A couple of years ago, when people still met face to face and large groups were not associated with Covid, I went to my friend Kate’s birthday party. One of the other guests was a more recent friend of hers, Max. Max was an actor. Not a famous one: the sort of actor who got small parts in well-known things on a semi regular basis, and spent the rest of the time working for a catering company. He behaved rather like an actor stereotypically should at a party: planted legs apart in the centre of the room, telling anecdotes in a loud, fruity voice to an increasing gaggle of girls. I loitered on the edge of the group like a stray moon orbiting a planet, and listened.
“We did,” Max was saying in a benevolent tone, “we did have to do ballet at drama school. No choice. Tights and everything.”
“Were you good at it?” Asked one goggle-eyed girl, her gaze wandering to his toned chest and downwards to his legs that bulged in their tight jeans.
“Oh no,” said Max cheerfully, “no good at all.”
“And…what else did you have to do?” An equally wide-eyed girl asked breathlessly. She seemed to be blushing.
“All sorts,” said Max. “I mean, sword fighting. We learnt to do that. Stage fighting in general. Mask work….”
Now, I had taken ballet at a pretty serious level, and the fellow artist in me took “mask work” in its stride. But my inner philistine had a good laugh. Apart from dressing head to toe in black and wandering the halls of RADA clutching a skull and reciting Hamlet, “mask work” seemed the epitome of actorly nonsense.
I had been at the party for almost an hour. The first hour of a party reached is a massive watershed for me: an achievement, but also the beginning of a fierce internal process of negotiation as to when I can allow myself to go home. I had been to the bathroom four, maybe five times and just sat, listening to noise almost excluded from the room, checking my reflection in the mirror to make sure that my face wasn’t decomposing and melting under the pressure of twisting to social demands. I did not know many people there. I smiled at them, it hurt. When they spoke and their eyes locked with mine it chinked and grated inside me like broken glass. A couple of the other guests had loud voices. They swore and bantered and joshed around. They frightened me. I watched them as carefully as I could, trying to anticipate the next jab so that I could duck it, shrug it off, laugh like everyone else seemed to. But nobody at that party would have guessed that my experience was different than theirs.
It is called “masking”, this thing that Autistic people do. Autistic girls do it especially and it certainly is hard work. Kate’s party had been in my diary for around six weeks, sitting there. It took the shape of a charred, black circle when I thought of it. I tried to squash my dread by rehearsing the journey there, planning my outfit, remembering the layout of her flat, formulating the excuse to leave early. When I got home that night, I knew that I would be dropping with exhaustion but so over stimulated that I would barely sleep.
We live in a society that advocates being oneself, being open and direct. So much lip service is paid to letting people see our true colours, our “real” self. As women, we are told that it is alright now – we can ask for what we want. We don’t have to hide anything. But how much of what we are expected to reveal is neurotypical? How much tolerance is there for behaviour that is genuinely unusual?
The National Autistic Society estimates that one in a hundred people are Autistic. Diagnosed Autistic girls are currently outnumbered by boys in a ratio of two to one. Theoretically, that makes me the only Autistic girl in three hundred people. There were less than three hundred people at my ballet school, in my year at my University college. My secondary school numbered less than six hundred: in a ratio of Autistic to neurotypical girls, that makes one and a bit of me.
As I grew up, I told myself that nobody wanted to know how I really felt. Whoever heard of someone who found being with other people difficult? How pathetic to find socialising unbearable. Noise is fun, other people are fun. Once I made friends, I could get away with a certain amount by casting myself as an eccentric. But in your teens and twenties it is difficult to bond with people in the first place unless you party with them.
The idea of squashing your feelings down and putting on a brave face and just getting on with it echoes the values of wartime Britain, of my grandmothers’ generation. But that is what I did. My mask was sociable, it smiled and chatted and was light hearted. It was immune to loud noise and bright light. It understood other people, it looked them full in the face.
Nowadays, I wonder how much of that masking was choice as opposed to necessity. I was ashamed at not being able to enjoy the things that other people did, but because I was in the minority, I reasoned to myself that the problem was mine. So, I tried to be like everyone else. There didn’t seem to be a choice.
The problem with masking is that, over time, the mask becomes fused to your face but is never actually part of you. It makes your life easier only on the surface. You are accepted by other people because you behave like them, but you are accepted under false pretences. The shame at having to mask in the first place becomes internalised, it settles inside you until you don’t even recognise it for what it is. I developed severe osteoarthritis in my early twenties (too much ballet), and I was grateful, actually grateful, because it gave me an excuse not to go out.
Post-diagnosis, I have a name for the reason why I mask: Autism. Have I thrown off my shame at having to pretend? A little, yes. I don’t feel so inadequate because I know that my brain is wired differently to other people’s, and I know that there are other people out there like me. But do I let the mask drop? Not so much. “Masked, I advance,” said Descartes, writing in a time when there was no name for Autism. The truth is that being able to convince people that you are like them is an advantage, and it has become second nature to me. At the moment I am settling for a combination of masking but not feeling guilty, and going easy on myself in the ensuing exhaustion.
I stayed at Kate’s party for another forty minutes. Not my best effort, but decent enough. On the bus home across a beautifully warm, dusky summer evening in London, I remember wondering what “mask work” actually entailed. As it turns out, I needn’t have bothered, because I already knew.
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