask, let’s dive into the science behind what masking really is. ### What Is Masking? In the psychological literature on the subject, Autism masking is said to consist of two classes of behavior:[^3.4] Camouflaging: attempting to hide or obscure Autistic traits in order to “blend in” with neurotypicals. The main goal of camouflage is to avoid detection as disabled. Compensation: using specific strategies to “overcome” challenges and impairments related to disability. The main goal of compensation is to maintain the appearance of high, independent functioning. When Crystal attempted to disappear into the social background by making herself agreeable and passive, she was camouflaging how confused and overwhelmed she was. When she studied up on celebrity gossip so she’d have things to discuss with her friends, she was compensating for her comparative lack of neurotypical conversation skills. Some of Crystal’s masking behaviors were a blend of both compensation and camouflage: faking being sick allowed Crystal to hide how exhausted and overloaded she was (in other words, it camouflaged these needs), but it also provided her a neurotypical-approved excuse for getting the breaks she required (which allowed her to compensate for her exhaustion). Camouflage is all about obscuring one’s unique qualities and struggles as a disabled person; compensation is all about crafting little hacks and cheats to help you get your needs met because you can’t request the accommodations you require. Playing up an interest in football because it was socially acceptable and gender conforming, for instance, was a compensatory strategy that served Timotheus well. All masked Autistics employ both compensatory and camouflaging strategies to help us get by, and apply them to a wide variety of tasks we find challenging. Someone might verbally camouflage by forcing themselves not to speak too much about their special interests,[^3.5] for example, and socially compensate by researching a friend’s Facebook posts before meeting up with them, so they’ll have a good idea of what to chat about.[^3.6] A person might camouflage their auditory sensitivities by gritting their teeth through the pain and never complaining about it, or they might compensate for it by wearing subtle noise-canceling earbuds that don’t stand out as unusual. When I introduce neurotypical people to the concept of Autism masking, they usually understand it as a social process or performance. It’s true that masking involves things like memorizing social rules and feigning friendliness, but that’s really just the most obvious form it takes. Most of us have to mask everything from our information processing style, to our lack of coordination, to our limited food preferences, to the fact that we require more rest than neurotypical people are expected to. Masking shapes the fields we work in, how we dress and carry ourselves, where we live. Many maskers choose careers that allow them to hide their executive functioning issues. Or they realize they have no choice but to freelance because they can’t keep up with all the meetings and socializing a full-time job requires. I was initially drawn to academia because I believed it was a place where I could dress however I liked, keep my own hours, and be eccentric without consequence. I knew I’d never have the energy or patience to fake being professional by corporate standards, so I compensated by developing skills and credentials that would allow me to be valued for my mind rather than my looks or poise. Many Autistic people who work in tech gravitate to the field because Autism spectrum traits are somewhat normalized there. Multiple neurodiverse people who do sex work reported to me that the flexible hours and the potential of making rent within a few days of work made the career a good fit for them. Masked Autistics tend to arrange our lives around our limitations and needs, and sacrifice anything that might demand too much energy out of us. An impressive resume or academic transcript might hide the fact our homes are messy, our hair is unbrushed, and we haven’t socialized with anybody recreationally in months. In a few key areas we may appear to be functioning highly, but that façade requires we let everything else in life fall apart. My friend Jess once described their compensation this way: “It’s like going to the grocery store, but only being able to bring home what you can sneak into your pockets when nobody is looking. And everybody else gets to just go through the checkout and buy as much as they want, so they don’t understand why you find shopping stressful.” Jess has ADHD, but their description of how challenging it is to lie, cheat, and steal your way through a neurotypical-looking life when you lack the accommodations you need is just as relevant to life as a masked Autistic person. Regular life is more cognitively and emotionally demanding for neurodiverse people than it is for neurotypicals, but we have to hide that fact from other people on a daily basis. To prop up our façade of being “high functioning,” we build a messy, unstable scaffolding of flawed coping mechanisms. It’s no wonder we report anxiety[^3.7] and depression[^3.8] at elevated rates. If the only food you ever get to eat is what you can steal, you’re gonna move through the world feeling undernourished and hypervigilant. Though masking is incredibly taxing and causes us