Mask Off: The Truth About High-Performing Autism

For most of my life, I have worn a mask so well-crafted, so seamlessly integrated, that even I believed in its illusion. I played the role of the articulate, the intelligent, the accomplished. I learned early that society values productivity over authenticity, intellect over emotion, and resilience over vulnerability. And so I became a master performer, hiding my truth behind a mountain of achievements and a carefully curated persona. 

I am autistic. 

Not the way most people think of autism—the stereotype of an awkward, socially inept genius or someone visibly struggling to navigate the world. No, I am what they call "high-functioning," though I have come to loathe that term. It implies that my suffering is more palatable because I can mask it well. That my struggle is less valid because I have learned to play the game. But let me tell you: hiding self-destruction behind success isn’t functioning. Not really. 

The Mask: A Lifetime of Performance 

I was a child who never quite fit. Other kids found me strange, intense. I annoyed them by speaking too much about topics that didn’t interest them. I clung to adults, impressed them with my precocious thoughts, and confused maturity with worthiness.

Being "gifted" didn’t feel like a gift—it felt like a burden, an expectation that I had to be extraordinary to justify my oddness. 

In adolescence, I excelled academically but made reckless personal decisions, walking the razor’s edge between brilliance and self-destruction. I burned myself out chasing excellence, mistaking validation for love, achievement for belonging. My intelligence became my armor, but inside, I was lost. I thought if I was perfect enough, if I worked hard enough, no one would see how broken I felt inside. 

I was a fantastic businesswoman when my life was at its most dysfunctional. I could charm anyone, as long as they didn’t look too closely. As long as they didn’t see the drinking, the lying, the slow unraveling beneath the polished exterior. Society rewards the mask—until it doesn’t. 

At 32, my body forced me to stop. I was paralyzed. My nervous system, after years of being pushed beyond its limits, collapsed. And in that silence, in that stillness, I had no choice but to face myself. I was autistic. And for the first time, I understood that I had spent my entire life performing an exhausting role that had never been meant for me. 

The Cost of Masking 

Masking isn’t just about faking a smile. It’s about shaping every detail of your life to fit into a world that was never built for you. It dictates how you speak, how you dress, the career you choose, the relationships you tolerate, even the way you arrange your home. It is exhausting, and for many of us, it leads to burnout, depression, and a profound sense of alienation. 

I learned to mask my sadness with aggression. To swallow my emotions because, in my family, crying was weakness, and weakness was prey. I learned to perform femininity, mirroring the girls around me, pretending to care about makeup and boys when I didn’t even understand the rules of social interaction. I had to become a caricature of a woman because I could never be just a person. 

When you mask for long enough, you forget who you are underneath it all. You become a patchwork of adaptations, a collection of defense mechanisms with nothing left inside worth defending. And worst of all, you believe that this is normal. That this is the price of belonging. 

The Breaking Point: Choosing to Unmask 

Discovering I was autistic was like finding the missing piece to a puzzle I didn’t know I was solving. It explained why life had always felt like a relentless storm while everyone else seemed to move through it with ease. It explained the social exhaustion, the burnout, the deep-rooted sense of otherness that had followed me like a shadow since childhood. 

And yet, even after knowing, the mask was hard to shed. Because unmasking isn’t just about self-acceptance—it’s about unlearning decades of shame. It’s about questioning every choice you made to fit in and deciding, one by one, which ones were never truly yours. 

It is terrifying. It is liberating. 

The more autistic voices I listened to, the less I saw autism as a curse. The more I learned, the more the shame began to dissolve, replaced by something unfamiliar but powerful: pride. Not the false pride of overachievement, but the quiet, steady pride of simply existing as I am. 

A Call for Change 

Society conditions us to believe that our worth is tied to our productivity. That to be valuable, we must be useful. This mindset is especially dangerous for disabled people, who are often treated as burdens if they cannot "contribute." Even those of us who succeed within these rigid structures are still harmed by them—we just hide it better. 

The more educated people become about autism, the less we will have to mask. The less we will have to navigate unseen and unacknowledged, feeling alienated but unable to name why. Acceptance, true acceptance, means dismantling the assumption that everyone must think, feel, and behave the same way. It means making space for difference—not just tolerating it, but celebrating it. 

Unmasking Is for Everyone 

If you suspect you might be a masked autistic, know this: you are not alone. There is nothing wrong with you. Examining the origins of your mask will help you understand the deep-seated beliefs that have shaped your existence. Behind every mask is a wound—a fear of being seen as too childish, too intense, too awkward, too much. But those qualities are not weaknesses. They are simply parts of who we are. 

Unmasking is a lifelong process, but it is one worth embarking on. Because at the end of it, there is freedom. 

For the first time in my life, I am allowing myself to exist without justification, without apology. I am autistic, and I am done performing. 

Today, on World Autism Awareness Day, I step out of the closet—not just for myself, but for every autistic person still trapped in the exhausting cycle of masking. 

You are seen. You are valued. You are enough. 

And it is time to unmask.