Someone asked me recently what my favorite movie was.
Simple question. The kind people ask at parties, on first dates, in the awkward silences between more important conversations. The kind that has an easy answer if you’re a person who knows yourself.
I didn’t have one.
And it wasn’t that I couldn’t think of one in the moment, or that I’d seen too many to pick. It was that when I actually sat with the question — really sat with it, tried to locate an honest answer somewhere in myself — I realized I’d spent so much of my life collecting things that were safe to like that I had no idea what I actually liked. What I had were things I’d liked because they were acceptable. Things that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. Things that fit the version of me I’d assembled over years of watching how other people were, cataloguing what worked, and quietly building an entire personality out of the parts that didn’t get me left out.
I had a curated self. I did not have a self.
That was one of the more disorienting things I discovered after my autism diagnosis. Not the diagnosis itself — that part, eventually, was relief. It was the excavation that came after. The part where you start going back through your own life with a different lens and realizing that so much of what you thought was you was actually survival. That the person you’d been performing had gotten so good at the performance that even you couldn’t always tell the difference anymore.
This is what masking does that nobody talks about enough. Not the exhaustion — that gets covered. But this: it hollows out your sense of self. Quietly. Over years. Until one day someone asks you a simple question and you realize you don’t know the answer.
What Masking Actually Is (And What It Isn’t)
Before we go further, I want to make sure we’re talking about the same thing. Because “masking” gets used in a lot of ways and some of them flatten what’s actually happening.
Masking — also called camouflaging or social camouflaging in research — is the process by which autistic people hide, suppress, or replace their natural traits in order to appear neurotypical. It’s been studied formally since around 2017, though autistic people have been doing it and naming it in community spaces for much longer than that.
It includes things like: forcing eye contact even when it’s genuinely painful or distracting. Suppressing stimming — the repetitive movements and sounds that regulate an autistic nervous system — because they look strange to neurotypical observers. Scripting conversations in advance, sometimes running through dozens of scenarios to prepare for interactions that other people have without a second thought. Mimicking other people’s tone, facial expressions, body language. Pretending to be interested in things you’re not interested in because those things are the currency of belonging in whatever space you’re in. Hiding special interests because you’ve learned — through direct experience, usually painful — that the depth and intensity of your enthusiasm reads as “too much.”
Sometimes masking starts at such a young age that it intertwines with a person’s core identity during their formative years. When a child faces discipline for their autistic traits — stimming, asking questions, avoiding eye contact, experiencing meltdowns — they may respond by learning to mask as a survival mechanism. Unbeknownst to them, this becomes their natural way of navigating the world.
That’s the critical word: natural. One of the fascinating and devastating aspects of masking is that individuals often don’t realize they’re doing it because it has seamlessly melded into their baseline experience of reality.
You don’t know you’re performing. You just think this is how you are.
And that is a very different problem than being tired from a performance you know you’re giving.
This Is Not the Same as Regular People-Pleasing
I want to pause here because this comes up a lot: everyone masks to some degree. Everyone code-switches, everyone adjusts their presentation for context, everyone has a “work self” and a “home self.” People make this point a lot, and usually they mean well by it — they’re trying to be relatable, to find common ground.
But there’s a fundamental difference between choosing how much of yourself to show in a given context and not knowing what you are outside the performance.
Autistic masking is often a survival strategy to avoid negative judgments, exclusion, or misunderstandings. It may involve copying speech rhythms, facial expressions, gestures, and topics of interest in real time. The aim is often safety and acceptance rather than social gain. Non-autistic masking is more often about impression management — choosing to present a certain image to make a good impression, without necessarily overriding one’s natural style completely.
When neurotypical people adjust their presentation, there’s still a self underneath doing the adjusting. A baseline. A “what I’m actually like” that they return to.
For autistic people who have been masking since early childhood, that baseline gets overwritten. Many autistic people find that they have been masking so hard and for so long that they have no idea who they are underneath.
That’s not social adjustment. That’s erasure. And a lot of it is self-inflicted, not because autistic people are self-destructive but because the world made very clear, very early, what the cost of being unmasked was. We just paid it. Continuously, for decades, without anyone telling us that the toll would compound.
The Things We Gave Up Without Knowing We Were Giving Them Up
Here’s what the research and the lived experience literature say about what actually gets lost. I want to be specific about this because the vague “identity loss” framing doesn’t capture the texture of it.
