Hey everyone, welcome back to Left Unattended, and I'm gonna be honest with you right now from the start. I think this episode is gonna feel a little bit different from what you've heard before. I think it's gonna be a little heavier. I think it's gonna be a little more personal and it's something I've been circling around for a while, but I think it's time to actually land on it.

Today we're gonna talk about masking and specifically what happens, um, or what I see, what happens to you when you've been wearing the mask for so long that you can't even remember what your own face looks like underneath. I'm neurodivergent. I'm a DHD and autistic, and I didn't know that until a few years ago.

Um, which means I've spent, well, most of my life, um, being really, really good at pretending to be someone or something I'm not. And the thing nobody tells you about masking is that it's not really a conscious choice. Um, most of us, or at least most of the time. It's not like you wake up and go, Hmm, today I'm gonna hide my authentic self so people, uh, see me.

It's more like you've learned early on that the way your brain works isn't quite right. Um, that the thing that, that, um, I. That interest. You might be weird that the way, um, that the way you move through the world is too much or too little or just like somehow off. And so you start kind of adjusting and little things at first, right?

Because you're probably a child when this is going on. You learn not to fidget in class. Um, you learn to not, um, I'm sorry to make. Eye contact even if it feels, um, startling, um, or like awkward or whatever that may be. 'cause our eye contact is, I wouldn't say we don't like to make on eye contact. I think the cadence of eye contact, uh, from what I read in the literature is just different.

Um, you learn to laugh at jokes, um, that everyone else laughs at. Um, and you don't really get. To know why they're funny, or if you're like me watching comedy, I don't need to literally laugh out loud. Like I, I think it's funny and sometimes I just don't laugh and people around me don't get it. And then you get really good at masking.

So good. So good in fact that people start saying things like, oh, you're, you're so normal. I would never have guessed you have anxiety. I would never have guessed you're autistic. I would never have guessed you have a DHD. Um, you don't look autistic. As if there's like a look right as this, you're supposed to be obviously visibly neurodivergent so that people can categorize you, uh, properly.

But the thing is like you're not just adjusting, you're just not choosing your behavior strategically. Um, you're rewiring your entire operating system to run on someone else's code. And what I mean by that is you're probably a Mac operating on a window system. At least that's how I think about it. And at first it looks.

Um, like it works. You get through school, you make friends, or at least you maintain relationships with people, um, that you don't realize, who don't realize that you're performing. Um, you get jobs, you build a life. Um, and on the surface, everything looks fine from the outside underneath. At least for me. Um, there's something happening that nobody talks about.

You're probably exhausted. And not like I didn't sleep well, exhausted. You're talking about like that bone deep, soul level exhaustion. Um, the kind where you come home and you're just, you just collapse and it's not because you didn't, um, you did anything physically demanding. Or maybe you excuse yourself.

I have a mentally exhausting job. You sat in a meeting and responded to emails and conversations like a normal person, but. You did it while running on Constant Translation program in your brain. You're constantly translating your Mac into PC and then the PC back into Mac. Um, you monitor every single word that you say, maybe unconsciously, not even realizing it.

Um, you've calculated the appropriate amount of eye contact. Again, you've gotten so good at it. You don't even consciously make that choice. You've managed your facial expressions. Um, you controlled your stems. You sat while you were, um. You sat still while you were sitting. Um, so still that it felt like torturous.

Um, you listened to sensory input that felt like it was stabbing you with tiny knives and acted like everything was fine. Guys, that's exhausting. And this is where it gets a little bit darker, at least in my experience being a coach. Because when you're masking that, well, when you're performing that convincingly, something else happens.

You start to believe that the performance you're putting on is real and it is you because you've done it for so long, you start to lose track of what is authentic and really what is a mask. And I don't mean in a philosophical what's, what is authenticity anyway kind of way. I mean, literally, you stop knowing who you are.

I'll never forget the client telling me, like, I just don't even know what my favorite color is. I tell people pink because I'm a female and I think that's what the expected answer is, but I don't even know why I would like pink. To me, that's, that's scary. I've got friends, actual friends, people I genuinely care about, and I realized recently that, um, they've never met me.

