Masking has a cost

Masking is the work of performing non-autistic: forcing eye contact, scripting small talk, suppressing stims, smiling on time. Many autistic people learn it to stay safe at school, at work, or at the dinner table.

It can look like success. It often feels like drowning quietly. After a masked day, the bill arrives as exhaustion, shutdown, or a delayed flood of feeling at home — the only place the mask can drop.

Girls, women, and people who were socialised to be agreeable are often missed because their mask is so practised. So are people of colour, whose behaviour is more likely to be read as defiance instead of difference.

Do not praise someone for “not seeming autistic”. That praise is a request to keep hurting. The gift is a room where they do not have to.