Preferences: What do you actually like to eat, watch, read, listen to? For a lot of autistic people who masked heavily, the honest answer is complicated. Masking can mean feigning interest in something to be included in conversations. Learning the names of band members and listening to music so that when other people spoke about them, you knew what they were talking about and could join in. Spending time on hobbies you have no genuine interest in. Watching shows you don’t care about. Over time, you stop being able to tell the difference between what you actually enjoy and what you adopted because it made you socially viable.
Sensory reality: Masking may involve suppressing certain behaviors that are soothing but that others think are “weird,” such as stimming or intense interests. When you spend enough years suppressing the signals your own nervous system sends you, you stop being able to read them clearly. You don’t know what soothes you because you’ve been interrupting the soothing before it could happen. You don’t know what your sensory triggers are because you learned to push through them before they registered as a problem. You’re disconnected from your own body’s feedback.
Emotional experience: Alexithymia — difficulty identifying and describing your own emotional states — is common in autistic people, and masking amplifies it. When your job is to monitor and manage how you appear to others at all times, the internal experience gets shunted aside. You become extremely good at tracking other people’s emotional states and extremely bad at noticing your own. People describe this as feeling numb, or feeling like they’re watching themselves from a distance, or not being able to answer “how are you feeling?” with anything more specific than “fine” or “not fine.”
Relationships built on the real you: Masking creates a structural problem in relationships: the people who care about you are, to a significant degree, caring about the mask. Intimacy requires being seen, and it is hard to be seen when you’re always performing. This produces a particular kind of loneliness that is hard to explain — you can be surrounded by people who love you and feel completely, profoundly unknown. Because they do love you. They love the version of you that you assembled for them. And somewhere underneath that, you’re not sure whether the real version — if you could find it — would be as easy to love.
The Specific Grief Nobody Prepares You For
I want to sit with this for a minute because I don’t think it gets named enough.
When you’ve been masking since childhood and you get diagnosed as an adult, people talk about the relief. The finally having language for it. The pieces clicking into place. And all of that is real.
What’s less talked about is what comes right behind it: a kind of grief that’s hard to categorize because there’s no clean loss at the center of it. Nobody died. Nothing was taken from you in a single moment. It’s more diffuse than that. It’s the grief of time. Of the years you spent building and maintaining a version of yourself that was never quite you, for rooms full of people who were responding to something you manufactured.
“The hardest part wasn’t unmasking. It was realising I didn’t know what I liked anymore — because I’d spent 35 years liking what made me palatable.”
That’s it, right there. That’s the thing.
The grief is also for the person you might have been. Especially for people who discover their autistic identity later in life, it is common to have masked unconsciously for many years, meaning it can be difficult for those people to know what kind of person they would have been and what interests and characteristics they would have allowed themselves to develop if they hadn’t suppressed them.
Who would you have been if, at eight years old, someone had said: the way your brain works is different, not broken, and you don’t have to spend your life pretending otherwise?
There’s no clean answer to that. That person doesn’t exist to compare yourself to. You only have the path you actually walked. And part of the masking grief is mourning a road you never got to take.
This grief is valid. It doesn’t mean you’re not grateful for where you are now, for the diagnosis, for the community, for the understanding. It means you’re human and you’re allowed to acknowledge that something real was lost.
Why High-Masking Autistic People Are Missed, Misdiagnosed, and Misunderstood
I cannot write this post without going here, because the identity piece and the diagnostic piece are inseparable.
Research shows high rates of late or missed diagnoses in AFAB (assigned female at birth) individuals and LGBTQIA+ communities. Women, nonbinary people, people of color, people who were socialized toward compliance — these are the populations that mask most heavily and get diagnosed latest, if at all. Because the diagnostic criteria was built on the presentation most visible in white boys who weren’t masking. And everyone else learned to hide.
Many autistic people who mask extensively report not knowing who they really are — having performed a character for so long that their authentic preferences, feelings, and needs feel unfamiliar. Research consistently shows elevated rates of suicidal thoughts in autistic individuals, with masking identified as a significant contributing factor — particularly in autistic women.
That last part needs to sit. Masking doesn’t just cost identity. At the extremes, it costs lives. The research is clear on this and it makes a moral case for why getting this right — diagnosing people correctly, affirming autistic identity, stopping the systems that teach autistic children that their natural selves are unacceptable — is not a fringe concern. It’s urgent.
Those who believed fervently that masking was necessary and that their true selves would be rejected by others — especially when these beliefs were created by experiences like being bullied or pushed to mask by parents — had intense fears and worries around unmasking, and felt that it was too risky.
That’s the trap. You learned masking was necessary because the world punished you for not masking. And now the world is also, indirectly, punishing you for masking — through burnout, through identity loss, through depression and anxiety and the particular emptiness of not knowing who you are. There’s no obvious exit from inside that trap, especially if nobody has ever told you the trap has a name.
