I’ve been starting to open my mind to changing my ideas about masking. A lot of them come from my sister who struggled very heavily with wanting to appear like everyone else and not stand out, so I’m biased based on experience.
At the same time, I recognize that forcing or pressuring people into masking when they don’t understand why would be traumatic to them and ultimately do the opposite of what is intended.
I feel like unmasking should be done in private or around people who will understand it. Unmasking could in theory be done all the time, but not everyone would understand it.
What’s your position on it? Do you mask in public but not in private or around only people who understand it?
I want to work on being more accepting and I have feelings in both directions.
I have a strange relationship with masking these days. I had no idea I had autistic tendencies until I married my wife who has been diagnosed with autism. Since then it has been very rewarding having conversations about how our two flavors of autism differ. One of the things we differ tremendously on is our abilities to mask effectively. My wife has struggled with it, especially as a kid, but it always came naturally to me such that it is now my “default mode” when I am in public. Instead of missing social queues like many people, I find I have the opposite problem where I over-analyze social situations to the extent that I read too much into them and it drives me crazy. So masking has actually been very useful for me in that regard because I feel like when I am masking in public I am less “aware” of how I am acting because I feel like I am mostly coming off “normal” relative to the social expectation.
My wife is also very socially aware but she struggles to turn off her over thinking meaning she frequently comes out of social encounters panicked that she said or did something wrong. Whereas I’ll be so blended into the situation I won’t even remember her saying or doing what she is worried about. We work together well in that regard because I remind her that if I am married to her and I don’t notice her say or do something “atypical,” then someone who doesn’t know either of us well almost certainly either didn’t notice either or won’t remember it five minutes after the conversation ends.
So it is a mixed bag. It has been rewarding being able to unmask at home around someone I can trust and who I know loves me, but I still find today that I rarely completely unmask unless I am literally home alone in our house. That usually manifests in me walking around the house doing chores and things talking to myself about a thousand different made up scenarios, which even as a kid I always regarded would probably come off as weird to everyone else.
I think the most important thing is striking a balance between masking and being genuine. I know many people struggle feeling like they are not being their true selves while masked and others even view masking as manipulative. But I think everyone has a different relationship with the practice.