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You’ve Heard the Word "Mask” - Here's Why You Can't Take it Off!

For neurodivergent, neurocurious, LGBTQIA+, chronically exhausted women and non binary people who are tired of the constant self-monitoring and being told “that’s just how life is,” or “you’re getting old” this is for you. 

Vicky stood in her own wardrobe - looking at her own clothes, her own life, and thought: none of this feels like mine.

Not the clothes. Not the way she'd learned to laugh half a second after everyone else - so as to be sure she was laughing at the right thing. Not the hiding in the kitchen, cleaning, alone so as not to be a burden. And she certainly didn’t enjoy the pain or insomnia either. 

But could all these things really be connected? And what about your symptoms that almost fit the fibromyalgia or ME profile, your IBS and joint issues and unhealthy relationships? Can it really be as simple as living a life that wasn’t meant for you?

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Yes - short answer. And before you think I'm about to get all woo on you, here comes the science. Udal et al. (2024) found 80% of adults with ADHD reported widespread pain versus only 17.4% of neurotypical adults. 

Asztély et al. (2019), in the Journal of Pain Research, followed 100 women diagnosed with autism and/or ADHD in childhood for over 16 years and found the 76.6% of them reported chronic pain as adults with roughly a quarter of the autistic women, specifically, reporting widespread pain across both sides of the body. 

While I’m sure many have been told  it’s  "in your head" - that's five times the rate of pain and fatigue reported by women of the same age in the general population. And I for one know it’s real. And I've pushed two nine pounders out my vag without pain relief so I'm relieved to hear people are eventually starting to listen.

And pain isn’t the only issue masked individuals face, when Raymaker et al. (2020) mapped what autistic burnout actually looks like, masking sat right alongside sensory overload as one of the main drivers. 

And before anyone reading this thinks "well I'm not autistic or ADHD so this isn't me," or "I have endometriosis or hypermobility which are actual conditions that go hand in hand with neurodivergence" hang on a sec. This isn't only a neurodivergent thing. 

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Meyer (2003) names concealment as one of several stressors in his minority stress model. It sits alongside expected rejection and internalised shame. And together predict higher rates of depression, anxiety and substance use in LGBTQIA+ people versus straight, cisgender peers. 

Pachankis (2007) is the one who actually dug into concealment specifically and named the mechanism: constantly scanning a room, editing yourself, deciding who's safe to tell... It drains your cognitive and emotional bandwidth and that drain shows up as depression, anxiety, general psychological distress and in some studies, disordered eating.

Then if your mask came from growing up somewhere that wasn't safe rather than from being ND or hiding who you are, that's no small thing either. Felitti et al (1998) - ok so it’s kinda old but is one of the biggest studies of its kind at over 17,000 adults - found a straight line between childhood abuse or a chaotic household and the leading causes of death and chronic illness decades later. Nothing to do with neurotype. Merely what happens when a kid learns early that keeping everyone else calm is the only way to stay safe. Therapist Pete Walker later gave this pattern a name and you know it - the fawn response - because people-pleasing as survival not a personality trait.

Wherever you’re coming from reading this - and of course there's a cross over - trans and gender-diverse adults are three to six times more likely to be autistic than cisgender adults (Warrier et al, 2020 and that one's a huge  study of over 600,000 people). Autistic adults also report meaningfully more childhood adversity than non-autistic adults (Webb et al, 202). You’ve all, or should I say we’ve all, as a bi-racial AuDHD Queer myself, racked up a pretty hefty  physical tax by our thirties or forties. And therapy that isn’t ‘masking aware’, isn't going to stop everything from coming tumbling down. 

 Read on to discover what I mean by that, but first let’s debunk some myths. 

The Mask Isn't a Thing You Can Take On or Off

Most articles talk about the mask like it's a costume piece. Something you put on for work, then peel off the second you're home in your pyjamas. Simple and removable.

As a literal person it’s not a helpful word because whatever you’re visualising right now - It isn't that - you can’t see it. Masking is a nervous system response that you have probably only recently heard of, it’s not the usual adapting everyone does day to day - such as putting on a phone voice for work. 

Researchers Amy Pearson and Kieran Rose (2021) describe it as an effortful, ongoing presentation your body has to sustain. One that disconnects you from your own internal cues and racks up a “stress cost” the whole time it's switched on. 

That stress cost doesn't stay abstract or "in your head." Chronically elevated stress hormones are already linked to exactly the kind of symptoms you might recognise - sleep that doesn't refresh you, flare-ups that make no medical sense, a gut that won't settle no matter what you cut out. 

In one of the first proper studies into it, Hull et al (2017)  found the same pattern in adult self-reports and concluded that masking or camouflaging isn't a single act, it's a mix of compensatory acts that leave people exhausted and, over time, unsure who they actually are underneath it.

That's not a personality idiosyncrasy, but a body doing overtime. And this performance starts before your memories do. Imagine if you were that the mask is how you built yourself over time. You swapped out parts of yourself that felt fundamentally wrong - swapping with those around you, who’s thoughts or actions at that time, felt right. This may have started with a parental figure or teacher. But after being ridiculed or criticized over and over for merely existing -  by your twenties you started swapping parts of yourself for the ‘right part’ from complete strangers you met too. 

