By Cory Singer
As I have gotten older, I have been unmasking more and more. I’m not talking about masking for covid of course. I’m Talking about Masking my autism. Masking autism means trying to act like everyone else, and hide who you really are in order to live life. Basically, It’s pretending to be someone that you are not.
Not everyone in the autism community has the ability to mask. People who say this have higher support needs. I Have low support needs. Meaning that my autism doesn’t affect me to the point where I can’t be independent. I can talk, drive, have relationships, work a full time job (which has Its challenges, But I will get to that later).Basically, I don’t need a whole lot of help to live my life. A High support needs autistic has needs that need to be helped with, hence “High Support Needs”. There have been many High support needs autistics that have said that masking is a privilege. I can understand why they would say this. But, as someone who has HAD to mask for a good portion of their life, I can say with confidence that it isn’t. Masking has taken a big toll on my mental health. In fact, masking is actually a response to trauma.
I started masking at an early age. I was diagnosed with autism at four years old. There wasn’t a whole lot of good autism information for my parents. Being autistic, I was a very unorthodox child who couldn’t help the way he was. I didn’t even understand why I was the way I was (until my mid 20s) . So when I would talk too much about my special interest, or I said something without understanding what I said, I would be met with frustration from both of my parents. One of the things that made me start masking were the times my parents' frustration got the best of them and would out loud wonder why I wasn’t like the other kids. It hurt me to the core. That was one of the first moments in my earliest memories that made me start masking. I’m not mad at my parents about this. And this isn’t me trying to say that they were bad parents. They did the best that they could and I love them for that.
School made things worse though. For lack of a better term, kids can be the biggest assholes. I am fully aware that they are brand new little humans that are blissfully ignorant to things like autism, and that with time they are slowly taught the ways of the world, but it didn’t help in my case. When you are autistic, you’re different, and when you’re different, you are an easy target. I was bullied as a child. I was a short, frumpy, overweight kid that couldn't help but march to the beat of his own drum. It sucked. But unfortunately that is to be expected with kids. Teenagers, they are even worse. I mean, oy vey! They go right for the jugular. When kids of any age keep making fun of you for your differences, it gets to you.
Now being autistic, I had no filter growing up. My mouth sometimes got me in trouble with the other kids. I would be called a “Know it all”. If another kid said something that was wrong, I would correct them, which was often taken as a pompous insult, which it clearly wasn’t. I was actually trying to help them out. Now that I’m older and wiser, I can understand why this would upset a lot of people. Another way my gloriously big me in trouble was my awfully weird humor. For example, if someone said “I don’t like star wars!”, I would reply with “Well star wars doesn’t like you!”. Many of my peers were understandably upset by this. I thought I was a comedic genius. I also talked a lot, like almost too much. Because of this,even at a very young age, I was called annoying, every single day. The thing is, I couldn’t help myself. And all the bullying, the reminder that I was annoying, day in and day out, understandably had a negative affect on me. This was a big factor which led me into the world of masking. It got so bad that I started apologizing all the time. Even when I didn’t do anything wrong, I apologized, and even that annoyed people. I was afraid that I said something wrong or if someone took something the wrong way. I was, and still am in a constant state of paranoia.
Being autistic, I internalize a lot very easily. In my teens. I watched a romantic comedy with my parents about a grown man with aspergers (outdated term, I know. But that was the term used in the movie) who falls in love with a woman. The woman in the movie helps the autistic man have a more successful life, by teaching him to act less autistic. In other words, she was teaching him to mask. The message that I got from the movie is that in order to be successful, I needed to mask. After watching the movie, I got paranoid. I started asking people if I did anything wrong. This is also in relation to me apologizing all the time. You can imagine that this was daunting and very annoying for me.
In my adulthood, the masking was the worst it had ever been. I got to a point where I had convinced myself that I had cured my autism and that there was nothing wrong with me.The next few years were the worst of my life. I was lying to myself day in and day out, because I wanted other people’s approval, instead of doing what was best for me, which was being myself.
I fell into a state of depression for quite a few years. I was doing things that I didn’t like doing because I thought I had to. It wasn’t until I started posting on Tiktok, and learning about autism from other autistic content creators, that I am the way I am because of my autism. And I was masking without realizing it. I felt a weight off of my shoulders and started to act like my old self again. Now I am in a much better place mentally. So from experience, masking is not a privilege, it is a burden. An autistic person can’t help the way they are, and there is nothing wrong with that.
There are a lot of autistic people who are diagnosed late in life. A lot of that is due to masking. Their parents didn’t understand that their child was possibly autistic. But because people are diagnosed at such a late age, It’s harder for them to unmask. I was diagnosed at four years old and I’m still learning to unmask. But I encourage, from experience, to unmask and be your happy self!