They've met the me that I've constructed, the version that's a little quieter than my actual thoughts. The version that remembers to make eye contact in a cadence that feels good to them, the version that laughs, uh, appropriately instead of getting hyper, uh, focused on something they said and derailing the entire conversation to talk about the, uh, entomology of a world.

Uh. The weirder part, the most terrifying part I think about, um, sometimes I can't even remember if I actually like those people or if I'm just good at appearing to like them. That's the harder part of like, do I like this? Or is the math that likes this? That's a really philosophical rabbit hole.

Sometimes that's identity erosion. That's what happens when you are, you have been masking for so long that you've lost yourself. Underneath of it. Let me paint you this picture of what chronic masking actually looks like. You wake up and immediately your brain starts performing calculations. Um, what mood should I be in today?

Um, who am I going to see? What version of myself do I need to be for each interaction throughout the day? You get to work and you sit in your chair, even though sitting makes you feel like you're gonna crawl out of your skin. Depending on the fabric you're sitting on, and then you nod along in meetings while your brain is, um, screaming for literally any kind of stimulation.

Something, someone makes a joke and you laugh, not because it's funny, but because that's what you do when someone makes a joke. You have lunch with a coworker and they talk about their weekend, and you follow up with questions in a way that feels natural and engaging. Uh, when you're really thinking about how much you wanna be alone, how much you want to sit in silence or listen to the same song on repeat, that's me.

There's a song on repeat, and then you get home and literally cannot move. You're exhausted, you're tired. And honestly, you're not depressed. Well, maybe you are, but that's not all of it. You are depleted. You've been running on fumes all day. You've been translating the entire internal world into something palatable for someone else or everyone else, and now there's nothing left of you.

So you scroll on social media. Maybe you are watching tv or you do whatever requires the least amount of effort, um, or energy. And you, you're. Vaguely aware that you're not actually enjoying it, but you can't bring yourself to do anything that requires more engagement or energy. And then you go to bed and you think about all the things that you didn't do.

That's, for me, that's the spiral every night, all the ways that I could have done better. Um, and I lie awake, rehearsing conversations in my head and replaying moments where I might've said the wrong thing or I've acted too weird, and then you wake up and do it all over again. And here's where it gets even more insidious.

Um, you can sustain it for a really long time, years and decades even. You can mask so thoroughly that even you believe that you're fine. And the people around you, they have no idea because you're not showing signs of struggle. You're not, you're, you're totally functioning, you're holding down a job, you're maintaining your relationships.

You are checking the boxes, the burnout sneaks up on you though. And it's not like regular burnout where you can point to the specific moment where you break. It's more like one day you wake up and realize you just can't do it anymore. You physically can't sustain the level of masking required. Your nervous system just says no.

And when that happens, it's devastating because suddenly you're looking at yourself thinking, who am I if I'm not performing? Who am I if I'm not the version of me that everyone knows? And you realize you don't know, and you've been so focused on being the person everyone needed you to be, that you've never figured out who you actually are.

I had a moment like that a couple years ago. It just broke, completely broke me, and I spent three months essentially alone trying to figure out what was real and what was performance. And it was terrifying. I tell you. Absolutely terrifying. So I understand where you might be because there were parts of me interests, um, ways of being, things I found genuinely amusing or interesting, um, that I had completely suppressed.

And when I tried to access them again, I wasn't sure if they were real or if I was trying to find or um, trying on a new identity to say it that way. Like, do I actually love this thing? I think I love, or have I gotten really good at convincing myself? Do I actually want the life I've built or have I been building a life for a version of me that doesn't actually exist?

That's the identity erosion. That's what I mean. But here's what's interesting, and this is where it gets important. Once you start to unmask, once you start to actually explore who you are underneath all of that performance, something unexpected happens, you get angry. Not like I'm annoyed, angry, I'm talking about volcanic primal anger, because you realize how much of your life you've lost, how much time you've spent being someone else, how many authentic moments.

You missed because you were too busy managing someone else's perception of you and that anger that's actually healing. That's your system. Waking up and going, wait, hold on. This is bullshit. 'cause unmasking isn't about discovering who you are, it's about grieving who you thought you had to be. It's about grieving who you thought you had to be.

It's about letting yourself be different than who you have been, and that's terrifying, and liberating and devastating all at the same time. So what does it look like to start unmasking? For me, it started small. I let myself stem in front of people. I fidget with things. I move my body the way I want instead of, um, ways that are appropriate to move.

