If Masking Is the Default Why Does It Crush Some of Us So Much More Than Others?

Reflections on masking versus being masked and why the difference matters.

Masking hard for my friends.

Some of you will know my upcoming book is about masking and alcohol. How it helps us to mask and unmask. This week I spoke to Dr Felicity Sedgwick about it, and Dr Tony Atwood too.

Two new chapters for the book and so much insight I will share later.

For months I’ve been having lots of conversations about it, and the more I learn the less clear I feel about what ‘masking’ is and why it is so damaging.

I'm going to return to my experience to help me better understand it, so hopefully it might help you understand it too.

A friend said something that stopped me in my tracks recently. I had been excitedly talking about an upcoming keynote talk I was giving and how I’d realised creativity was a form of unmasking that all of us need to manage the masking load society demands of us.

“Masking is the default position, right?” he said, and I realised it was true.

A few days later, someone at the neurodiversity and creativity conference pointed out that ‘neurotypicality’ itself is highly performative - that the whole thing is made up and kept afloat by people acting out expected behaviours, often without even realising they’re doing it.

Neurotypicality equals human society here or civilisation perhaps.

It reminded me of that Shakespeare line:

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

And suddenly it clicked.

Masking really is the default.

So if everyone is performing to an extend the majority of the time, or thereabouts, why does Autistic masking feel so uniquely crushing?

What’s the difference?

I have a few ideas and I’d love to hear yours.

I wonder if:

For more neurotypical people (because I think it's a spectrum, not a binary), the script seems to come from inside.

They can feel, intuitively, what role they’re meant to play in each social setting. And maybe - maybe! - they even enjoy the performance. Maybe it’s playful. Maybe it gives them a sense of agency or belonging.

Or at least doesn't hurt them particularly.

For me, especially as a teen when it was no longer cool to be a bit of a weirdo, the script often seemed to be missing. Or inaccessible due to a layer of anxiety triggered by being visible or in a group.

I just couldn't tell what the audience would respond to. Couldn't thrive in the conditions.

Even now when I am around people I can't easily think. I can't remember upcoming appointments or if I need to catch a train at four o clock. My nervous system floods with adrenalin and I am just in the moment, trying to keep up. Even with dear friends. Especially my incredibly smart ones.

Trying to follow the conversation and work out if what a person has said is serious or a joke takes so much effort!

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Since I got sober I have thought of socialising as a kind of non-stop form of improv.

Since I quit drinking I’m a slightly stiff participant.

So nervous of saying the wrong thing that I say too little or so nervous of not saying enough that I stream of consciousness every thought going through my head.

As a drinker, sometimes, I felt like one of the stromgest members of the improv troupe. I would give myself over to the drink, to the night, to the group, full commitment. And sometimes then I would feel it, the joy of the shared performance.

But I often took it too far. Did things I regretted. Made myself ill. And of course, all the while, I was getting older, and my life hadn't come together in the way I hoped.

My social life was always pretty good!

The life that surrounded it, as I got older, not so much.

Maybe it's all the booze, I thought.

So I got sober.

Without alcohol, my improv skills lost their fluidity.

I didn’t enjoy socialising so much without the drink.

I was back to being awkward and nervous in groups. Trying to keep up, trying to work out the rules of the game and the edges of appropriateness (cos that's where the fun and jokes are, right?).

It didn’t feel playful. It didn’t feel like self-expression. It felt more like survival or duty.

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When I was a teenager, I remember sitting on the edges of the pitch with a group of girls, watching the boys play football - (one of the lamest pursuits of my life, which I feel shows how fucked up it was to grow up as a girl in the UK in the 90s but that's a different post…)

I always used to wonder why some members of the group could just stand up and walk away, and the whole group would get up and follow them - like they’d sent some invisible signal.

Other people - people like me, I decided - couldn’t do this. We didn't have the authority.

I never tested my theory, but I knew that if I got up and walked away, the group would just carry on without me.

The idea of it felt agonising.

It's only recently I've understood that those girls were just willing to do what they wanted even if no one followed them.

This is the kernel of masking for me. I don't know if it makes sense to you. But that basic ability to be able to think enough to have initiative while in a group. That is what I am not able to do. Even now, aged 42.

Group situations take so much from me I can only respond and follow cues. I cannot initiate.

So mostly, now I know myself and understand myself, I avoid them. Socialise in other ways. I'm still learning about this. Coming to the conclusion that I don't really like group meetups so much but that I still want to have friends and be connected so…

It's a work in progress.

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I actually really don't like the term ‘masking’ because it suggests a level of consciousness that is often not there.

In her book, Dr Felicity Sedgewick outlines the different types of masking, some more and some less conscious. This is excellent work.

But for me, it is more accurate to say that I was masked.

