🫥 Session 10: Masking and the Loss of Self
🌿 Transformative Education for Neurodivergent Liberation
“The true self is always in hiding where the false self is most loudly performing.”
— (adapted from D.W. Winnicott, with tenderness and a wink)
📌 If you’re just joining us, I recommend reading [Session 1 – Why I’m Leading This Workshop (My Positionality)] for shared agreements and to understand how this space is held.
This one is tender. It lands on May 12th—my mother’s birthday—and that timing is not lost on me.
In our last session, we talked about burnout—not as a personal flaw, but as a systemic failure. We named how pushing ourselves to perform, to pass, to persist through overwhelm is not sustainable—and not our fault.
Today, we go one layer deeper. We look at one of the root causes of burnout for so many autistic people: masking. Not the light version. The decades-long, dissociative, identity-erasing kind. The kind that keeps us alive, but at the cost of ourselves.
Much of my masking was born in childhood. Like many late-discovered autistic people, I learned early that performance was protection. I was praised for being polite, articulate, helpful, self-sufficient. I was parentified—given emotional and practical responsibilities well beyond my years. I didn't know it then, but I was already disappearing.
And my mom? She didn't know either. She was doing her best inside a system that didn’t give her the tools to see me clearly. We didn’t have the language. But we had the love. And before she passed, we healed some of that. She watched all my TikToks. She listened. She made space for the truth. That listening was one of the greatest gifts she ever gave me.
So this session is for the ones who are still trying to be good, when they’re really just trying to be safe. It’s for the ones who have forgotten what it means to belong to themselves.
It’s also for the parents who are ready to hear it. Because listening—truly listening—is a form of repair. If you’re reading this as a parent—know that it’s never too late to become someone safe to your child’s truth.
What Is Masking, Really?
Masking isn’t just pretending to be someone you’re not.
It’s a survival strategy.
A trauma response.
A form of camouflage developed in unsafe ecosystems.
For many late-discovered autistic people, masking begins before we have language for it. We notice that certain behaviors get us praise, while others get us punished, laughed at, or ignored. So we start suppressing our natural instincts—our stims, our silences, our questions, our sensitivities.
We script conversations, mirror others, study what’s considered “normal.” We become chameleons in environments that reward sameness.
And the longer we do it, the more we forget who we were before.
Masking becomes muscle memory.
We don’t even know we’re doing it.
Until one day we can’t anymore.
For me, the unmasking began in the safe, anonymous spaces of Alcoholics Anonymous. Before I knew the term “masking,” I was already peeling back layers. AA gave me language for honesty, for imperfection, for spiritual connection. It made space for me to stop performing—and that opening is what eventually led me to recognize I’m autistic.
But the system I was in didn’t like that.
The more I honored my truth, the more uncomfortable I became to people who preferred the mask.
And that’s part of the grief.
Because for many of us, masking didn’t just help us survive—it helped other people feel comfortable.
When we stop doing it, we lose roles, relationships, and often, our sense of stability.
But what we gain… is ourselves.
The Cost of Long-Term Masking
Masking isn’t harmless.
When it becomes a lifelong adaptation, it’s not just exhausting—it’s erosive.
It erodes identity, safety, and trust in self.
It disconnects us from our bodies.
It disconnects us from truth.
Many of us who masked for decades now carry what researchers are finally beginning to name: autistic burnout, complex PTSD, depersonalization, and somatic collapse. But before those terms reached us, we only knew we were falling apart—and no one could tell us why.
We were told:
“You’re just anxious.”
“You’re too sensitive.”
“You’re doing fine—you’re so high-functioning.”
But we weren’t fine.
We were fracturing.
I lived through five burnouts before I found the word “autism.” I thought I was resilient—but I was dissociating. I thought I was driven—but I was disconnected. Every success was a performance. Every failure, a shame spiral.
I didn’t know then that I was masking.
I didn’t know that my “success” was coming at the cost of my self.
Long-term masking doesn’t just lead to fatigue.
It can cause:
Identity diffusion
Shutdowns and meltdowns that seem to “come out of nowhere”
Relationship ruptures from misattunement
Physical health issues from chronic dysregulation
Deep grief when we realize we never got to be known for who we actually are
And often, when we begin to unmask, people don’t like the change.
Because the version of us they loved was curated.
It was digestible.
It didn’t challenge the norms.
But the real self—the one underneath—is not a problem.
They were never the problem.
The problem was a world that only made room for the mask.
Unmasking Is Not Always Safe—But It Is Always Sacred
Unmasking is often described as a liberation.
And it can be.
But it can also be terrifying, disorienting, and deeply vulnerable—especially when the systems around us don’t know how to hold difference without punishing it.
Unmasking isn’t just about dropping a persona.
It’s about returning to a self we may have buried so long ago we barely remember their shape.
It’s about:
Rebuilding identity after years of performative survival
Relearning how to listen to our bodies when we’ve ignored them for too long
Sitting with the grief of what was lost while we were pretending to be fine
When I started to unmask, I didn’t even know that’s what I was doing.
It began in the safest space I had—Alcoholics Anonymous.
A place where truth-telling was expected.
Where people spoke from the gut.
Where no one flinched when I talked about grief or rage or shame.
That’s where my mask first cracked.
And it’s no coincidence that my autism diagnosis followed.
Because when I stopped trying to be palatable, I began to be honest.
And that honesty didn’t fit the systems I was in.
In workplaces, I became “too intense.”
In school, I became “difficult to manage.”
