The hardest rooms for me to function in aren’t full of strangers, and they aren’t full of close friends. They’re full of acquaintances. People I’ve met once or twice, where my small talk (never much of a resource to begin with) has run dry. In those rooms, the mask goes into overdrive. It becomes a running list of questions on a loop: where should I be looking? Am I making enough eye contact? Am I making too much? Where do my hands go? Is what I’m saying boring this person? Am I talking about myself too much? Wait, was that a joke? Every decision, every action, thought through. No autopilot left anywhere. I usually end up standing alone or latched onto the one friend I came with.
With strangers, or with people I know well, dropping the mask is my default. Either you don’t know me yet, or you know me well enough, and the weird is just who I am. It’s the crowd in the middle where the weird turns uncomfortable, and everything gets conscious and clunky to manage. That’s masking: the conscious or unconscious suppression of your own natural traits, done to move safely through a world built around a different set of norms. It’s not deception. It’s a survival strategy, and often a very effective one.
It isn’t only behaviour, either. I have alexithymia, and it took me until the last year or two to learn that feelings are meant to arrive as a physical sensation, not get worked out as a cognitive puzzle. That’s meant a lifetime of sitting one step removed from my own reactions to things, quietly auditing them instead of feeling them: was my happy, happy enough? Was my sad, sad enough? It looks like anxiety from the outside. It’s really just the work of finding the socially acceptable version of an authentic response, in real time, every time.
It’s also exhausting in a way that wears into the body, literally. Neurodivergent burnout affects mitochondrial function, not just mood. At 17, I had a year of chronic fatigue and serious digestive issues, living in a boarding house where I was “on” all the time, the mask never coming down. We worked through diet, exercise, every medical avenue, and landed on a probable IBS diagnosis. The digestive symptoms responded. The exhaustion didn’t. Nearly 20 years later, I recognise that year for what it actually was: an unrecognised teenager in neurodivergent burnout. I still get migraines and digestive flare-ups sometimes, but far less than I used to, because most of my life now doesn’t require the mask. When it goes back up, so do the symptoms.
Here’s the reframe that matters most, though. We tend to talk about “communication problems” as something that lives inside neurodivergent people, as though the neurodivergent partner in a conversation is the one who needs fixing. Research doesn’t support that. Autistic people communicate just as effectively with each other as neurotypical people do with each other. The breakdown shows up specifically at the crossing point between the two groups. Researchers call this the double empathy problem. The idea, formalised by Damian Milton and supported by later work including Catherine Crompton’s peer-to-peer studies, is that miscommunication is a two-way mismatch of styles, not a one-way deficit.
That reframes masking too. If the gap is genuinely mutual, masking isn’t a neurodivergent person quietly fixing a flaw in themselves.
It’s one side of the conversation doing all the adapting, every single time, so the other side never has to notice there was a gap at all.
None of this means unmasking everywhere, all the time, is automatically the answer. Sometimes it isn’t safe, and that’s a real constraint, not a failure of courage. But it does mean the exhaustion belongs to both sides of the gap, even when only one side is paying for it in migraines and boarding-house years instead of just words. The breakdown was never in them. It was always between us.
