What does it mean to mask, and who have you allowed to be so important to you or your goal that you mask for them? That is about as difficult as any question can be. Answering it is what Steven Johnson calls a slow hunch. Slow hunches are not crystal clear immediate breakthroughs. They are ideas or personal discoveries too hard to tackle all at once. This question falls into that range because you need to be honest with yourself before you can even start.
As individuals we do not want to willingly admit that we are lower in social rank than someone else. Then again, I cannot say everyone is like me, so let me reframe that. I do not like to admit that someone is above me. Even saying this now, I want to immediately defend my statement. I want to do that. I am not going to. This is part of the self observation process. Once I admit I am uncomfortable with others holding a superior position to me, I have to ask where they hold it.
Work. Gym. Education. Social media followers. The list goes across every aspect of my life. Once it starts, it extends to the lives of those I value too. Left unchecked, this thought becomes a destructive one. Putting yourself in an unbiased and frankly humbling hierarchy of life shows you one undeniable truth. We do not just have one mask. We do not just mask a single condition or handicap.
I have watched this in my own life. The mask I built for dyslexia never stayed in its lane. It bled into how I handled deadlines, how I showed up at the gym, how I talked about myself online. I have never seen a study prove that one mask hides behind another like a nesting doll, and I am not going to pretend I have. This is what I noticed watching myself.
Our masks are not just covering our faces. They are covering us. Those around you are like clothes to you, and you are clothes to them. You wear one another to benefit yourselves. When the situation changes, so do those around you. If you are reading this and disagreeing with me, thank you. You will get the most from this because you will challenge the thought and do real thinking, the kind of thinking where your thoughts perish instead of you. The point is that you and who you think you are are not one and the same. In the context of this piece, that means we also mask ourselves from ourselves. We faked it to make it, but faking it required believing the character enough to make it believable to others.
How did this play out in my life? It burned me out. I was exhausted from a lifetime of masking dyslexia with jokes, job hopping, and hours of learning that never felt like it earned me any rest. I looked up to Dan Gable, Savion Glover, teams that were down on points when I started watching the game. I looked up to people who were not wearing the outfit I was wearing. People with the innate drive to show up when no one was watching. I did not know they were wearing the same mask.
We were lost in working to be better, never knowing when we had gotten better, because that version of better was only the prerequisite for the next level, and the level after that stayed hidden until we arrived. Two would become one, so three was just a carrot we could smell but never see through the fog. Psychologists have a name for part of this. They call it hedonic adaptation, the tendency to return to the same emotional baseline no matter how far we climb. The goalposts do not stay still. You clear one and the next one is already waiting.
The cost of masking is an unfulfilled life. We all want to stop masking, but how often are we proud enough of the naked image in a mirror to walk freely in public like that? Never. We will never walk naked because it is unsafe, so let me drop the shock value and answer more honestly. When do we become confident enough to dress confidently?
We become confident enough over time. Over time we change something as trivial as underwear no one will ever see. Feeling that new cut or cloth against a naked, more confident self becomes an armor we extend to the socks, then the accent items. Next comes a different material in the same color pants, until it becomes new pants. Then the shirt changes too. The shirt is where everything shifts.
Shirts are noticeable. They get questioned and covered up the easiest. Researchers at Cornell and the University of Michigan who study code switching among Black professionals found the same pattern in a completely different context. The more visible the difference, the more it gets policed, and the more it costs the person managing it to keep managing it. If you change the shirt before the confidence is there, unconfident people will tease and confident people will compliment, and it will be nearly impossible to tell the two apart. If you wait too long to change it once the confidence exists, you will stand out just the same, and earn the same reverse compliment as clowning. Putting the shirt on just a moment before you are truly ready is the moment you become truly ready.
This is the real mask. Everything you put on, from underwear to the crown of your head. What you put on your face changes nothing about how you present yourself. It takes away from everything else. The unmasked individual knows they have a place in society. Below some. Above others. Eye to eye with all. They see life as the marathon it is.
Here is what masking actually looked like for me. Studying alone the night before a group class so I could seem like I had kept up. Nobody saw the studying. They only saw the keeping up. Researchers call this compensation, using an invisible route to arrive at a visible outcome that looks like everyone else’s. The effort disappears. Only the result survives.
The unmasked person knew they woke wearing one set of clothes, worked in another, worked out in something different still, then met friends for dinner while putting on or taking off an accent item, then went home and changed again to sleep. Only they know if they will wear the same thing to sleep tonight as last night, or something else entirely. Only they have seen themselves naked through every transition. Only they know how confident they truly are in the mirror, or what it cost them to get there.
That cost is not just a feeling I have. A team at University College London followed hundreds of autistic adults and found that the more someone camouflaged, the more anxiety and depression symptoms they carried. It was not a huge jump, and it does not prove the masking causes the harm rather than reflects it. But it is a real thread researchers keep finding in different rooms with different people. When I say the cost is an unfulfilled life, I mean something science is starting to circle, even if it has not landed the plane yet.
References
Brickman, P., & Campbell, D. T. (1971). Hedonic relativism and planning the good society. In M. H. Appley (Ed.), Adaptation-level theory: A symposium (pp. 287–305). Academic Press.
Hull, L., Levy, L., Lai, M.-C., Petrides, K. V., Baron-Cohen, S., Allison, C., Smith, P., & Mandy, W. (2021). Is social camouflaging associated with anxiety and depression in autistic adults? Molecular Autism, 12(13). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13229-021-00421-1
Johnson, S. (2010). Where good ideas come from: The natural history of innovation. Riverhead Books.
Livingston, L. A., Shah, P., & Happé, F. (2019). Compensatory strategies below the behavioural surface in autism: A qualitative study. The Lancet Psychiatry, 6(9), 766–777.
McCluney, C. L., Robotham, K., Lee, S., Smith, R., & Durkee, M. (2019, November 15). The costs of code-switching. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-costs-of-codeswitching
A note on what’s behind each one
- Brickman & Campbell is the original source for hedonic adaptation. I could not locate a freely accessible full text of this 1971 book chapter anywhere I searched. It’s cited by title and author only, not quoted or paraphrased in detail. If you want to verify it directly, you’d need library or database access.
- Hull et al. is open access, no paywall, fully verified from the document you provided.
- Johnson is a trade book, not a journal article. No paywall issue, but I have not read the full book, only excerpts and summaries via search. The “slow hunch” attribution is accurate based on multiple independent secondary sources describing the same concept and page location.
- Livingston, Shah & Happé is the primary compensation-strategies paper I found in earlier searches to support the studying-alone anecdote. I have not fetched or verified its full text directly, only its abstract via search snippets. Flagging this since it’s the one reference in this list I have not personally confirmed beyond a secondary citation trail.
- McCluney et al. is fully verified, full text fetched directly from HBR, no paywall encountered.
Leave a Reply