a lot of existential turmoil, it’s rewarded and facilitated by neurotypical people. Masking makes Autistic people easier to “deal” with. It renders us compliant and quiet. It also traps us. Once you’ve proven yourself capable of suffering in silence, neurotypical people tend to expect you’ll be able to do it forever, no matter the cost. Being a well-behaved Autistic person puts us in a real double bind and forces many of us to keep masking for far longer (and far more pervasively) than we want to. ### The Double Bind of Being “Well-Behaved” Psychiatrists and psychologists have always defined Autism by how the disability impacts neurotypical people. A more “severely” Autistic person is not necessarily a person who experiences more interior suffering, but rather someone who suffers in a more disruptive, annoying, or disturbing way. The Autistic children who present the biggest hassle are the ones most likely to be referred to services, whereas those who can conceal their struggles are granted tentative approval—but risk never being understood or empathized with. Researchers Zablotsky, Bramlett, and Blumberg set out to understand how parents perceive the “severity” of their Autistic kids’ symptoms.[^3.9] They surveyed nearly a thousand families raising Autistic kids, and also measured the Autism symptom severity of the children themselves. What the researchers found was that parents did not accurately perceive the level of their kids’ suffering. Instead, parents based their ratings of Autism “severity” on how much their kids’ behavior bothered them and required a lot of their time and attention. Many children described by parents as “high functioning” were quietly coping with debilitating sensory pain, or were falling behind academically or socially in significant ways. This carries over to how Autistic adults are perceived, and the expectations that neurotypical institutions place on us to appear “normal.” This desire to make Autistics compliant and nondisruptive is a large part of why the prevailing treatment for Autism in children is Applied Behavior Analysis (or ABA) therapy. ABA is focused on training Autistic kids to fake a neurotypical personality. It’s a behavioral therapy, not a cognitive or emotional one. As long as the Autistic child’s outward actions change and become less “disruptive” or more “normal,” it doesn’t really matter to the ABA therapist what’s going on between the kid’s ears. ABA therapists train children to camouflage their Autistic traits using a system of rewards and punishments. ABA patients get sprayed in the face with water (or on the tongue with vinegar) for failing to make eye contact, or for talking too much about their special interests. If a child engages in echolalia (phrase repeating), chews on their fingers, or flaps their hands, they’ll be punished, even if they find these impulses painful to restrain. ABA patients are also forced to rehearse compensation strategies. They’re made to sit still for hours until they parrot back a conversational script correctly, and aren’t allowed to get up and play until they provide an “adequate” amount of eye contact.[^3.10] They may be asked to repeat conversational niceties like “please” and “thank you” over and over until they hit on the correct tone of voice, or be told to stand up and sit down repeatedly while the therapist snaps their fingers at them like they’re a trained dog. When Autistic kids act out or demand attention, ABA therapists are supposed to withdraw, leaving the room or ignoring their distress. This teaches the Autistic child not to expect any help from the outside world. ABA therapists also punish children by electrocuting them.[^3.11] The electroshock devices used in ABA therapy were briefly banned by the Food and Drug Administration 2020,[^3.12] before being reinstated in 2021.[^3.13] Today, the Association for Behavior Analysis still vocally supports the use of such “aversives” to discourage visibly Autistic behavior. In 2012, an ABA-trained special education teacher came under fire for coating her young students’ crayons in hot sauce, to discourage chewing.[^3.14] That case wasn’t a random act of violence. It reflects the core philosophy of ABA. The founder of ABA, Ole Ivar Lovaas, used to coerce children into providing hugs and kisses to their therapists by giving them candy.[^3.15] Forty-six percent of Autistic adults who underwent ABA therapy as kids report having Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as a result of the experience.[^3.16] Many experience deep shame even naming the subjects they feel passionate about, because they’ve been punished for having special interests. Some are unable to appreciate the emotional and psychological benefits of fidgeting or stimming because the importance of having “quiet hands” was so deeply drilled into them. Many don’t know how to refuse an unreasonable demand, or how to express emotions like anger or fear. One former ABA therapist confessed on an anonymous blog that she worries she conditioned her patients to be easy to manipulate and abuse. “Upset about being treated like a circus animal? Not my problem, kiddo,” she writes. “I’m here to lure you with candy and manipulate you into doing my bidding, no questions asked. Which will make you excellent prey for sexual predators, abusive teachers, caregivers, and partners later in life.”