Thoughts on Autism – Masking

Preface

I know not everyone can mask, but this is about my experience, and I can mask.

Many people who write about autism have the tendency to try and speak for others, or even everyone else. This will post not be one of them; I acknowledge that I am only qualified to speak of my own experience. Perhaps they do it because presenting their own opinions and experiences as that of others gives them a broader sense of legitimacy or validity, but I find that kind of credibility too dishonest and superficial.

I may use different pronouns (you, I, we, our, etc.) interchangeably throughout this post out of habit (carelessness), but they do not change the fact I can only speak for myself—as much as I’m often also tempted to stray from it and make my opinions seem more important than they really are. If you happen to meet people who love making bold generalisations about such a heterogeneous condition as autism, it helps to know that just because they claim to speak for everyone with autism doesn’t mean they actually do.

I also use different terms like autistic person, person with autism, normal people, neurotypical people, etc. interchangeably because at some level I do want to spite people who are easily-offended, or at least send them the message that this isn’t one of those posts that will further reaffirm their biased views by participating in their echo chamber (it’s actually because I don’t see the difference, but I like this other reason more).

What is masking?

At its simplest, I believe masking can be taken quite literally: it’s just putting on a mask.

It’s just trying or wanting to be seen as someone else, or in other words acting and playing a different character. This form of masking is the most common, and is often also used to disguise other socially-undesirable behaviours such as depression and low self-esteem, or arrogance and condescension. Because it doesn’t (necessarily) require thinking from the observers’ perspectives, it presents itself as a relatively accessible and simple method: just follow the script.

But there is a more complex method that trades ease of use for flexibility and effectiveness: trying to actually simulate others’ minds beyond the basic mimicry and rehearsed scripts in order to create a character that’s able to actively adapt to different situations and appear as normal as possible in most if not all of them. If we were to describe the common form of masking as passive camouflage, then this other method would be active camouflage.

It is much more difficult, it takes a lot more effort, and the hard work may not always be worth it. Often, even a couple mistakes will risk undoing everything, as once people start noticing that “something isn’t right”, it takes a very long time before they stop feeling suspicious.

There aren’t actually fixed ways of masking and others have their own methods (given that it’s usually a self-taught skill that isn’t purposefully taught in school curriculums or courses) but I’m guessing that those who mask effectively (i.e. those who aren’t often getting “caught”) should typically use a hybrid strategy that combines both passive and active camouflage.

As a side note. those who have mild autism and can mask effectively need not even realise that they’re masking. Growing up, it never even once occurred to me that others didn’t see social interaction—let alone the world— the same way I did. I was always perplexed by others, wondering how they managed to become so skilled with social interaction when it takes so much careful intellectual effort and conscious practice, but never managed to connect the dots and realise that others didn’t actually need that much deliberation for their everyday social interactions, let alone realise that it wasn’t normal to need it.

Anyway, by using detailed and deliberate mental simulations to try and reconstruct the remaining of the typical human mind (i.e. the differences between myself and others), I am able to approximate a normal person’s perspective and provide real-time adjustments to my behaviour by constantly monitoring myself in order to ensure that I don’t deviate too far outside the bounds of normalcy and start drawing suspicion from others.

There are limitations to trying to simulate someone else’s mind, and it’s quite a bit like running a virtual machine on your computer: the virtual machine’s capabilities cannot exceed that of the host. For example, if the host machine doesn’t have a Wi-Fi chip, the virtual machine will also be unable to connect to the Wi-Fi network. This is, coincidentally, also a fitting analogy because normal people also communicate with each other using a kind of “wireless network” that I can’t hear, see, or even measure using any equipment.

To elaborate more on that hybrid strategy earlier, it’s a method that involves using the passive camouflage as a default state to cover the majority of social interactions, while saving the resource-intensive active camouflage state for more demanding situations, such as when the relationship with the other person is either long-term or important (e.g. certain colleagues, classmates, or family members).

That said, I don’t like using the passive form of masking if at all. Perhaps it’s because my autism is on the milder side, but I am prideful in the sense I don’t want to be like someone else and am categorically against lying if I can help it, instead trying to just present myself as accurately and truthfully as possible—it’s not up to me to judge on their behalf how others should see me; that’s their job. All I can do is be as honest as possible.

It isn’t the best strategy for making and most importantly keeping friends, but putting on a false persona is technically lying and I can’t stand lying to people I care about unless I convince myself I don’t actually care about them and that they’re not actually my friends, which defeats the point.

Anyway, by using the active form of masking, it’s possible to maintain most of my personality as if editing and cleaning up a very badly-recorded video instead of just using a different but higher-quality video. I can still talk about what I like and say what’s on my mind while monitoring myself and making sure I “edit” any mistakes in advance or cut the video. It’s very tedious, and the end result may not really be the most honest representation of myself, but at least I feel like I’m playing a character that’s unique and close enough for me to still call it “myself”.

Due to being so resource-intensive, I am at a higher risk of shutting down especially in more chaotic situations (i.e. interacting with more than one person at a time), but after many, many years of practice, I’ve become better able at identifying and avoiding these potential situations at advance. It has come with major lifestyle changes (avoiding peak hours) and avoidance of (loud or crowded) places, but I still like it far more than the idea of having prepared scripts.