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Ever taken up a partner's hobby - then kept it without knowing if you like it, long after the relationship ends? Or taken your tea or cooked your eggs the same way a friend does? Have you thrown an outfit because it wasn’t complimented? Or worn your hair or makeup in a way that made you feel uncomfortable? Perhaps you’ve felt so embarrassed by your kid on the bus you’ve changed your parenting style as a result? If so, it’s nothing to feel shame about. It’s not your fault as The Lego Analogy will later explain. 

Myth Two - You Can Merely Decide to Stop

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"Just be yourself" sounds lovely, but I don’t know about you - every time someone said it to me I wanted to gauge their eyes out with a blunt spoon. And I assure you, as a nurse, I am not a violent person. I mean what “myself” were they after, for starters!  I had my work self, my family self, a certain self depending on what friends I was with and another self when with my partner - and I wasn’t crazy enough to let them all meet let alone allow all my selves to combine into one person - the world might combust!

Besides, “just stop” completely ignores that the mask got built for a reason. Because being visibly, unapologetically yourself once cost you safety - at a time you were probably too young to even remember. Since then perhaps you can further pin point to other things too - a job, a friendship - many lost friendships in my case. I was 16 when I was told I was “too bulchy” to be a waitress. By 18, I had copied the other girls' smiles and responses so many times in the mirror they became my own. And I got my reward when I left the pub kitchen sink.

 When someone tells you to rip off the mask and “just be yourself” in one go, with no scaffolding underneath, you're not being brave. You're removing a stress response your body installed to protect you, without replacing it with anything to keep your body feeling safe. 

And besides if you don’t know where the mask ends and you begin, which parts of you are yours and which are the camouflage? Not knowing brings the whole of you tumbling down leaving nothing left at all. And you're reading this for a way to feel better, not for a fast route to a mental health crisis!

And even if you do know where you end and the mask begins there's research behind why the "flip a switch" approach backfires too. Cage and Troxell-Whitman (2019) found that autistic adults who switched masking on and off depending on the room - masking hard at work, dropping it at home, back on for family - reported worse mental health than those with a more consistent pattern either way. So while we can’t rip it off, toggling it on and off repeatedly is no good either! 

Myth Three: Unmask and You’ll Find the "Real You" Hidden Underneath

This is the one even well-meaning unmasking content gets wrong.

There's no finished, factory-setting version of you sitting under the mask, fully formed, waiting to be excavated.

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That idea sounds hopeful but it's not how any of this works and chasing a fixed "authentic self" is its own kind of pressure.

Here's a better way to think about it. You were handed a set of Lego bricks at birth, your quirks, your values, your particular flavour of brain. Some people get to build with their own bricks their whole lives  - the neurotypical, heteronormative, white in a white world people born into a safe world, especially if also male. Others swap theirs out, brick by brick, for whatever the room seemed to want instead, until they can't really tell which parts were ever theirs to begin with.

Unmasking isn't stripping paint off a statue that was always underneath. It's assessing every brick of the statue and assessing which ones are yours, the ones you want to keep, the ones you're ready to swap back in. It’s discovering and uncovering you layer by layer while rebuilding yourself with purpose and fun. 

It’s easier to describe The Lego Analogy in person - when you book your workshop time and date to suit we’ll get the Lego out and see in real time how the building could go well and also what the masked version might look like. 

It’s easy to see then too why “doing the work” hasn’t worked to fix what you’re currently struggling with. You are not here because of a lack of effort! 

Myth Four - Everyone's Mask Looks the Same, So One Fix Fits All

If you've read a generic "unmasking checklist" or attempted a Do it Yourself programme and felt weirdly worse afterwards - I’m not surprised! Your mask was built out of your specific history, what got criticised, what got rewarded, what kept you safe in your particular home, school, job or body. A script written for a general audience can't account for any of that. It's a bit like being handed someone else's glasses prescription and being told to just try harder to see. 

It’s why you should never hand over your power to someone else - you’ve been doing that enough already. And it’s why I created The Unwrapping Wheel™ - something you can use how you want, with whom you want and make up your own rules about. Something I share LIVE so that you can get all your questions answered about it. You won’t find it on the internet - at least tell me if you do - unmasking is only something that should feel safe. And with The Unwrapping Wheel™ it doesn’t have to feel so black and white either - you’ll be surprised by who you can keep in your life and still feel yourself around. 

Myth Five - Unmasking is Equally Safe for Everyone

It plainly isn't, and any conversation about unmasking that skips this part isn't giving you the full picture.

An autistic Black trans woman navigating the world faces different risks from unmasking than a white woman in the UK does. Sometimes the mask is a choice. Sometimes, in a specific room, with a specific person. That’s what keeps you safe. Nobody gets to unmask "correctly" by some universal standard and nobody outside your situation gets to tell you when it's safe to drop the mask and when it isn't. That's the whole reason The Unwrapping Wheel™ was created, to help you work out, moment by moment, whether the person in front of you is a genuine choice.

Myth Six - Needing Support Means You're Doing it Wrong

The opposite is true. Trying to do this completely alone is exactly the black-and-white thinking that gets people into trouble. If you’re exhausted from pretending discover how to unmask without burning out in this free, no sales pitch workshop -