In friendships, I became “unreliable” or “needy.”
But I wasn’t regressing—I was emerging.
The truth is: unmasking doesn’t always lead to acceptance.
Sometimes it leads to exclusion, misunderstanding, or even punishment.
That’s why unmasking must be supported, not demanded.
No one owes their unmasking to anyone.
And no one should be shamed for still surviving through masking.
But when we do find spaces to unmask—when it’s safe enough—it’s not just healing.
It’s sacred.
Because the self underneath is not defective.
They are whole, wise, and worthy of being known.
And if you’re still masking—because the world hasn’t made it safe yet—please know: that’s not failure. That’s wisdom.
Survival is not shameful. You don’t owe unmasking to anyone. And you are not less authentic for protecting your peace.
You get to move at your own pace. You get to choose what stays private. Your safety comes first—always.
🔍 Masking Is Shaped by Power
Masking is not neutral.
It is deeply informed by power—by race, class, gender, culture, language, and how close or far we are from what society deems “acceptable.”
In many white, Western, able-bodied, cis-centered spaces, masking is mistaken for competence. Being articulate, agreeable, productive, high-achieving—these can act as shields, especially for those of us socialized into performance early. But that protection is not distributed equally.
Some of us were able to blend in.
Some of us were forced to disappear.
And some of us were never believed to begin with.
✴️ Black autistic children are more likely to be criminalized than supported.
Behaviors that might be interpreted as “quirky” or “creative” in white children are labeled as “disruptive” or “defiant” in Black children—especially boys. But Black autistic girls, often overlooked altogether, experience a different form of erasure: they’re misread as emotionally unstable, aggressive, or just “too much.” Their masking, if present, is rarely seen as adaptive. Their needs are rarely recognized as valid.
✴️ Latinx and immigrant families often face language and cultural barriers to recognition.
Even when signs of neurodivergence are present, families may be gaslit or dismissed by school systems, clinicians, and caseworkers who don’t understand their culture—or worse, assume neglect or dysfunction instead of difference. Masking in these environments is often not a strategy—it’s a demand for survival, especially for children navigating two worlds.
✴️ Nonspeaking autistics and those who use AAC (augmentative and alternative communication) are often excluded entirely from conversations about masking.
Their experience of masking may look radically different—but it’s no less valid. The pressure to suppress stims, adapt tone, hide emotions, or script interactions is just as intense, and often compounded by the ways others fail to meet them where they are.
✴️ Queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming autistics face layered masking.
They are not only navigating neuronormativity, but also cisnormativity and heteronormativity. The stakes are high—not just socially, but physically and psychologically. Many are forced to mask their neurotype, gender expression, and trauma history all at once just to stay safe in medical settings, family homes, or public space.
Masking, then, is not just about fitting in.
It’s about surviving systems that were never meant to hold us in our full complexity.
And that survival comes at a cost:
Burnout
Dissociation
Identity fragmentation
Loss of authenticity
And for many, misdiagnosis or no diagnosis at all
For those of us with privilege—white, verbal, formally educated, middle class—we must be especially cautious not to universalize our experience of masking. Because what may have functioned as a tool of protection for us could be a tool of erasure or punishment for others.
Some people were never afforded the luxury of being seen as “normal” in the first place.
So when we talk about unmasking as liberatory, we must also talk about who gets to unmask without punishment, who gets seen as “authentic” instead of “defiant,” and who is still fighting to be understood at all.
🧘🏽♀️ Reflection Prompt: Intersectional Masking
Take a few minutes to sit with these questions—no pressure to answer all of them. Let your body lead. Let your truth emerge without needing to explain it.
Where did you learn to hide parts of yourself in order to be safe?
Who taught you—directly or indirectly—what was “acceptable”?
When have you been punished for unmasking? When have you been praised for it?
How have race, gender, class, language, or culture shaped the ways you’ve had to mask?
Who gets to be “authentically autistic” in public—and who is still fighting just to be believed?
Let your answers be messy. Let them come in waves.
This is about building awareness—not performance.
💫 New Sessions Every Monday & Wednesday
This 12-week journey unfolds twice a week—every Monday and Wednesday—with each session building on the last.
You can view the full session lineup here, and here’s what’s coming next:
✨ Session 11 – Not All Autistic People Are Seen
We’ll explore the systemic erasure of autistic lives—especially those living at the margins of race, class, gender, language, and survival. Visibility is not the same as liberation. And some of us are still fighting to be seen.
👇 If this resonated with you, feel free to share a reflection, offer feedback, or tell us what landed. This space is here for real connection—not performance.
💖 A Note on Support
This work will never live behind a paywall.
It’s here to be accessible, co-created, and shared freely.
If you have the means to support it through a paid subscription, it allows this series to remain accessible to those who can’t afford to pay, while sustaining the labor that makes it possible. It also directly contributes to The Compassion Collective—a community rooted in justice, mutual care, and transformative change.
Every subscription, every share, every message of resonance keeps this space alive and grounded in care.
Thank you for being here.
🌿
Shamani of The Compassion Collective
I learned to mask when I was in school and I realized how my extreme shyness made adults uncomfortable. The only time I offered to speak was when I was sure I had the right answer and I found it easy to learn, so I would raise my hand with great enthusiasm. "Call on Me!" But the rest of the time, I wanted attention but could not ask for it and few adults (my grandmother for one), took the time to engage with such a quiet, complicated - not funny or entertaining kid. So I abandoned myself and morphed into whatever the environment was asking for. Ouch!