Comment by f0e4c2f7

I've gotten much farther in life by masking it to some extent. Those gains in life allowed me more freedom overall and let me do more of what I enjoy.

"Just be yourself" is a good message in a movie, but everyone has to play a role to some extent to get where they want to be.

> If you're autistic, don't mask. Live authentically as yourself and find people who love you for who you are.

No thank you. I very much prefer to remain employed.

I get enough accommodations as it is; society is built on give-and-take and I’ve found a stable medium. My masking is part of that compromise. Without it I would just be entitled.

Masking doesn't (only) mean presenting as 100% neurotypical with the goal of others not even realizing you're autistic. It's also what you call any amount emotional labor you go through, trying to decrease the amount of emotional labor that other people have to expend on dealing with the ways you would, if not masking, approach interactions/tasks/etc differently.

If you imagine neurotypical and autistic as two "languages", then masking is when an autistic person is going to the effort to speak the neurotypical language, so as to remove the burden from neurotypical people of having to parse the autistic language. Most of the time, unless the interaction is very short and one-shot, the autistic person will still come off as speaking the neurotypical language "as a second language" rather than speaking it "fluently"; but it is the lived experience of many autistic people that this is still less disruptive in mixed company than just letting go and going full native autistic and expecting neurotypical people to be the ones to adapt. (Even in SF, a randomly-selected group of people often contains a few people visiting from elsewhere, who have never interacted with [non-masking] autistic people before, and so have never learned to "speak" autistic.)

Which is not to say that it isn't nice to find other autistic people to hang out with, where you can just let your hair down and "speak your native language" together! But it's not like this is something people avoid doing, if they get the chance. It's just that in most places in the world, you're rather unlikely to stumble into groups consisting solely of autistic people. (Except maybe in engineering-led tech companies!)

Am AuDHD.

To be direct: this is a recipe for failure in a neurotypical world.

I agree with you with regard to the resulting personal relationship quality. However, there is a *massive* practical/economic cost.

I worked in Tech for 30 years. Burned out hard. Then I got my autism diagnosis.

I lived sincerely. I was punished for it.

I then tried to conform—masking before I quite knew what it was. I just knew that it required enormous effort to remain "composed".

Nope, still punished. The mask wasn't good enough.

Not only that, I began to loathe who I was becoming because of the mask. And I saw the added cost of how it was wrecking my marriage.

I'm now into year 3 (2.33) into unemployment with no idea what's next. I just know that it can't involve any masking whatsoever.

And that, in of itself, means I will be far "less successful" in this neurotypical world.

For clarity, I am not autistic (as far as I am aware) but I do have personality traits and quirks that absolutely have made my life challenging. As I have gotten older I have learned to mask those traits and it has led to far more success in life. While I still have trouble maintaining relationships, I at least can curate a professional reputation that has granted me benefits.

I am not saying this to claim that those with autism should mask, but I think the advice in this comment could be misinterpreted. While we should all be able to live as authentic selves, the reality is that this comes with trade-offs. We should evaluate those trade-offs independently and determine which of our personality traits are worth masking and which are not.

I'm audhd in real life and I've been unable to get to day 3 in this game after 5 tries. I don't know what that says about me, the spectrum, this way, or the way I live my life, but I think I also don't like the premise much either.

Masking is hell, I agree. But the person you are underneath isn't guaranteed to be something that people like to be around either.

IDK if it says something about me, but my first couple tries at the game I misunderstood what masking was.

I thought when my Masking score went down, it meant I was showing my true colors too much and exposing myself as autistic (to the detriment of my career). Took me a minute to realize it was the opposite.

> If you're autistic, don't mask

I strongly agree. Masking is a maladaptive strategy and it's described that way in the literature.

But you do have to figure out who you are and what matters to you. A lot of autistic people spend much of their youth trying to be other people and only really figuring out what they like when they're in their 30s, 40s, or older.

Yikes. I suppose "Just stop masking" is great advice if you're in a highly privilege position where you don't have to worry about losing your job. But that does track with suggesting autistic people "just move to San Francisco," where my crippling disorder is "imitated" in "amusing" ways.

Screw that. There’s nothing inherently good about authenticity. Be yourself when it’s good to be yourself. Don’t when it’s not. Try to change “yourself” when it’s beneficial to do so.

I first learned that it was possible to intentionally act "normal" when I was 12 (I'm now 47). So I spent a lot of years studying people to figure out how to do those things they did automatically but I had to do manually.

Later I learned it's called masking and a lot of people like yourself think of it as bad.

But it made my life immeasurably better.

I hated how I acted and how people reacted to me when I was young.

I wouldn't even know how to turn off the "masking behavior" now and I never would have become who I am without it.

Maybe it's because I was young and didn't know any other people like me but I don't think labelling this survival technique as hell is right for everybody.

That's an interesting take. Most humans have a viscerally negative reaction to unmasked autistic behaviours, in the same way they might react to a strange spider. A mix of fear and disgust. You quite literally cannot build a life for yourself without masking unless you're already financially independent. Once you have enough power and F-U money, sure, go for it. In the meantime it's not really a realistic solution.

> They can find other people to spend time with.

In the context of this game world, that circumstance manifests as the player getting fired from their job. Perhaps a person would like to keep their job and so does things they otherwise wouldn't like to do.

> If you're autistic, don't mask. Live authentically as yourself and find people who love you for who you are.

What does “masking” mean to you? Because when I search for autistic masking I get a really wide range of behaviors from suppressing physical rocking to attempting to learn social skills.

Some masking might be counterproductive or even harmful. Some of the stuff I’m finding listed as masking is just basic being an adult stuff, though. If “don’t mask” means “don’t try to improve yourself” then it’s terrible advice.

I have aspergers (not sure the term is even used anymore) and eye contact is very uncomfortable, but I try to do it (or fake, it as I have to wear glasses and can take them off) because in day to day life not having eye contact when having a conversation is seen as rude and the last thing I want is for everyone that I have a one time conversation with to think I'm rude.

SF, famously affordable for people who have decided to skip success in social, academic and professional arenas. What is this, a trust fund satire?

> You'll annoy the hell out of some people, and thats fine.

Some of those people sign my paycheck though.

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