Masking is often talked about as if it is either a problem to be eliminated or a strength to be admired. Both framings miss what masking actually is.
Masking is a survival strategy. It develops when the environment asks for more than a person can safely give as themselves. It is not chosen because it is healthy. It is chosen because it works.
For a long time, masking worked for me. I did not know that was what I was doing. I only knew that there was a way to be that made life smoother and a way to be that made it harder. I learned the smoother way.
That version of me was not fake. She was adaptive. She was attentive. She was doing what was required to stay employed, to stay accepted, to stay functional. At the same time, there was a quiet cost. I felt like a pretender even though I was being sincere. I struggled to hold boundaries. I struggled to name needs. My self-esteem was shaped more by performance than by truth.
After I lost my first child, masking became harder to sustain. I dug my heels in and did it anyway. I survived, but it required more effort than before. The work increased. The recovery time lengthened. There was less margin, even if I didn’t yet have language for why.
At that point, I still did not know I was autistic. I did not understand why the effort of everyday life left me so depleted, or why returning to myself took longer and longer. I only knew that I could manage if I was careful, and that carefulness came at a cost.
Years later, not long before my second loss, I learned that I am autistic. With that knowledge came language. I began to recognize some of what I was doing as masking.
Grief did not create that awareness. But it did make the cost unmistakable.
After my second loss, masking required longer recovery and demanded more in return. The more I masked, the less capacity I had for anything else. The container was already full. What had once been manageable became unsustainable, not because I was failing, but because the conditions had changed.
When masking stops working, it is not a sign that unmasking has been achieved or that healing has occurred. It is simply the point at which the cost exceeds what the system can pay.
This is often mistaken for regression, burnout, or weakness. It isn’t.
It is a system responding accurately to overload.
Awareness did not arrive all at once, and it is still ongoing. I did not suddenly know when I was masking for safety and when I was masking out of obligation. But I noticed. I began by noticing effort. Noticing recovery time. Noticing how much I was giving versus how little was left. I began noticing how often I was performing to appease others, even when it took more than it gave back.
At first, awareness arrived as insight. Later, it arrived as limit.
There is a different kind of grief here. Grief for the version of yourself who could absorb more, recover faster, and disappear less inside the effort of being acceptable. There is grief in knowledge, too. Understanding why something costs so much does not make the cost disappear.
Masking is not the enemy. Expecting endless masking without cost is.
The work is not to strip the mask away at all times, but to understand when it is needed, when it is harmful, and when rest or withdrawal is the wiser choice. That is not failure. That is discernment.
And discernment is not weakness. It is the beginning of living within reality instead of against it.
