The 20-minute phone call
You rehearse a 2-minute phone call for 20 minutes. You laugh a beat after everyone else because you’re tracking the joke on a delay. You keep your hands still in your lap, and the whole time some part of you is watching yourself do it.
That’s masking. Sometimes it’s called camouflaging. It’s the set of things you do to look less autistic than you are, and if the word autistic started fitting last week, this is probably the part that explains the most.
The tiredness you’ve been carrying for years has a name. And you don’t have to put the mask down this week to have earned that.
Where it came from
Most autistic people who mask never decided to. You picked it up in pieces, young, after the world made it clear that the natural version of you got mocked or quietly left out. Masking is a survival strategy. It worked well enough that you kept using it, which is why it’s hard to set down.
It often was safer. Fit in and you keep the job and the peace at the dinner table. Stand out as visibly autistic and you risk being talked down to or treated as a problem. For a lot of people that’s the recorded history of their life.
High maskers get praised for it, too, and that’s the trap. You’re called mature, so put-together. The performance earns real rewards, so the cost stays hidden, even from you. This is a big reason so many autistic adults are recognized decades in, and our piece on late-identified autism sits right next to this one.
What it costs
Running a performance every waking hour is expensive, and the bill comes late. It shows up as exhaustion sleep doesn’t touch. As coming home and being unable to speak. As meltdowns or shutdowns that seem to come from nowhere and are the sum of a thousand small self-overrides.
Sustained masking is one of the main roads into autistic burnout, the flattening loss of skills and capacity that can take months or years to climb out of.
There’s a quieter cost underneath. After enough years of performing a self, many people lose track of which parts are them and which parts are the costume. People who start unmasking often describe a strange grief: they aren’t sure what they like, or how they’d sit if no one were watching.
If you’re feeling that grief this week, it makes sense. The energy budget went on being legible to other people.
You don’t have to unmask
Unmasking is slow work, and it’s optional. Nobody has to earn their autism by dropping every coping strategy at once. Some of the mask keeps you safe. The goal, when you’re ready, is to stop paying for it in the places where you don’t have to.
One bare-minimum step, if you want it: alone, in a room with the door shut, let a stim happen. Rock, flap, hum, whatever your body has been wanting to do. Notice that nothing bad follows.
Later, maybe in front of the 1 or 2 people who’ve already met the real you and stuck around. Unmasking fully at home and staying mostly masked at work is a reasonable, self-protective choice. Safety matters more than consistency.
A neurodiversity-affirming therapist can be a real help with this, if you want one. It costs money and the good ones often have waitlists. No therapist can tell you which parts of the mask are worth keeping, either. That’s yours to work out, and self-recognition stands on its own.
Many autistic people carry ADHD in the mix too, which adds its own layer of masking. If that rings a bell, the AuDHD overview is a good next read.
This page is education and lived experience, and it isn’t medical advice. For tonight, the door-shut thing is enough.