[^3.17] Despite how loathed ABA is by Autistic people, the parents and teachers of Autistic kids tend to love it, and research broadly deems it “effective.” This is because the efficacy of the program is based on the neurotypical gaze, not how the Autistic child feels. ABA does teach Autistic kids to quiet down and be less annoying and “weird.” The problem is, it does so by training them to hate themselves and obey all adults. It’s akin to evaluating how “effective” a depression treatment is by asking the depressed person’s boss how they are performing, rather than checking in with the depressed person themselves. Sadly, the comfort and convenience of the neurotypical teachers and parents are prioritized, so ABA remains the one and only “evidence-based” treatment for Autism that most insurance plans will cover. Becoming “well behaved” is more important than being psychologically well. For many Autistic kids, learning to obscure your pain often becomes a primary survival strategy; for masked Autistics, this isn’t taught within ABA therapy, but as part of regular life. I didn’t go through ABA, but friends’ parents did yell at me for squirming awkwardly in my seat. No one forced me to rehearse “normal” conversational scripts, but kids laughed and walked away from me when I spoke in an inappropriately loud voice or quoted movies to express how I felt. My Girl Scout leader shamed me in front of the whole troop for years because I always sat with my knees pressed to my chest. My body craved the pressure of sitting in a curled up, “gargoyle” posture (many Autistic people enjoy sitting this way), but the group leader found it so irritating she couldn’t help but berate me for it in front of the whole troop every single time it happened. Autistic educator and social equity consultant ChrisTiana ObeySumner has written about an eerily similar experience of having her Autistic traits publicly shamed in Girl Scouts.[^3.18] “One of my stimming activities is that I suck my thumb, and put my forearm to my face to both smell my natural scent and feel the soft hairs brush up against my nose,” she writes. “For some reason, this rubbed my scout leader the wrong way when I was around 7 or 8 years old. She called all of the other children to circle around and hurl insults at me.” Every masked Autistic person has a litany of experiences like this. Most maskers dodge the massive psychological bullet that is ABA therapy, but we still receive endless conditioning that says our unfiltered selves are too annoying, unusual, awkward, nonconforming, and cold to fit in. We also witness how other nonconforming bodies and minds are treated. When the entire world shames people for being into “childish” things, having odd mannerisms, or simply being irritating, you don’t need ABA to program you into compliance. Everyone around you is already doing it. I still remember the first time I consciously compared myself to a more “typically” Autistic person, and realized I needed to hide who I was. It was middle school, and I was sitting in the cello section a few feet away from Chris, a percussion player.[^3.19] Chris and I were both in the same special education gym class; I was there because I was uncoordinated and had abnormally slow reaction times, and my muscles were incredibly weak, though no one figured out this was due to Autism. Chris, on the other hand, had been diagnosed when he was very young. Chris was smart and chatty. He loved sharing World War II trivia with people. He’d ask questions in class that seemed to come out of nowhere, and sometimes would involuntarily do a stiff-armed wave to stim, which (because of his World War II obsession) people read as a Nazi salute. Kids laughed at him, teachers condescended to him, and school administrators treated him like a problem to be contained. He was the first Autistic person I ever knew, and how he was treated was instructive to me. That day in orchestra class, I was already on edge and annoyed by how loud everyone was. Percussionists were whipping drumsticks around; viola players were gossiping and laughing; violinists were tuning their instruments, filling the air with screeching, high-pitched peals. I coped by folding my arms tight across my chest and screwing a pissed-off expression onto my face. The grimacing, somewhat irritated expression that Autistic climate activist Greta Thunberg is now famous for[^3.20] is very similar to how I used to react to loud noise and social chaos. I had already started to cultivate a grumpy, goth persona to protect me from seeming weak. Instead of showing that I was overwhelmed, my mask told other people to stay far away. Chris didn’t have that option. He couldn’t mask how upset he was by the noisiness of the orchestra room. He was jittery and visibly agitated, slamming his music stand up and down on the ground, trying to get his anxiety out. People laughed at his unease and tried to provoke him by asking him questions they knew he wouldn’t understand. “Hey Chris,” an older boy hollered. “Do you spit or swallow?” Chris kept slamming the music stand up and down while he looked off into space and pondered. “I guess I do both,” he answered sincerely, not grasping the sexual implication. He interpreted it as a literal question about whether he ever spit or swallowed at all. People cackled and looked away. Chris’s whole body was tense. He knew he’d stepped on some conversational land mine the older boys had