Frank
There’s a meeting I think about a lot. Conference room, about twelve people, some kind of change management discussion about a system rollout. I’m sitting there doing what I always do, nodding at the right times, making appropriate eye contact, keeping my voice level, not saying the four or five blunt things I actually want to say. Looked fine. Probably looked like the most normal guy in the room.
Under the table my leg was bouncing hard enough to rattle the chair. I had already mentally rewritten the agenda twice, catalogued everything wrong with the proposed rollout, and was actively fighting the urge to get up and pace. But nobody could see any of that. I’d been hiding it so long I barely noticed I was hiding it anymore.
That’s the thing about masking. It doesn’t stay a conscious strategy. It becomes infrastructure.
I didn’t get any real answers about what was going on with me until I was well into my fifties. ADHD. Autism. Both. Late-diagnosed, which means I spent the first five decades of my life wondering why I was wired so differently from everyone around me and coming up with exactly zero useful explanations. You just chalk it up to being weird, or difficult, or too intense, or not intense enough depending on the day.
What you don’t understand, because nobody tells you and the research on adult late-diagnosis is still catching up, is that the exhaustion isn’t just being tired. It’s the tax you pay for running a second operating system in parallel to your actual life. Every social interaction, every meeting, every phone call, there’s a real-time process running in the background analyzing what the “normal” response is supposed to look like and executing it before anyone notices the gap. You get good at it. So good that the process goes fully automatic.
And that’s where it gets genuinely scary.
When the Mask Becomes the Face You See in the Mirror
I didn’t know I was masking during that meeting. I thought I was just functioning. I thought everyone did this. I genuinely believed that the difference between me and other people was that I was just worse at it, not that I was doing something extra they weren’t doing at all.
When you find out late that your brain works fundamentally differently, you go back through your whole life and start relabeling things. The friendships that always felt slightly off because I couldn’t figure out the unspoken social rules everyone else seemed to know by default. The jobs where I overperformed technically and struggled inexplicably with the parts that should’ve been easy. The way loud environments can take me from functional to completely fried in about ninety minutes flat. The anger that comes out of nowhere and scares people, including me.
None of those things were character flaws. They were symptoms I had no framework for understanding.
Here’s what nobody tells you about masking that long: it doesn’t just hide the autism or the ADHD from other people. It hides them from you. By the time I got to any kind of real understanding of what I was dealing with, I had no clean read on who I actually was underneath all of it. What were my real preferences versus my adapted preferences? Which of my instincts were genuine and which ones were trained responses to avoid negative social feedback? I genuinely didn’t know.
That’s not a therapy talking point. That’s a practical problem. I’ve built systems for everything in my life because good systems beat good intentions every single time. But you can’t build a useful system on top of misidentified requirements. I was trying to fix the wrong things for thirty years.
What I’m learning now, slowly and uncomfortably, is that unmasking isn’t a single event. It’s not a revelation that fixes everything downstream. It’s more like trying to read the original source code after someone ran it through an obfuscator for fifty-five years. You find pieces of yourself that make sense for the first time, and then you find other pieces you can’t interpret at all because you’ve never seen them run in their native environment.
The scariest part of the whole story isn’t that I was masking. It’s that I got so good at it that I lost the ability to distinguish the performance from the performer.
I’m still working on that distinction. Fifty-five years old, nearly three decades in IT, two grandsons I’d like to actually be present for, and I’m just now starting to understand why I’m so tired all the time.
Better late than never is what people say. I’m choosing to believe them.
