#autistic masking
“You don’t look autistic” is not the compliment you think it is. This is because of something called masking. Basically, masking is when an autistic person is just… really good at acting. It’s when we hide our most obviously autistic traits to have an easier social life.
Masking is a trauma response. Autistic people don’t mask naturally. It’s stressful and exhausting. So, when you tell an autistic person, “you don’t look autistic,” you’re praising a performance that we hate giving.
“You don’t look autistic” is the biggest insult to me. I WANT to look autistic. I want to look like me.
One of the reasons the whole idea of masking broke my brain a little:
I really feel like there was a pop cultural discourse in the 1980s about “everyone being fake.” All Gen Xr alt kids and weird kids knew that the “popular kids” were big fakes.
So there is a degree that being a big fake was heavily presented as normal; it’s what popular, social kids did.
And the “Cool Kid Makeover” was absolutely a big 80s trope: take some social pariah or nerd or alternative girl and turn them into a jock or cool dude or pretty popular girl.
I feel like moving through Middle Class America (especially the San Fernando Valley in the 80s) involved some kind of social contract where everyone knew everyone was faking it, and you didn’t call attention to anyone else’s mask slipping except by clearing your throat from behind your hand.
So that’s the cultural stuff I have to filter “masking” through because if I had talked about having to mask to anyone in the 80s or 90s, I might’ve gotten the response, “DUH, EVERYONE DOES THAT.”
So this is a place where historical context in autism discussion is important and can be kind of muddy; it’s a case where people didn’t talk about things the same way, the environmental pressures were different, and certain things might have been hard to distinguish from normatively accepted cultural adjustment skills.
Any other autistics have the experience of masking by default (even if not masking well enough to seem NT) around people until you’ve known them for a long time/well and the mask starts to drop bc you trust them enough to know the Real You but then they lose interest/drop you? It’s really fucked with my self esteem having befriended so many people that seemed to like me and realizing (sometimes after months/years) that they don’t like me when I’m not actively performing and pretending to be someone I’m not. I’m scared of getting close to anyone now. And a lot of people are like “just stop masking and be your authentic self!” which sounds ideal, but for a lot of autistic folks, especially multiply marginalized, masking can be a shield from being treated with immediate hostility/judgement, having your autonomy rejected, etc. I don’t like pretending to be someone I’m not and I want people to get to know the real me. But I also don’t have the mental strength to deal with the social (and other) consequences of unmasking. I feel caught in a lose/lose situation.
I wonder about how the people on the other side of this feel too. When I stop masking around someone, maybe to them it seems like *I’ve* lost interest or *I’m* being rude because of the difference in my speech and mannerisms. Or maybe they don’t like people who act “fake”, idk.
A lot of folks think they don’t have a problem with autistic people. But the moment their friend needs something “obvious” explained, is seen struggling to do “basic tasks” independently, gets too overstimulated to speak, otherwise appears/acts unpalatable- they feel resentment. A lot of this applies to physical chronic illness as well. I’ve had friends lose interest in me when I actually set boundaries and stop pushing myself to do things that will put me in pain. The message I get from that is “I liked you until I realized you were an inconvenience”. So many people, including some NDs, only support autistic people when we are palatable enough. They like autistic people as long as the autism is something they can write off as a personality quirk and not something they have to acknowledge as a developmental disability. Even without the words “high and low functioning”, a lot of people (probably unconsciously) still view autistics in a dichotomy due to their level of support needs. Palatable vs unpalatable. Independent vs burdensome. Eccentric vs off putting. Worthwhile vs worthless. A lot of people, esp but not limited to NTs, seem to struggle with understanding that autism isn’t a dichotomy, that it’s more complex than “high and low functioning”. When they meet an autistic person who exists in the grey area, they mentally categorize us as one or the other. Lots of autistics have been told things like “if you’re capable enough to speak, why can’t you drive?” or “if you struggle so much that you can’t live alone, why expect to be treated like a real adult?” Many cannot conceive of autistics existing outside of this dichotomy. Autism isn’t a spectrum from capable to incapable, autism is a spectrum of many traits. An autistic can be capable of speaking eloquently while being far from able to understand unspoken social rules. An autistic can be a tech genius and struggle with disabling sensory issues. I am *incapable* of masking for more than a few hours at a time before shutting down, and even in the most ideal situations my masking skills aren’t good. So I’m caught in a situation where sometimes I can hide my disability at first but I quickly become unable to hide it. I feel like when people who don’t know me well learn I’m autistic, they’re fine with it at surface level because they think I’m “not that kind of autistic”. But then they find out I am in fact the unpalatable kind of autistic. And they get uncomfortable. Even a lot of well intended (including ND) folks seem to feel the need to neatly fit me into one category. I’m either infantilized, or held to expectations that I am too disabled to meet.
It’s all “I hate fake people” and “just be yourself!!” until the person in question is autistic. If I stopped being “fake”, everyone would think I was rude- even though I try my best to be considerate and thoughtful of others, I do so autistically, so it’s seen as incorrect. It’s very important for allistics to understand that an autistic person who loves being around you is not going to express it in the same way that an allistic person would. We tend to express our emotions differently. It doesn’t mean we don’t like you. And it hurts more than I know how to express when someone you thought liked you only wants to be your friend if you’re performing, and stops seeing your value as soon as you start expressing yourself authentically.
