Behind the mask

In my last post, I wrote about how autistic people communicate naturally. This post is about masking, or passing, and it’s about how autistic people communicate un-naturally, by pretending to communicate like NTs (neurotypical people). Generally, we’re not very good at it. Autistic women tend to be much better at it than men, to the extent that they are often undiagnosed. But they don’t achieve this without demanding and exhausting effort; none of us do.

Masking is something that many of us feel we have to do, but there are good reasons why we don’t like it. Here is my take on those reasons.

First, and least, is that we don’t like to communicate as NTs do. We find it confusing and uncomfortable. We can overcome this, of course, but it is still hard for us not to communicate naturally.

Secondly, masking is hard work! Our brains are slightly differently wired (connected) to yours, and perhaps the most common feature of this is that the part of your brain that helps with social interaction is wired for some other purpose in an autistic brain. Analogy: It’s as if successful communication requires numeracy and you all have a scientific calculator in your brains, but we don’t. It’s not that our social skills are untrained or underdeveloped, it’s that we aren’t equipped to do it as you do.

So, when we mask, we must use pretence. We try to avoid situations or conversations where social prowess is highlighted. We try to guess what an NT might say in our current situation, and we review the words we are about to say many times before we say them, looking for the interpretations that NTs might place upon them. It’s very difficult, so it’s not surprising that we’re not good at it.

The final reason is the most significant for me, and for many other autistic people. It’s about why masking is considered necessary. It’s as if society says to each and every autistic person “We don’t like you. In fact, we dislike you so much that we will never admit you to our society. As a person, you have no attractive or redeeming qualities, and we reject you.“

Of course these words are never spoken. It’s unlikely that any NT individual even thinks this, consciously. But society‘s response to us, endlessly confirmed by the life experience of autistic people, is as simple and brutal as my words relate.

Please bear in mind that the training, therapies, and support offered to autistic people are not meant to make us happier in society, they’re to make society happier with us. Masking is one of these techniques.

It’s very hard to know that you, as you naturally are, are not acceptable to others, and that you must pretend to be someone else if you want to be accepted. It is hurtful and depressing. Did you know that the life expectancy of an autistic person is 56? If we are unlucky enough also to have special educational needs, this drops to 36!!! The reasons for this revolve around social rejection, and its effects.

“But why don’t you just communicate like everyone else?” looks like a reasonable question. After all, you are a huge majority, so why don’t we come into line with all of you? It seems fair, until we remember that autistic people aren’t equipped to do that. We don’t do it because we can’t do it. When we must, when masking seems unavoidable, we do our best, but we often fail, and we suffer the social consequences.

Footnote: a few people in our autistic community have little or no speech. I have not discussed their difficulties, as they are unknown to me. But these people should not be forgotten. Read Naoki Higoshida‘s books to find out more.

Thank you for reading.

Separated by a common language

The autistic community is as diverse as the neurotypical (NT) community, but in general, we communicate differently. We aren’t ‘literal’, that’s just a myth-understanding; we communicate explicitly. All of the meaning we intend to convey is explicitly present in the words we choose to use. We say what we mean, and only what we mean. It’s difficult to explain this difference clearly enough. We speak and write explicitly, so we don’t make use of implication, which is so central to NT language use. The effect this has is fundamental and far-reaching.

If I speak to you, and you perceive (say) a negatively-critical judgement in my words, that judgement is implied; implied by you, but not by me. I don’t use implication; I didn’t put it there, but somehow you found it anyway. If you find me rude, I beg you to consider the possibility that this rudeness is implied; I did not intend it. This is a major source of misunderstanding when autistic people speak or write to NTs. If you ‘read between the lines‘ of what an autistic person says, you will find stuff, just as we all can see faces in clouds. But the stuff you find was not put there by the autistic speaker/writer.

The thing is, if you used the words that I use, you would have put the implications there on purpose, and the stuff between the lines too. And your intended meaning would intentionally include these implicit additions. Everyone does it. That’s how (NT) people communicate. It’s natural to decode the words of others in this way, but when you do it with an autistic person, communication breaks down.

I think we don’t like implication because we don’t generally lie. It’s not that we’re too saintly to lie, or that we can’t lie, it’s just that we really don’t like dishonesty of any sort. We see implications, and the like, as dishonest, so we choose not to use them.

Every day, we see NT people using implication to get away with saying stuff they wouldn’t say straight out. People say “Where have you been?”, but what they mean is “You’ve kept me waiting for half an hour, and I’m angry! Account for yourself!” And if the hearer has a good reason for being late, they will react angrily. At this point, the original NT speaker falls back on the explicit meaning – the meaning an autistic person would have intended! – and claims they knew there was a good reason why you were delayed, and they just wanted to know what it was. This use of deniability and deception is clear and obvious to autistic people. It shouts out to us so that we can’t not see it even if we wanted to. And we don’t really like it, so we choose not to do it.

From our point of view, NT communication seems, at its core, deceptive, intentionally misleading, and intentionally dishonest. From your point of view, we can only assume you do this unconsciously, out of habit, as surely no-one would deliberately base their communications on dishonesty?

Autistic people use body language too. It’s not as overt as that used by NTs, and it’s a little different too, as we might expect! But it combines with our preference for explicit speech without implication or deception to result in our being cast out (of society). We are social lepers. And the reason is simply misunderstanding. We are not doing (or saying) anything wrong. You are not doing anything wrong either. There is no blame to be usefully assigned here. But if autistic people and NTs are ever to communicate effectively, you need to make that stretch of the imagination to see what we intend to communicate, even though we do it differently from you.

To set aside your natural way of communicating, and to do it so differently that you need to concentrate on doing it consciously? That’s a lot to ask. It’s exhausting to do something consciously, with effort, especially when it’s something you would normally do unconsciously, without effort. Autistic people do this all day, every day of their lives. It would help us a lot if you would try to see what we mean.

Will you try? Please?

The second part of this post, “Behind the mask“, considers what happens when people with autism try to communicate like NTs.

^{4th October 2020 – Minor edits and additions in the light of comments received (thank you!).}