For most of my life, I was a master of disguise – an expert actor improvising a role I barely understood. It wasn’t until my twenties that I finally received an official diagnosis: Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Growing up, every twitch, every awkward silence, every social misstep felt like a glaring personal failure. What I didn’t know then was that these weren’t flaws – they were signs. More importantly, I didn’t realise I had been masking all along – an invisible, exhausting survival skill that shaped my entire existence in ways I’m only now beginning to untangle.
Read More: The Hard Truths Nobody Tells You About Moving Out
What Is Masking & Why Do We Do It?
Masking is the act of concealing or minimising autistic traits in order to appear neurotypical. It’s a complex, exhausting dance of coping strategies used to hide behaviours – like stimming or impulsive repetition – while mimicking the social cues seen around you. It’s like wearing an invisible costume every day: convincing the world, but at great personal cost.
Studies show that masking occurs far more often, and often more intensely, in autistic women and girls. This contributes to delayed or missed diagnoses, as their differences are buried beneath layers of learned ‘normal’ and reinforced by pervasive societal expectations.
For me, masking meant erasing the so-called ‘weird’ parts of myself and painstakingly self-teaching the endless unspoken rules of social life that others seemed to know instinctively. I didn’t recognise my repeated tics or compulsive echoing of movie lines and conversations as self-soothing mechanisms – I only saw them as urges I had to suppress out of deep shame. That shame crystallised the day someone caught me echoing and repeating, and gave me a look I read as part bewilderment, part disgust.
Early Years: The Birth Of An Invisible Actor
When I was very young, I briefly earned the label of troublemaker. But it didn’t take long for me to realise that being ‘different’ wasn’t exactly safe. My strategy became silence. I turned into the ‘quiet and shy kid’ (even winning a few grade-school superlative awards for shyness), when in truth I was simply hiding in plain sight – stripped of any personality that might draw unwanted attention.
My mask wasn’t stylish or sophisticated; it was simple: minimise interactions, keep social encounters short and rehearsed in my head, and (try to) hold some form of eye contact. Yet even these rehearsals often failed. Copying the wrong social cues led to awkward missteps that left me feeling even more disconnected from the world around me.
Slowly, though, I found people who accepted me – even when the mask occasionally slipped and revealed glimpses of the odd. Over time, I learned the ropes of navigating a neurotypical world and managed to socialise more effectively. But with that shift came a new challenge: now I had to suppress the self-soothing behaviours I once relied on, camouflaging my discomfort even as I engaged more.
The Heavy Toll Of Burnout, Isolation, & Identity Loss
Relying on masking wasn’t just draining – it was deeply destructive. I burned out often, retreating into solitude when everything became too much. In those quiet moments, I sometimes couldn’t even speak; it felt like my voice had been packed away as tightly as the parts of myself I was battling to suppress. Alone in my room, all the tension I’d carried through the day exploded – not always beautifully. I wrestled with waves of anger and frustration that frightened even me.
At a particularly low point, I remember lying in bed in tears, silently pleading with the universe to make it rain hard enough to cancel a school trip to the amusement park. The thought of having to pre-script so many interactions, force eye contact, and spend an entire day trapped in heat, noise, sweat, and crowds terrified me. Just imagining being stuck in that overwhelming environment – with no way to escape – filled me with a dread I could barely put into words.
Depressive episodes followed me from youth into adulthood, growing heavier as the cost of constant masking sank in. Fighting so hard to appear ‘mostly normal’ on the outside left me invisible to myself on the inside. People knew my mask – the ‘shy kid,’ the quiet observer – far better than they knew me. But after spending so much of my life fighting against myself, I wasn’t even sure who that ‘me’ was anymore. So many parts of me had been silenced, cut off before they ever had a chance to rise to the surface.
Finding Permission To Unmask
Getting my official autism diagnosis as an adult was a turning point. It gave me a name for what I’d been living with – and permission to start unlearning decades of masking. The process has been slow and difficult: learning to allow myself discomfort instead of gritting my teeth through it, recognising when to step away rather than forcing myself into socially draining situations, and most importantly, beginning to rebuild connection with myself and others by lowering my guard.
Unmasking has not been a linear path. It demands patience, kindness, and a willingness to be vulnerable – with myself and with others. I’m learning how to engage genuinely, how to listen deeply, and how to avoid causing harm, even unintentionally.
For me, this journey is about more than seeking comfort – it’s about piecing together a fractured identity. After years of being at constant war with myself, I finally have the chance to meet who I really am. Living behind a mask taught me lessons about resilience and exile. But unmasking? That’s where real life begins: messy, imperfect, and profoundly freeing.
Born in Korea and raised in Hong Kong, Min Ji has combined her degree in anthropology and creative writing with her passion for going on unsolicited tangents as an editor at Friday Club. In between watching an endless amount of movies, she enjoys trying new cocktails and pastas while occasionally snapping a few pictures.
