Part 2 — Masking: The quiet art of making yourself smaller

A strengths-based reflection from 🟠 the neurovision group

Masking is the most shared story in neurodivergent life, and still the one most people get wrong.

They call it “faking” or “acting.” It never felt like acting to me. It felt like subtraction. A silent, lifelong edit where pieces of you are deleted in real time so the world doesn’t flinches. You don’t put a mask on. You take yourself off, layer by layer, until what’s left is small enough to pass.

What masking really feels like

It isn’t performance. It’s emergency camouflage installed before you had language for danger. By the time you’re grown, many of us can’t remember what was removed. We just know something necessary is missing and we’re tired in a way sleep never fixes.

How the habit was learned

It starts early and it starts small.

• “Sit still.”
• “Use your inside voice.”
• “Why can’t you just be like the other kids?”
• “Stop making that noise with your mouth.”
• “Look at me when I’m talking to you.”

Hundreds of tiny corrections, delivered with love or impatience or exhaustion, but always with the same message: the volume you arrived at is too high for this room.

Neurodivergent nervous systems are exceptional learners.

We downloaded the lesson perfectly: full volume = risk. So we built a second, quieter operating system and learned to run both at once. The cost is billed later, in burnout, meltdowns, chronic illness, the sense that existing is a debt you can never quite repay.

The hidden strengths we had to mute

Masking only works because we’re working with extraordinary material.

That hyper-awareness that drained you in the playground? It’s the same instrument that spots the unspoken fracture in a team, the quiet hurt in a friend, the risk nobody else has noticed yet.

The iron self-control you used to stop flapping, rocking, spinning, asking the “wrong” question? It’s the same discipline that lets you stay calm when everything is on fire and still make the right call.

The empathy that made you shrink so others wouldn’t feel uncomfortable? It’s the reason you can sit with someone’s pain and not look away.

The constant code-switching and pattern-matching? Pure translational genius. You became fluent in a language that was never meant for you.

Masking wasn’t weakness. It was evidence of capacities so powerful the world asked you to turn the dial down.

What happens when the volume comes back up (Yes please!)

I still catch myself masking. Old habits have deep roots. But now I notice sooner. I pause. I breathe. I ask: “Who am I making myself smaller for, and do they deserve it?”

Unmasking isn’t about suddenly becoming loud. It’s about becoming accurate.

Letting the bounce return to your step, the intensity to your voice, the unedited question to your mouth. Letting yourself cry, laugh, go quiet, light up; whatever the moment actually calls for.

And the relief of that first full-volume breath in a safe room? You’ll chase it for the rest of your life.

Because the whole thing is quietly ridiculous

If masking were an Olympic sport we’d sweep the podium every four years. We’ve been:

• translating ourselves into subtitled versions mid-sentence

• running a secret emotional operating system on battery power

• mentally cropping and editing our own personality on the fly

• mentally photoshopping our own face mid-conversation
• coming home and collapsing like a corseted duchess 

It’s absurd. It’s exhausting. It’s also, slowly, becoming optional.

A place where the dial can stay where you left it

Unmasking alone is brutal. Unmasking in relationship is healing.

We’re building rooms; online and in person; where the lighting is kind, the sensory load is adjustable and nobody’s first response to intensity is “tone it down.”

Places where you can arrive at full volume and be met with curiosity instead of correction. Where brilliance, chaos, softness, logic and joy are all spoken fluently.

That’s what 🟠 the neurovision group is for.

If any of this sounded like your life story written in someone else’s words, we see you.

Your full self was never the problem. It just hadn’t found its people yet.

If this chapter helped you feel understood, you’ll find the full 12-part series, plus tools, resources and gentle support, inside 🟠 the neurovision group community.

Part 3 up next - Sensory load (and why a full-volume brain is a gift, not a glitch)