Chronicles from an atypical mind — Unfiltered and unapologetic
I’ve explained several times on this blog how capable I am of treating a rule like a sacred creed. One of those rules came from the countless times my father scolded me for losing important documents. “Scan it”, “How many times have I told you to scan things?”, “You’ll have to learn to scan your documents.” And countless variations of the same message eventually got through to me.
Many autistic people spend years appearing to function normally in the eyes of others. Yet this apparent normality often relies on an invisible effort: autistic masking, also known as social camouflaging. This mask can sometimes help a person adapt more easily to the outside world, but it comes with an often underestimated cost: chronic fatigue, overload, and sometimes autistic burnout. In this article, I explain what masking really is, why it appears so early for some people, and how it can eventually become a trap.