Starting to Unmask

I started to realise that I almost disliked - or at least feared - the person I am 'behind' the mask

The presence of my ‘mask’ implies the hiding of my true self. In many ways, a mask has been a protection, a cloak, and a means to fit in without making myself vulnerable to being really seen. But a mask also created more anxieties about whether I was delivering correctly, whether the façade had slipped and someone saw the ‘real’ me.

With my autism diagnosis, I started to consider what masking meant to me, when I felt I masked the most, and where I felt I unmasked. The biggest heartache I felt was starting to realise that I mask to an extent that even I began to believe it, leading me to query which aspects of me were ‘true’ and which aspects were a mask. At times it felt like a crisis, a constant cycle of questioning about myself: about whether I was being authentic, whether I was mimicking other people, whether I was playing a character that even I had come to believe.

I started to realise that I almost disliked – or at least feared – the person I am ‘behind’ the mask because that ‘version’ of me was so infrequent and detached from my day-to-day performance. The masks had become so extensive I felt like a film actor: I had a person for the supermarket, a person for certain friends, a person for certain activities, even a person that I practiced being in the mirror, or in my mind. But what felt less in touch was the real me.

Fortunately, my therapist and I have engaged in many reflective exercises that have helped me get back-in-touch with the person I feel I truly am, but alongside this, I started thinking about how my masking is my own internalised ableism. The fear I had of being ‘spotted’ as autistic had become so pronounced that I have come to realise just how much time, anxiety, and energy I have put into presenting myself as some kind of ‘normal’ by societal standards.

The unmasking journey has barely begun in all honesty. Despite my diagnosis being over eighteen months ago, I think it’s important to reflect on why it’s taken me this long and why I’ve built it up to be such a huge event. In the simplest of terms, all I’m doing is being myself. But when being yourself seems so socially unacceptable and so scary that I’ve spent years in therapy and months wholeheartedly reflecting on ‘who am I?’, it actually kind of is a big event.

Whilst the internet feels like the worst place in the world sometimes, the freedom it has given me to follow other people’s unmasking ‘journeys’ through social media, podcasts and blogs is something I will forever be grateful for. Without engaging with disability studies and the neurodiversity movement, I don’t know if I ever would have had the courage to even start to unmask, despite being so vocal about autistic awareness.

My unmasking journey is a big deal to me, and whilst I hope that one day, for other autistic people, it won’t be a big deal, or even better, they don’t need to do it at all. But that doesn’t change the difficulty involved with taking my mask off and putting it down a bit more. To get through the entire catalogue of masks will take time – as I likely have three wardrobes full of them – but I hope Life as Us will provide a platform for regular unmasking, honesty, and a whole load of rambling.