I prefer the way @drdevonprice discusses it in his work, as akin to ‘egg mode’ in the trans persons experience, when you I don't know this key thing about yourself and so you can't even begin to find what you need/want.

It's funny how drinking perpetuates egg mode also. Personal development etc largely on hold unless you're lucky

I didn't know it was ok to go home early every night or to lie down for hours reading alone or to nap in the middle of the day. So I drank and took substances to change my energy levels and mood and social need (i.e. create the urge to be around others.)

Nowadays I don't feel masked so much. At work, in my relationships, I am openly Autistic/ADHD.

Sometimes I am more or less professional. Sometimes I am more of less smartly dressed.

Maybe that's why I stopped going to AA because it was one of the places where I felt myself resorting/defaulting to masking. I'm not sure.

If my friend is right and masking IS the default position then maybe it feels different once you are no longer masked.

I know that when I was masked, as in , undiagnosed, without adequate self-knowledge, I often felt completely trapped, waiting for someone else to make a decision. Hoping people would be kind to me. Vulnerable and knowing it but not knowing it or trying to hide it…

Unable to even imagine risking initiating the smallest motion of my will, i.e. to stand up and leave the edge of the football pitch.

I didn’t understand why I didn’t have that ability. And I still don't. But I just didn’t. The self-consciousness and lack of self-esteem that went along with not knowing myself were that disabling.

Looking back, I wonder if I’d already used up all my executive functioning just to sit there, masked, pretending to be the same as the other teenage girls I was with, working overtime to manage the relentless list of how to be acceptable in that space and context.

It was an impossible task for any girl. Misogyny was like a mud you had to wade through. For an autistic girl? No chance.

I had nothing left over to have initiative. And so I stuck to the prettiest most popular girls like glue. The eternal sidekick!

It’s a small moment, but it’s stuck with me for decades - that quiet awareness of who could move and who couldn't. The unspoken social currency I didn’t have and the innate authority I didn’t know how to earn from myself.

I'm privileged to have let go of the mask much more these days. I try and encourage other people to as well.

If I wasn't able to do this, I'm not sure how I'd manage.

The research shows that for autistic people masking takes a much higher toll on mental health. But it's complicated. And the research is pretty new.

We are only just beginning to understand how the human brain works. I'm not sure there is really such a thing as ‘neurotypical’.

Society expects too much of everyone. The conditions we live in are inhumane and that's in the comfortable, peacetime west.

I don't even know how to talk about what is happening in the rest of the world. I don't know how we are supposed to go about our usual business while families and children are being starved and shot at in Gaza.

I'm right on the cusp of being completely burnt out to be honest, ready to throw in the towel and sure it's a sane response.

But also I have a toddler and a mortgage and a partner so…

I am keeping going, just about.

For so many of us, unmasking is not optional. Some people still feel they must mask even in their homes and families, even at work.

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Maybe what I am experiencing lately is closer to the so called neurotypical experience of masking. As in I am not working hard to pretend to be something I'm not.

So I'm awkward or I say inappropriate stuff or take things literally or don't get the joke or don't understand why everyone is laughing at the totally serious thing I just said… but I just admit it.

I don't laugh along, pretending to be in on stuff as much as I used to. I ask for help. Admit when I'm clueless. Arrive late, in the wrong clothes and just have to style it out with my winning personality. (Yikes.)

If masking as the default for a more neurotypical person feels like an intuitive shape-shifting improv session that still feels like ‘you’ then maybe that's my experience now.

I don't know. I mean, it's the summer, which means my time is my own. And I've designed my life to suit me so maybe I'm just not being pushed out of my comfort zone.

I'm mostly not doing much besides writing, resting, scrolling, eating oh and childcare, domestic shizz, admin, loving, etc.

Basically I'm letting slide what I can.

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I don’t have answers yet, but my book is coming together and these are the questions I’m arriving at.

I'm curious about your experience.

Is the difference with masking about access to the script?

Is it about consent?

Self-knowledge?

Or is it about joy - does it feel more fun for some people to perform the various roles required in society?

Or are some of us actually handed heavier costumes to wear?

Also, I need to know:

Are you someone who can walk away from the football field and trust the group will follow?

Or are you, like I was, stuck waiting for someone else to move first?

I’m still working on having initiative. I still can't think in group situations. Maybe it doesn't matter too much. We're not all supposed to be leaders. We are supposed to be more in community.

Still trying to find mine.

Thanks for being here.

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📚 Chelsey Flood is the author of award-winning novels Infinite Sky and Nightwanderers, and a senior lecturer in creative writing at UWE.

She is currently working on a book for Jessica Kingsley Publishers about the connection between undiagnosed neurodiversity and addiction (+ her first children's picture book + a domestic noir for her powerhouse agent - no wonder she's on the cusp of burnout, right. Send help.) 📚