There is a particular kind of exhaustion that many autistic adults know intimately, the exhaustion of performing. Of spending a social event monitoring your facial expressions, calibrating your laugh to the right duration, translating the unspoken rules of a situation in real time while also trying to participate in it. Of arriving home and having nothing left. Masking is the name we give to this performance, and understanding it is essential for any autistic person seeking to live more authentically, and for any clinician trying to support them.
What is masking?
Masking (also called camouflaging or passing) refers to the suite of strategies autistic people develop to appear neurotypical in social contexts. It can include copying others’ body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice; suppressing stimming behaviors; scripting conversations in advance; mimicking social rituals without understanding their purpose; forcing eye contact; and generally performing a version of yourself designed to fit in.
Masking is not conscious deception. It develops, often in childhood, as an adaptive response to an environment that keeps making clear that your natural way of being is wrong, strange, or unwelcome. It is survival behavior, and it often works remarkably well at its stated purpose.
“The mask fits so well that many autistic people don’t realize they’re wearing one, until they try to take it off and find they’ve forgotten what’s underneath.”
How masking develops
Most high-masking autistic adults began developing their masks long before they had any framework for understanding themselves. As children, they noticed, through social feedback, through teasing, through the subtle corrections of caregivers and teachers, that their natural way of engaging was off somehow. They learned to watch and imitate, to suppress the behaviors that got them in trouble, to perform the expected scripts.
Intelligence is often a significant factor. Many high-masking autistic adults are highly intelligent, and that intelligence can be applied to the project of figuring out the social world. They become skilled observers, cataloguing what neurotypical behavior looks like and learning to reproduce it. Some describe it as learning to act in a foreign language: they can perform fluently, but it is always a performance, always a translation, always requiring a part of the mind dedicated to monitoring the gap between what they’re doing and what they’re supposed to be doing.
The costs of masking
Masking is metabolically expensive. It requires sustained cognitive and emotional effort, effort that has to come from somewhere. Research consistently shows that high levels of masking are associated with significantly elevated rates of anxiety, depression, burnout, and suicidality in autistic people.
There are several distinct costs:
- Autistic burnout: Prolonged masking can lead to a state of profound exhaustion and cognitive decline that researchers now call autistic burnout. It often looks like severe depression but has distinct features and requires different treatment.
- Identity confusion: When you’ve been performing a self for so long, it becomes genuinely difficult to know who you actually are. Many high-masking autistic adults describe a sense of hollowness or unreality about their own identity.
- Delayed diagnosis: Masking is perhaps the most significant reason autistic adults, especially women, nonbinary people, and people of color, go undiagnosed for decades. When you’re good at appearing neurotypical, clinicians often miss what’s underneath.
- Relationship difficulties: Masking creates a structural problem in relationships: the people who care about you are, to a significant degree, caring about the mask. Intimacy requires being seen, and it is hard to be seen when you’re always performing.
In my practice, I often see high-masking autistic adults who have been misdiagnosed with anxiety, borderline personality disorder, or treatment-resistant depression. The underlying neurodivergence, and the masking that has developed around it, is the primary issue. When we address that, the other symptoms often shift substantially.
Recognizing masking in yourself
High-masking autistic adults often don’t initially recognize themselves in descriptions of autism. The stereotypical presentations, the ones most people picture when they hear the word, don’t match their experience. They’ve learned to make eye contact, they can hold a conversation, they have friends. They feel like they can’t be autistic.
But there are often telling signs. The exhaustion after social events, even ones you genuinely enjoyed. The sense that your “public” and “private” selves are substantially different. The feeling of watching yourself in social situations rather than being fully present in them. The relief, sometimes tinged with shame, of finally being alone. The way certain environments (fluorescent lights, crowded rooms, unexpected changes in plan) affect you more than they seem to affect others.
Many high-masking autistic people also describe a persistent, low-level sense of being wrong somehow, of not quite fitting, even when they appear to fit perfectly well. This can be mistaken for low self-esteem, or social anxiety, or a symptom of depression. It may be those things too. But it can also be the quiet knowledge of a self that hasn’t yet been given permission to exist fully.
What unmasking looks like
Unmasking is not a project of abandoning all social adaptation, we all modulate our behavior across contexts, and this isn’t inherently problematic. Rather, unmasking is about developing a clearer sense of who you are and what you actually need, and creating more conditions in your life where you don’t have to maintain the full performance.
It often involves: learning to recognize when you’re masking and when you’re not; finding people and environments where the mask is less necessary; grieving the years spent in performance; developing a more stable and compassionate relationship with your autistic self; and learning to communicate your actual needs rather than suppressing them.
For many people, formal assessment and diagnosis is an important part of this process. Having a framework, words, a diagnosis, an explanation, for what you’ve been experiencing can be profoundly organizing. It doesn’t change who you are, but it can change how you understand yourself, and that changes everything.
