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In past workplaces, I was known for being calm, capable, and kind. I met expectations. I was good at meetings. I smiled, nodded, and made eye contact. I did my best at the small talk, had learnt how to keep my tone steady, and how to appear unfazed when the fluorescent lights were frying my nervous system.
What people didn’t see was the effort it took to seem “fine.” What they didn’t know was how long it took me to recover after a day in the office.
I’ve never disclosed that I’m autistic in a workplace. I’ve thought about it a lot. But the risk always felt too high. So I mask.
Masking, for autistic individuals, means suppressing traits that might be perceived as unusual or disruptive. It means forcing eye contact, scripting conversations, pushing through sensory overwhelm, and hiding how overstimulated you are. It means smiling when you feel like shutting down. Laughing on cue. It means different things for different people, but for me, it’s how I fit in.
Of course, many people mask at work to some degree. Even neurotypical people perform a version of themselves to meet professional expectations. But for autistic people, the stakes of that performance are higher.
The energy it takes is greater. The consequences of slipping are sharper.
I often think, how long can I keep the mask on and push through until it falls, and I fall along with it?
In open-plan offices I’ve worked in, there was no quiet space. No option to work from home. I was never asked if I might need accommodations. Maybe that’s because I’d gotten so good at hiding. Maybe it’s because most workplaces were never built with people like me in mind.
I was already out as queer at work, and while that hasn’t always been easy, there’s at least a cultural understanding of what that means. Coming out as autistic is a different kind of vulnerability. It feels riskier, more misunderstood. It opens the door to assumptions, to being underestimated, to being treated like a problem to manage instead of a person to support.
To come out as neurodivergent is to risk not being taken seriously.
It’s worrying that everything I’ve done well will be seen differently. That my capability will be filtered through a lens of doubt or pity.
The truth is, masking helps me to keep jobs. But it’s also slowly worn me down. Most days, I’d get home and collapse, unable to speak, think, or cook dinner. There were mornings when I woke up already dreading the performance ahead. I’ve spent years becoming the version of myself that’s easiest for others to understand, and it’s cost me my confidence, my energy, and my connection to who I really am. Who am I without the mask?
Sometimes I wonder how much better I could perform at work. How much more I might enjoy it.
How much more balanced my life could feel if I didn’t have to carry the constant pressure to mask.
Still, I know I’m lucky in some ways. I can mask. That’s a privilege. Many autistic people, especially those with higher support needs or more visible traits, don’t get that option. They are excluded from the workforce entirely or forced into roles that offer no safety or flexibility. My ability to blend in isn’t the same as being accepted, but it’s often the only way to stay employed.
So I kept masking. Not because I wanted to, but because the systems around me hadn’t made it safe not to.
I wonder what it would be like to work somewhere that didn’t wait for someone to disclose a diagnosis before building in accessibility. What would it look like to normalise flexibility? Offer accommodations? Ask what people need without expecting them to justify it?
Real inclusion means not forcing people to choose between hiding who they are and keeping their job.
I don’t know if I’ll ever fully unmask at work. But I do know this: the more we talk about masking and what it costs us, the closer we get to workplaces where being neurodivergent doesn’t require coming out at all. Acceptance and accessibility would already be built in.