Life with Aspergers

Masking is one of the most crucial skills that autistic people develop. We learn to mask at an early age simply by copying our peers so that we become less of a target for bullies. In our working lives, we mask to become "one of team", to keep our jobs, to avoid being singled out and to avoid becoming the subject of gossip and speculation. It's no exaggeration to say that for an autistic person, the ability to mask is a life-saver.  It is well established that very young autistics mask quite poorly and that as a general rule, our ability to mask improves as we get older, so that by the time they are adults in the workforce, many autistic people can pass undetected as "normal", most of the time.  What's less established is that as autistic people pass middle-age, they mask less. This doesn't seem to be the loss of an ability so much as a choice, or perhaps simply the result of tiredness. Masking is, after all a very exhausting activity. While masking is v...

Masking in terms of autism and Asperger's syndrome is a way of hiding your true self from others as a means of fitting in and avoiding harm. It can best be summed up as "pretending to be normal". In this post, I want to talk about some of the ways that we mask, why it is necessary sometimes and why ultimately you need to minimize masking in your life. How do we mask? It's often said that people with Asperger's syndrome are great actors because they spend so much of their lives pretending to be someone that they are not.  Masking is a very normal activity and everyone masks in some form or other. The teen who loves classical music but listens to rock in front of their school friends is masking their musical taste. The guy who eats all his vegetables at his girlfriends place but never at home is masking for her parents, so that they will like him more. We mask whenever we put on clothing that is not us, wear makeup that we don't like or put effort into making ou...