What Unmasking Actually Is (And What It Isn’t)
Unmasking is one of those words that can sound deceptively simple. Take the mask off. Be yourself. Easy.
It is not easy, and it is not a single moment. Dr. Devon Price, author of Unmasking Autism, emphasizes that unmasking isn’t about instantly “taking off a mask” to reveal a fully-formed authentic self. Instead, it’s a gradual journey of rediscovery — think of it as adjusting a filter, slowly letting more of your authentic self show over time.
For people who have been masking since childhood, deconstructing masking repertoires and rediscovering their true selves is genuinely challenging — when masking becomes highly automatic or unconscious, especially when it has led to loss of identity, it can become impossible to unmask or even conceptualize how to do it.
You can’t take off a mask you didn’t know you were wearing. And even once you know, the taking-off is slow and often disorienting and looks nothing like the clean “becoming yourself” narrative.
Here is what it actually tends to look like:
Noticing, for the first time, that you have preferences. Small ones, first. That a certain fabric feels genuinely terrible and you’ve been tolerating it your whole life without naming it. That the specific lighting in certain rooms is not a neutral fact but something your nervous system has been working against. That you’ve been eating the same few foods over and over not from lack of imagination but because they’re predictable and predictable feels safe. These tiny recognitions are not small. They are you, beginning to pick up your own signal.
Reconnecting with things you abandoned. Signs you’re in the process of unmasking include reconnecting with old interests or routines that feel comforting or “more you.” Things you liked before you learned they were socially inconvenient. The intense interest you hid because it made you “weird.” The way you wanted to communicate before you learned the more acceptable version. These things are still in there. They went quiet, not away.
Letting relationships change shape. Some relationships can hold the unmasked you. Some can’t, or won’t. This is one of the harder parts of unmasking — discovering that some connections were built entirely on the performed self, and that the real you fits differently there. Some of those connections will deepen when you bring more of your actual self to them. Some won’t survive the introduction. Both of those outcomes are information.
Grieving and rebuilding simultaneously. Unmasking is not linear. There will be days where it feels like freedom and days where it feels like walking into a room naked. You will find things out about yourself that surprise you, delight you, embarrass you, sadden you. You are getting to know a person who has been there your whole life but never got properly introduced. That’s a strange thing to do as an adult. It’s also an extraordinary thing to get to do at all.
A Note About Safety
I want to say something that I don’t see said often enough in unmasking conversations.
You do not have to unmask everywhere. You do not have to unmask all at once. And in some environments — workplaces with histories of punishing neurodivergent behavior, family systems that are not safe, communities that are actively hostile to who you are — unmasking at full volume could genuinely cost you something you can’t afford to lose right now.
You don’t owe the world your authenticity at the cost of your safety.
Unmasking is safest in supportive, neurodivergent-affirming spaces — start where trust already exists.
The goal is not to tear down every protective layer immediately. The goal is to slowly, in contexts where it’s safe, stop performing the parts of yourself that were never you. To let the real you take up a little more space. To build relationships and find communities where the unmasked version is not just tolerated but actually wanted.
Those communities exist. They’re not always easy to find, but they exist. And once you’re in one — once you know what it feels like to be in a room where you don’t have to run the constant background calculation of how much of yourself is currently acceptable — you understand something you couldn’t have explained before.
Now you understand what it feels like to be a little bit free.
You Are Not Starting Over. You Are Starting.
Here’s the thing I want to end on, because I think it matters.
If you’re reading this and recognizing yourself — in the not-knowing-what-you-like, in the performing-since-childhood, in the strange grief of a diagnosis that explains everything and opens new questions at the same time — I want to say something directly to you.
You are not behind, you have not wasted your life, you have been doing something extraordinarily difficult without the right framework, without the right support, without even the right language for what was happening to you. The fact that you’re still here, still curious about yourself, still asking the questions — that’s not nothing. That’s actually remarkable.
The version of you underneath the mask is not a stranger you have to build from scratch. They were always there. They’re the reason certain things felt wrong. The reason certain rooms felt impossible, the reason some relationships felt hollow even when they looked fine. The reason you always knew, somewhere underneath everything, that you were working harder than everyone around you and couldn’t entirely explain why.
That person has been waiting. Not impatiently. Just waiting.
And the work of finding them — strange and nonlinear and sometimes genuinely painful as it is — is not a loss. It is the most interesting, most honest thing you will ever do.
You are not starting over.
You are, maybe for the first time, starting.
