What Masking Autism Has Really Been Like

Text: Most people: Masking Autism must mean just pretending loud sounds don't bother you. What masking autism has really entailed: picture of white man holding cigarette with papers stuck to the wall and lots of connections with red string and writing.

Masking sounds like such a straightforward simple thing but I can assure you, it has been anything but that for me. I don’t think I could ever adequately explain what the level of research and obsession it has required of me in order to cosplay being a human. Sometimes I wonder if Autism is like a big circle because the more obsessively Autistic I became about masking, the more elaborate my mask became and, in some ways, the more “successful.” I say successful in parenthesis because I don’t think I truly “passed” as a neurotypical person, I wish I had accurate knowledge about how I’ve been perceived throughout my life but I can most certainly say that people probably suspected something was a little off about me. If the person was generous, perhaps they thought I was just intelligent and strange but more than likely, a lot of people had less generous opinions about me. 

I have so many memories about obsessively constructing my mask. I distinctly remember in middle school creating an AOL account in a random person’s name and then obsessively messaging people at my school to get their list of top 5 most popular girls so i could make sure I was on it or, if I wasn’t, sneakily interview them as to why I wasn’t on it and then change my mask accordingly. That same year I remember trying to befriend a popular girl and switching my speech so that I mimicked her speech impediment and I even begin misspelling words because she did. I would always play dumb, I learned the rules early that you never want to use too big of words or that you’re smarter than the popular kids. I stopped eating that year too. 

As I got older, my mask became much more complex, with lots of conflicting goals/motivations that morphed and changed over the years. Various obsessions have come and gone, but the obsessive nature, the strategizing how to mold my mask in intricate ways in order to fit what I think society would accept the most has been a constant. Unmasking is not so simple either. A lot of us don’t even know truly what is behind the mask after so many years/decades of this elaborate construction. Who would we have been if we had never needed to mask in the first place? Would we have used this obsessive energy for something more worthwhile? It’s a fascinating concept.