The Exhausting Art of Fitting In

What is masking, and why does it matter at work?

Masking is the conscious or unconscious effort many neurodivergent people make to hide their natural differences and appear neurotypical. At work it can look like forcing eye contact that feels unbearable, rehearsing conversations in advance, suppressing movements that help with self-regulation, or carefully copying the social behaviour of colleagues. It matters because masking consumes enormous energy, is strongly linked to exhaustion, burnout and poor mental health, and it hides the very needs that reasonable adjustments are meant to meet. An employee who masks well can be struggling significantly while appearing completely fine.

Here's the thing about masking. It often works, and that's exactly the problem.

The colleague who masks well gets through the meeting, hits the deadline, laughs at the right moments. From the outside, fine. From the inside, they've spent the day performing a role while frantically decoding social rules everyone else seems to have been handed at birth, and the performance has a price. That energy comes from somewhere, and it's usually paid in the evenings, the weekends, and eventually in their health.

There's a cruel catch built in, too. The better someone masks, the less support they get. "But you don't seem autistic" or "you manage fine in meetings" gets said as reassurance, and lands as proof that the mask must never slip. Some people mask for years before the cost becomes visible, and by then it often looks like burnout, anxiety or depression, because that's frequently what it has become.

The goal of an inclusive workplace isn't teaching people to mask better. It's building a place where the mask isn't needed. That means judging work by its quality rather than its performance style, making adjustments normal rather than exceptional, and getting curious rather than judgemental when a colleague does things differently. Support beats judgement, every single time.

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