By continuing to do this, it gives me hope that one day, I may really become a real boy. But, Pinocchio is a work of fiction that grossly violates everything we know about physics and biology, so using it as a reference is likely unhelpful.

Simulating others

You may be wondering at this point how I’m simulating others’ minds since I don’t think like them and cannot intuitively understand the many important messages that they inaudibly send. Fortunately, this subject is very well-covered: psychology is studying how people think.

Luckily for me, I was naturally interested in psychology ever since I was 13, even bringing university textbooks to school. My teachers were less than impressed, however, instead wishing I would stop being obsessed with subjects outside of the curriculum while failing everything that’s actually inside the curriculum.

I even went on to experimenting in the real world to try and hopefully figure it out the parts I couldn’t understand on my own. I would often form hypotheses about how people would react to certain stimuli, then try to verify them by setting up various “experimental” conditions. Needless to say, treating other people as test subjects wasn’t exactly the most effective way to make friends, and it turns out people actually do hold grudges even after the experiment is over. I didn’t get physically bullied much, but everyone either avoided me or asked me to just stop talking especially in group chats. Though… after seeing other examples of people getting beaten up and such… I don’t feel like I can call that experience being bullied.

After a few years, I eventually narrowed the most useful subjects down to linguistics, evolutionary psychology, game theory, and even neurobiology for understanding human social behaviours and why they talk in their funny ways.

I think that being human (as opposed to being a different species) was very fortunate, in that I was able to quickly grasp many things intuitively, such as being able to understand why it’s not okay to shout randomly at strangers (we’re not birds), why we shouldn’t be thrown onto dangerous conveyors and violently tossed back and forth before being stored on dimly-lit racks (we’re not airplane luggage), or why we shouldn’t physically throw people across the room (we’re not basketballs).

In the end, after dabbling in my own research studying these fields for a few years, I eventually became able to correctly and accurately interpret human social behaviour upwards of 70% or even 75% of the time, which I think is a pretty high accuracy, at least far better than the base 50% accuracy (i.e. literally a coin flip).

Modifying behaviour

That still only explains the part about understanding others; it doesn’t explain how or in what way I actually modify my behaviour. The method I use is simple, though perhaps somewhat peculiar: instead of trying to mimic neurotypical people, I try to specifically avoid autistic traits. In other words, I’m constantly monitoring myself with an “autism checklist” in my head, making sure I never pass the threshold where others begin to suspect something’s genuinely wrong with me beyond being just a bit quirky (like the aforementioned “editing”).

Let’s take eye contact for example, otherwise known as staring into the sun. I strongly advise against trying it, but if you’ve ever looked directly at the sun (especially during sunset), you’ll notice that it doesn’t actually feel like it hurts. Yet, for some reason, you can’t help but close your eyes or want to look away. My reaction to eye contact is similar: it doesn’t hurt at first, but for some reason it gives me that same feeling of intensity and makes me want to look away. I often try and look back because it feels fine and have no idea why I looked away, but I end up looking away again anyway.

Luckily, there are many viable alternatives to eye contact. Often, people care more about whether you’re paying attention to them more than the act of eye contact itself, and there are many ways to show that, one of which includes looking at something relevant.

If someone is talking about something that can be seen on a screen, book, or even newspaper, looking at it instead still sends the message that one is paying attention, even without eye contact. From experience, most people don’t even notice that I never even made eye contact with them for the two hours.

If there’s nothing to look at, I often act as if I’m deep in thought, or busy writing something down. In general, any method that shows I’m listening tends to work. This is another one of those things that studying psychology really helps with.

I know that there’s common advice for looking near the eyes, or people saying they like to look at the mouth because it’s moving, but I think people do notice that you’re looking at some other part of their face. Therefore, I think it’s more effective to find a good reason to look somewhere else rather than making them wonder if there’s something stuck in their teeth or on their cheek.

Some people also say they look in-between the eyes instead of actually at the eyes, but that’s pretty much eye contact to me at that point and I can’t stand it. I don’t know how those people can do it, but I think they’re insane.

Closing

By the way, if some of what I’ve written so far seems a bit “jumpy” or inconsistent, it’s because more than half of this post has been deleted due to too much rambling. I’m currently only about 1/4 through the original draft of this post even after cutting it down, but it’s still become too messy to continue so I’m going to stop here and gather the rest of my thoughts first.

This post may have skimmed over some important aspects of masking, such as not properly emphasising just how powerful having at least a textbook understanding of the human mind really is instead of blindly trying to mask using less-effective methods, but it covers most of what I wanted to talk about regarding masking.

I also really don’t like how this blog’s content has been steering towards autism ever since I got diagnosed especially when I specifically said I didn’t want to talk about it after the first post, but there’s still so much more I want to talk about. The faster I finish this topic, the earlier I can go back to writing about other things, I suppose.

Anyway, thanks for reading, the next part should be about something a bit more towards the mental health side, unless I can hopefully figure out a way to cram even more of the full draft into it.