Taking off the Mask.

Growing up, many autistics, particularly girls, quickly learn to mask their autistic behaviours in order to fit in with societal norms and to not stand out. This masking is usually detrimental to their mental health. Harmful therapies such as ABA teach masking and try to pass it off as a “cure” without any regard for the mental wellbeing of the autistic individual.

I can’t credit this picture because it came from an unknown source. If you know the person who made it, please tag them in this post (and tell them to take out the extra apostrophe; it’s driving me mad!).

When I was a child I was lucky enough to never be subjected to the horrors of ABA, yet I still masked my autistic behaviours for fear of bullying from my peers or being sent to live in an institution (a fear I made up in my own head after watching Rain Man). I learned to only stim in the privacy of my own bedroom (my favourite way to stim was -and still is- to flick and twiddle my hair for hours); I could never bring myself to make eye contact, it induced far too much anxiety, but I did learn to carefully watch a person’s mouth and nose while they were talking in the hopes that it would give the appearance of eye-contact;  I was mostly mute at school unless I was alone with my friends because I always felt that my voice sounded “odd” compared to my peers so I was self-conscious of talking and besides, I wasn’t so stupid that I missed the rolled eyes and sniggers when I tried to talk about things that interested me, I decided that it was best to just keep quiet and pass myself off as shy.

As I grew up I masked more and more, trying my best to speak about subjects that seemed to interest other people and to appear as “normal” (read: neurotypical) as possible. When I started college I decided I wanted to try and increase my social circle so I stopped passing myself off as shy and tried to make friends with people. I found it surprisingly easy to slip into one role and then another, I had many large groups of friends but I was never truly myself when I was with them. I would hang around with one group of people at morning break, acting and talking like they did, then sit with an entirely different group at lunch, again taking on their values and social habits as my own, before walking home with a completely new bunch of people and imitating them as I went.

Having such a mixed social life led to some interesting fashion choices. This is me aged 16, if you’d asked me back then I would have told you I was a “goth”! (I think it’s safe to say, I wasn’t!)

I’ve since found out that this social mimicry is called being a social chameleon and is relatively common amongst autistic teenagers. I don’t think I was fully aware that I was copying the people I spent my time with, I truly believed that each personality I tried on was really me. This had a massive knock-on effect on my mental health and today, at almost 30 years old, I am still struggling to figure out exactly who I am and whether or not the things I like are really things I like or if I just think I take pleasure in them because the people I spend time with enjoy them. It’s a very confusing thing to not really know yourself and causes me a great deal of upset and anxiety. I regularly feel like I really don’t belong in this world.

After having my daughter and realising that she was autistic I began to notice how much I masked and I could see how damaging to my health it was: I took stock of my anxiety, crippling depression and insomnia and realised that all of them, to an extent, could be credited to me constantly pretending to be somebody I wasn’t, just to make the people around me comfortable. I didn’t want my daughter growing up thinking that masking was the norm so I began slowly taking off the mask that I had spent my entire life perfecting. It’s been four years since I made a conscious effort to stop masking, and I still find myself doing it more often than not. It turns out being yourself after a lifetime of pretending to be somebody else is not easy!