Thread by @rosieICM

Happy #AutisticPrideDay everyone!
Thought I would do a thread on autistic masking - a phenomenon particularly common in autistic women and something I was completely unaware of until I began exploring how autism in women and girls presents ..🧵

This resource from @Autism summarises masking:

Masking may be described as ‘to hide or disguise parts of oneself in order to better fit in with those around you’ 1/

autism.org.uk/advice-and-gui…

Autistic girls learn to do this early, We are socialised to try and ‘fit in’ with the dominant social group and so may hide our real interests, and mimic the phrases, inflections and body language of peers or characters from TV shows 2/

This may help with social acceptance - but it is work - hard work - to suppress your real self and can lead to absolute exhaustion at the end of a school day, and avoidance of out of school socialising (I was constantly called ‘anti-social’ at secondary school) 3/

In the workplace, women are penalised for not demonstrating stereotypical feminine gender norms - being smiley, considerate, warm and conscious off the feelings of others. Autistic women must learn to mimic all these traits if they want to get on 4/

This leads to us developing a myriad of social ‘scripts’ to allow us to negotiate the variety of conversations we have to hold during the working day. We can often hold them very well. But they are cognitive, not intuitive, in nature and they are energy-consuming 5/

After using up all your energy to get through the school or work day there is little left. This can lead to burnout

Masking can be unlearned but its hard to cast off a lifetime of habits

Personally I know that if I am not ‘masking’ I look & sound like a miserable b@stard 6/

So part of preserving the energy of autistic people in the workplace is understanding that adherence to some social norms doesn’t necessarily add much to everyone else’s working day but can use up *so* much energy for your autistic colleague 7/

So when they see you and launch straight into a question rather than a ‘how was your weekend/how are you doing’ its not necessarily because they are rude. If they have a neutral face, they may not be bored or angry 8/

(On the subject of faces mine jumps from expressionless to exaggerated expression and has led me to receive the feedback from a consultant that I had ‘the most annoying face [he] had ever seen’) 9/

In summary, autistic masking is a set of learned social behaviours, particularly seen in autistic girls and women, borne of a pressure to align with social norms.
It’s energy consuming and can lead to emotional and cognitive exhaustion and burnout 10/

But by being aware of this phenomenon you can make the day to day lives of your Austistic friends and colleagues a bit easier /end