In Praise of Masking

Let's stop treating "masking" as a blanket negative, and start thinking about how to balance our individual differences against the health and strength of the collective we contribute to.

Note: if the algorithm God has seen fit to smile upon me, and you’ve stumbled across this post with no prior knowledge of the term “masking” as used by the ADHD, AuDHD and ASD community, “masking” refers to the ways in which neurodiverse people are required to “act normal” or “perform” in order to fit in with the world.

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Look around you.

Yes, right now. If you’re at home, crack the curtains and watch the street a moment. If you’re on the train, do a quick visual sweep. Observe the office. Peer across the park.

Right now, everywhere around you, all over the world, people are masking. Kids are nodding glassy-eyed along to Mom’s latest lecture, grinding the urge to bite back between their teeth. Suits are sitting serenely in HR trainings, silently imagining the more useful things they could be doing with their time — like reading terms and conditions or gargling broken glass. People at parties are politely asking about their friends’ promotions and pets and kids and colonoscopies, suppressing the urge to rave on about themselves and their own favourite topics. Beekeeping perhaps, or AI, or their own kids, or how Freud was actually bang-on correct about quite a lot (GUILTY).

I’m writing this in my friendly neighbourhood dive, watching the bartender mask as someone talks his face off loudly about IPAs. Then it’s my turn to mask, as a server interrupts my flow to ask if I’d like to order anything else. My first instinct is to huff rudely, which I am not going to do because people doing their jobs attentively and warmly don’t deserve to get chewed out for it. Is this tiny slice of human relating tougher for me to manage than it is for a neurotypical person? Probably. Because I have ADHD it’s hard for me to regain my train of thought, I get internally frustrated by seemingly small things, and once I get distracted there’s a very good chance I won’t return to what I was doing.¹ Especially if I impulsively decide to order the 7% peanut butter stout.

As much as it feels amazing to “unmask”, like shedding tight itchy pants after a long, muggy working day, you need to keep them on in public. Nobody likes wearing them, but we agree to do it collectively for very good reasons. While some of those reasons are superfluous and unhelpful (and deserve critique), many of them are vital, worth more to us collectively than the individual joy of letting everything hang out and fly free.

Because here’s the thing: the world runs on masking. It’s what separates us from monkeys and raccoons and amoebas.

Bear with me before you hit ‘unsubscribe’, please. I promise I don’t mean it the way you think I do, and I’m not talking about the ways in which you have personally been harmed, twisted and warped by what masking has demanded of you.

I understand. Believe me, I do. But…