Masking worked for me for a long time.
I didn’t even know I was masking.
I learned how to show up, how to meet expectations, how to appear capable even when I was tired, overwhelmed, or unsure. I learned how to adapt without understanding that adaptation had a name.
It worked, but it wasn’t free.
Even before loss, masking carried a cost. I often felt like a version of myself rather than myself. Capable, but not anchored. Authentic, but also a pretender. My sense of self eroded quietly. Holding boundaries was difficult. Naming my needs felt unsafe or unclear.
At the time, I didn’t understand that autism was shaping this. I only knew that meeting expectations seemed to take more effort for me than it did for others.
What made masking possible then was not recovery, but margin. There was less cumulative strain. Fewer simultaneous demands. The system could absorb the cost longer, even as it took its toll.
Grief changes that.
After loss, the baseline load increases. Grief occupies attention, memory, emotional bandwidth. Sleep changes. Tolerance narrows. The nervous system stays alert longer, even at rest.
At the same time, grief often requires more masking, not less.
Safety still matters. Work still demands performance. Social spaces expect acceptable grief. There is pressure to reassure others, to regulate emotions publicly, to appear functional enough to proceed.
So the mask stays on, even as capacity shrinks.
This is how the container becomes overfilled. Not because one thing fails, but because too much is being asked at once. The effort required to function increases, while the space to hold that effort disappears.
Masking doesn’t stop working because you forget how to do it.
It stops working because the cost becomes unsustainable.
This is often mistaken for regression, burnout, or weakness.
It isn’t.
It is a system responding accurately to changed conditions.
Masking assumes margin. It assumes that effort can be recovered from later, that equilibrium will return, that the cost is temporary.
Grief removes that guarantee.
What was once adaptive becomes extractive. Every interaction costs more. Every day requires more management. And the consequences of pushing through accumulate faster.
This is part of what grief has felt like in my autistic nervous system.
When masking stops working, something else has to take its place.
Often, what replaces it looks smaller from the outside. Fewer interactions. Narrower roles. More boundaries. Less explanation.
From the inside, it is not shrinking. It is stabilization. An attempt to stop overflow.
There is grief in this too. Grief for the version of yourself who could absorb more, recover faster, and disappear less inside the effort of being acceptable.
That grief doesn’t come from wanting to go back.
It comes from recognizing what survival required.
Awareness didn’t arrive because I suddenly understood myself.
It arrived because the system stopped compensating.
When the container finally reached its limit, the cost could no longer be ignored. What had once been managed quietly became impossible to carry without consequence. The strain that had always been there became visible.
That visibility is what creates awareness.
Awareness doesn’t remove the need to mask.
It changes the relationship to it.
Knowing what is happening restores choice. It allows for discernment, for selective masking, for recovery where possible, and for compassion where it isn’t.
When masking stops working, it is not because you failed.
It is because the container reached its limit.
And limits, once visible, change everything.