planted. Then some prankster pulled the fire alarm, and the already loud room filled with clanging bells and kids yelling. There was laughter and mayhem as everyone headed for the door. I felt sick to my stomach and furious, but able to hide behind my mask of wincing pissed-off-ness. Chris, on the other hand, had booked it out of the room. School administrators found him circling the track outside, dashing and breathing heavily. Through the windows, we watched as the adults tried to reassure him there was no fire, that he was safe. But it wasn’t the fire that was bothering him. It was the noise, and the people. It took them an hour to coax Chris back inside. Though everyone at school knew Chris was disabled, they had no patience for his actions. Administrators groaned as they tried to get him to calm down; my classmates and I joked while he kept awkwardly circling the track. We all saw him as hopelessly immature and embarrassing. I recognized a much-loathed, deeply buried part of myself in Chris, and I hated him for it. I thought I was better than Chris. I could “keep it together.” I took pride in the fact that no one would ever catch me being nervous and weak. I remember being disgusted and fascinated by Chris in equal measure. I kept my attention pinned to him during every orchestra class after that, picking apart every quality in him that I needed to hide. I began to surround myself even more thoroughly in a camouflage of frostiness and rage. ### Masking as Overcorrection For many masked Autistics, the best way to camouflage a socially undesirable quality is to rebound into the complete opposite direction, and overcorrect for anything neurotypical people and institutions have taught us to hate about ourselves. An Autistic person who was mocked for being needy and intense as a child may camouflage as hyperindependent and emotionally avoidant, for example. On the flip side, an Autistic person who has repeatedly been told they are selfish and robotic might instead wear a mask of helpful friendliness, and become a compulsive people-pleaser or teacher’s pet. We internalize many of the values of the ableist society we’re living in, and project those values both at other disabled people and at ourselves.[^3.21] After the incident with Chris, I put excessive effort into hiding everything about me that might reveal I was disabled. I avoided showing enthusiasm or strong emotions for fear of seeming “cringey” and immature. I shut up about my obsessive interest in fruit bats and video games. I put on headphones and sunglasses when I went out in public, and didn’t look anybody in the face. I impressed teachers with my wit and racked up debate trophies and merit-based scholarships, which fed into my sense that I was better than other people, and that my intelligence was the real reason I was alone. I dished out so much forceful social aggression that no one could think about challenging me. In old home movies from that time, I mock my friends and upbraid them for showing excitement or innocence. It was a cruel act that only made me harder to love, but I performed it perfectly. Until, like many masked Autistics, I finally realized the mask was taking far more from me than it ever gave, and that if I wanted to stay alive, I’d need to let it drop. In the table below, I’ve listed some of the most common negative stereotypes of Autistic people, and the opposing qualities often used to camouflage and overcompensate against them. As you read through the list, you can reflect a bit on the traits that were encouraged in you as a kid, and which qualities you did your damnedest to avoid. I’ve also listed some common behaviors that go along with each masking strategy, and left some blank space, so you can fill in your own examples. You may want to revisit your responses to the exercise at the top of this chapter, to help you reflect on which needs and fears shaped your own need to mask. (add your own using the blanks) | I was taught it was bad to be: | So I had to pretend to be: | I did this by behaving this way: | | ------------------------------ | -------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Arrogant | Humble | • Pretending I didn’t know the answers to questions | | | | • Keeping silent when people said things that weren’t true | | | | • Softening statements with phrases like “if that makes any sense” or “maybe” to make myself sound less certain | | | | • | | | | • | | | | | | Cold & Unfeeling | Warm & Friendly | • Smiling all the time no matter how I felt | | | | • Asking people about their feelings and not talking about myself | | | | • Taking care of other people whenever they were upset | | | | • | | | | • | | | | | | Annoying & Loud | Agreeable & Quiet | • Only experiencing big emotions in private | | | | • Solving problems by myself | | | | • Not getting “too excited” about anything, including good things | | | | • | | | | • | | | | | | Childish | Mature | • Serving as a confidant for adults and authority figures | | | | • Carrying myself in a restrained, “proper” way | | | | • Acting like a “teacher’s pet” or “little professor” and distancing myself from my peers | | | | • | | | | • | | | | | | Awkward | Cool | • Withdrawing from any activity I wasn’t instantly good at | | | | • Pretending to be aloof and uncaring | | | | • Rehearsing fake conversations in my mind so I could make talking to people seem effortless | | | | • | | | | • | | | | | | Clueless, Pathetic | Independent | • Nodding or laughing, even when I have no idea what’s going on | | | | • Developing unique, private habits and “hacks” that make it possible for me to hold my life together | | | | • Making sure my life looks “put together” on paper, even at the expense of my health or happiness | | | | • | | | | • | | | | | | Sensitive | Strong | • Not voicing my needs | | | | • Feeling ashamed whenever I wanted to cry or express anger | | | | • Fighting internally with every “disruptive” emotion I felt | | | | • | | | | • | | | | | | Weak | Tough | • Mocking or being aggressive with other people | | | | • Thinking of myself as superior to others | | | | • Showing distaste for anything society considers feminine, soft, or tender | | | | • | | | | • | | | | | | Weird | Normal | • Studying what other people like in a systematic, analytical way | | | | • Imitating people or characters’ mannerisms, style of dress, tone of voice, etc. | | | | • Mocking those who are more obviously “weird” than I | | | | • | | | | • | > To download this chart, go to http://prhlink.com/9780593235249a007. There are massive psychological consequences to adopting strategies like these, which go way beyond the anxiety, depression, and burnout we’ve already discussed. To maintain their masks and compensate for the challenges they’re facing, many Autistic people fall back on an array of destructive and compulsive coping mechanisms, including substance abuse, calorie restriction, excessive exercise, emotional codependency, and even joining cults. I think if we want to really confront the role the mask has played in our lives and work on parting with it, it’s important we face just how unsustainable and costly masking has been. We sacrifice a lot of our well-being and individuality in order to seem “normal.” In the next chapter, I’ll review the research showing how damaging that is, and share the stories of a few Autistic adults who’ve begun to question whether all the effort they’ve been putting into compensation and camouflage has really been worth it. [^3.1]: Hume, K. (2008). Transition Time: Helping Individuals on the Autism Spectrum Move Successfully from One Activity to Another. The Reporter 13(2), 6-10. [^3.2]: Raymaker, Dora M., et al. (2020). “Having All of Your Internal Resources Exhausted Beyond Measure and Being Left with No Clean-Up Crew”: Defining Autistic Burnout. Autism in Adulthood, 132–143. http://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2019.0079. [^3.3]: The idea that the lives, feelings, opinions, and experiences of minors have less value than those of adults is called adultism; for more on what adultism is and how it shapes the mistreatment of minors, see Fletcher, A. (2015). Facing Adultism. Olympia, WA: CommonAction. [^3.4]: Livingston, L. A., Shah, P., & Happé, F. (2019). Compensatory strategies below the behavioural surface in autism: A qualitative study. Lancet Psychiatry, 6(9), 766–777. [^3.5]: J Parish-Morris, J., MY Lieberman, M. Y., Cieri, C., et al. (2017). Linguistic camouflage in girls with autism spectrum disorder. Molecular Autism, 8, 48. [^3.6]: Livingston, L. A., Colvert, E., Social Relationships Study Team, Bolton, P., & Happé, F. (2019). Good social skills despite poor theory of mind: Exploring compensation in autism spectrum disorder. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 60, 102. [^3.7]: Cage, E., & Troxell-Whitman, Z. (2019). Understanding the reasons, contexts and costs of camouflaging for autistic adults. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 49, 1899–1911. [^3.8]: Lai, M.-C., Lombardo, M. V., Ruigrok, A. N. V., et al. (2017). Quantifying and exploring camouflaging in men and women with autism. Autism, 21, 690–702 [^3.9]: Zablotsky, B., Bramlett, M., & Blumberg, S. J. (2015). Factors associated with parental ratings of condition severity for children with autism spectrum disorder. Disability and Health Journal, 8(4), 626–634. https://doi.org/10.11016/j.dhjo.2015.03.006. [^3.10]: https://sociallyanxiousadvocate.wordpress.com/2015/05/22/why-i-left-aba/. [^3.11]: https://autisticadvocacy.org/2019/05/association-for-behavior-analysis-international-endorses-torture/. [^3.12]: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/decades-long-fight-over-electric-shock-treatment-led-fda-ban-n1265546. [^3.13]: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/decades-long-fight-over-electric-shock-treatment-led-fda-ban-n1265546 [^3.14]: https://newsone.com/1844825/lillian-gomez-puts-hot-sauce-on-crayons/. [^3.15]: Lovaas, O. Ivar. Teaching Developmentally Disabled Children: The Me Book Paperback. April 1, 1981, p. 50, “Hugs.” [^3.16]: https://neurodiversityconnects.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/PTSD.ABA_.pdf. [^3.17]: https://madasbirdsblog.wordpress.com/2017/04/03/i-abused-children-for-a-living/?iframe=true&theme_preview=true. [^3.18]: https://southseattleemerald.com/2018/12/05/intersectionality-what-it-means-to-be-autistic-femme-and-black/. [^3.19]: Chris’s name and some details have been changed to preserve his anonymity. [^3.20]: https://truthout.org/articles/as-an-autistic-femme-i-love-greta-thunbergs-resting-autism-face/. [^3.21]: Woods, R. (2017). Exploring how the social model of disability can be re-invigorated for autism: In response to Jonathan Levitt. Disability & Society, 32(7), 1090–1095.