The Arithmetic of Masking

Masking gets talked about as though it were mainly a question of authenticity — hiding your real self, performing normality. That is true, and it is also not the most useful frame for someone trying to decide what to change on a Tuesday.

The more actionable version: masking is work, it is metabolically expensive, and it is billed to an account that has to be settled later.

Where the energy goes

In a social or professional setting, an autistic or ADHD adult may be running several processes that other people are not:

• Monitoring facial expression and posture deliberately rather than automatically
• Suppressing movement that would regulate the nervous system
• Translating indirect speech into explicit meaning in real time
• Rehearsing sentences before saying them
• Tracking the sensory environment while trying to ignore it

Each is small. Run concurrently for eight hours, they consume the capacity that would otherwise go to the actual work — and to the evening afterwards.

The settlement

The bill arrives as the shutdown after a normal day. The weekend spent recovering rather than living. The inability to face a phone call at 6pm after a day of being perfectly fine at 2pm.

This is where the arithmetic framing helps. If the cost is energetic rather than moral, then the question stops being why can’t I cope like everyone else and becomes what am I spending, and which of it is optional?

Auditing the spend

Some masking is genuinely load-bearing. Some is habitual and buys nothing. Worth separating:

• Which of these do I do because it is required, and which because I was once told to? Eye contact during a meeting you are not speaking in is usually the latter.
• Where is the cheapest place to stop? Home, generally. A lot of people mask hardest where it costs most and matters least.
• What would I need in place to unmask somewhere specific? Often something small and concrete: a camera-off norm, a chair facing away from the door, a walking meeting instead of a seated one.
• Where is the recovery time, and is it protected? If it only exists in the gaps left over, it does not exist.

None of this requires disclosing anything to anyone. It is a spending review, and most people find at least one line item they were paying for out of habit.