Masking is often described as something Autistic people “do”. A behaviour. A strategy. A skill that can be learned, refined, and sometimes, praised. This framing is dangerously incomplete.
Masking is not a personality trait. It is not evidence of adaptability or social competence. It should not be used as a measure of resilience. It is the accumulated knowledge that safety, care, and belonging are conditional, and that those conditions are set by other people.
Masking is what happens when being yourself makes you a target. We mask to feel safe.
What masking actually is
At its simplest, masking refers to the conscious or unconscious suppression of Autistic traits and the performance of non-Autistic normativity. This can include forcing eye contact, monitoring tone and facial expression, scripting conversations, hiding stims, suppressing sensory needs, or flattening emotional responses to avoid being seen as “too much”.
But that list misses the emotional core.
- Masking is vigilance.
- Masking is self-surveillance.
- Masking is living as if you are always being assessed.
- Masking doesn’t always mean appearing less Autistic
It is the ongoing labour of translating yourself into something more acceptable, while knowing that the translation will never be exact, and that mistakes will be punished. Sometimes that means suppressing your Autistic nature, always it means adjusting your perceived identity to appear as something that keeps you safe in your environment. Even if that means appearing more Autistic.
Why masking develops
Autistic people do not start masking because we want to. We start because we learn, early and often, that our nature has consequences. We learn to mask as reflex rather than constant conscious decision.
- We learn it through bullying, exclusion, ridicule, restraint, disbelief, and concern.
- We learn it in classrooms where compliance is rewarded and difference is corrected.
- We learn it in healthcare settings where distress is dismissed unless it looks right.
- We learn it in families where love may be present but understanding is not.
Masking is pattern recognition. It is the logical response to an environment that treats divergence as danger. It is the subtle yet costly consequence of a world that does not let us feel safe.
The cost of wearing the mask
Masking works; until it doesn’t.
In the short term, it can bring access to education, employment, services, relationships. In the long term, it exacts a steep and often invisible price.
Sustained masking is linked to exhaustion, anxiety, depression, identity confusion, suicidality, and burnout. It disrupts interoception (the ability to sense internal states) because attention is constantly pulled outward, monitoring others rather than listening inward.
When you spend years acting a version of yourself designed to be palatable, it becomes harder to know who you are beneath the performance. This is why many Autistic adults describe late diagnosis not as a revelation of identity, but as a grieving process. The mask kept them alive. It also kept them lost.
We don’t necessarily grieve the fact we are Autistic. We grieve the traumatic loss of a constructed identity that has kept us safe our entire life.
Masking and the illusion of success
One of the cruellest twists of masking is that it can be misread as wellbeing. The Autistic person who “passes” is seen as coping. The one who collapses is seen as failing. The system congratulates itself on the former and pathologises the latter; without ever questioning the conditions that made collapse inevitable. Masking allows environments to remain unchanged.
If the cost is borne privately, invisibly, then the problem appears solved.
This is why calls to teach Autistic people to mask better (traditions “social skills” classes and similar) are so insidious. They frame survival strategies as treatment goals and ignore the structural violence that made those strategies necessary in the first place.
There is a fundamental divide here creates by the double empathy problem. Non-Autistic people view Autistic embodiment as inherently pathological, and so encourage masking for their own comfort. There is a lack of empathy driven consideration on the part of non-Autistic society.
Who benefits from masking?
Masking is often described as something Autistic people do to fit in. A more honest description is that it is something Autistic people do to make others comfortable. It protects non-Autistic people from having to confront difference and preserves norms by hiding their exclusionary effects. It shifts the burden of adaptation onto those with the least power.
In this sense, masking is not just personal. It is a form of violence inflicted upon us by those with the most sociopolitical privilege. The idea that we tell a group how to act and behave sounds dystopian, and yet this is the reality for Autistic people.
Unmasking as risk, not trend
Recently, unmasking has entered popular discourse, sometimes framed as liberation or self-actualisation. That framing can be seductive and misleading.
Unmasking is not a switch you flip. It is not always safe. For many Autistic people, especially those facing intersecting oppressions, unmasking can mean loss of housing, employment, healthcare, or physical safety. Unmasking is not an aesthetic choice. It is a negotiation with risk.
The real ethical question is not whether Autistic people should unmask. It is why masking is still required for survival at all.
It is also vital that we move away from unmasking being a journey towards “authentic” expression. When a cultural group sets standards of authenticity, they inevitably create normative standards that exclude and alienate it’s own members.
Toward a world with fewer masks
The goal is to build environments where masks are no longer needed. A world where people can embody themselves naturally. A somatic and psychological freedom.
That means designing systems that assume Autistic presence rather than accommodate it reluctantly. It means valuing direct communication, sensory honesty, emotional difference, and alternative rhythms of engagement.
The goal should be shifting from “Why can’t you behave normally?” to “What would safety look like here?”
Masking is not evidence of social success. It is evidence of social failure. Until that failure is addressed collectively, Autistic people will keep learning the same lesson; belonging, for now, comes with conditions.
The work ahead is to make it unconditional.