Um, sometimes I, I do, I lean back and forth in my chair and I used to try to suppress that, and now I'm like, you know what? I'm just gonna be me. I started saying no to things. Um, I didn't actually want to do, even when saying no felt rude or inconvenient to someone else. I let conversations derail into tangents about things I am actually interested in instead of steering back to what other people want to talk about.

Um, I told people that fluorescent lights hurt my eyes and I can't be in those spaces. I told people that small talk is actually a form of psychological torture for me. I told people the truth about how my brain works, and here's what happened. Some people left some relationships, couldn't handle the real me, and that hurt, and that hurt a lot.

But the people who stayed, they actually know me now and I actually know them because I'm not so busy performing that I can't have a genuine interaction. The thing about unmasking is that. It's not like you flip a switch and suddenly you're not masking anymore. It's kind of a process, um, and it's ongoing because the world is still going to require you to moderate yourself sometimes.

Sometimes it's just not safe to be who you authentically are. You still have to function in systems that are not built with how your brain works. But there's a difference between choosing to adapt to a specific moment and unconsciously performing all of the time. There's a difference between code switching strategically and losing yourself in that process.

Unmasking is about kind of reclaiming yourself. It's about saying, I'm going to let people see who I actually am, and if they can't handle it, that's information I need to know about them.And it's about being okay with being too much, too loud, too quiet, too scattered, too focused, too weird, too anything really. So instead of constantly trying to figure out or file yourself down to fit into spaces that they were never designed for you anyway, but here's the part that nobody really talks about.

Unmasking as lonely as hell. When you've been masking forever, your entire, entire social uh, infrastructure is built on performance. Your friends know the performed version. Your family knows the performed version. Your coworkers definitely know the performed version. And when you start showing up differently, when you start expressing yourself more authentically, it can feel like you're losing people.

In a way you are, you're losing the relationships that were built on the false version of you. And that's grief. That's real grief. You're grieving the loss of people and connections that were never actually authentic to begin with, which is its own kind of heartbreak. I wanna talk about the burnout specifically, because I think that's where a lot of neurodivergent people are right now, and I see that specifically in veterinary medicine.

We're not talking enough about. And they don't even know what it is. You know that moment, maybe you're in it right now, where you just can't, you can't mask anymore. Your nervous system says no. Your body says no. Your soul says no, and you don't understand why you've been managing it fine for years. So what's different now?

What's different is that you hit a wall, you've exceeded capacity, and you've been pushing yourself for so long that maintaining this performance, managing your energy so carefully, you finally just ran out, and your system is shutting down to protect you. And here's what's cruel about it. The shutdown feels like depression or anxiety or laziness, or a character flaw.

Or you keep pushing. You try harder and harder and harder, you mask even more intensely. You beat yourself up for not being able to keep going the way you have been. And then it gets worse because burnout from chronic masking isn't something you can just rest away. You could sleep for months and still be exhausted because the exhaustion isn't physical, it's existential.

It's your nervous systems. Way of saying, I can't do this anymore. I don't understand this at, I didn't understand this at first. I thought I was depressed. I thought something was wrong with me more than neuro diversions. I mean, I thought I had failed life somehow, and I even went. On depression meds that never worked.

I tried several and they never really worked, but what was actually happening was that I was burning out. I had reached the absolute limit of what I could sustain while masking and my body was forcing me to stop. And when I finally let myself stop, when I finally let myself be what I actually am instead of what I thought I needed to be, that's when I.

I started to actually recover, not immediately, because recovery is slow. Recovery is messy as hell. Recovery means sitting with a lot of grief and anger and confusion, but it's also the only path to actually becoming yourself. So what does it look like to find your authentic self? When you've been masking for that long, it's not like suddenly you know exactly who you are.

It's more like you start to notice. You notice what actually brings you joy versus what you thought you were supposed what was supposed to bring you joy. You notice what energizes you versus what you've convinced yourself you've liked. You notice the things that you do feel like coming home for me, that that was like admitting I'm more introverted than I thought.

I thought I was quite extroverted. I am now leaning towards, I'm an introvert. Um, not quiet. I'm actually pretty chatty. Um, but I need significantly more alone time than the performed version of me I was willing to take on before it was discovering that I have actual genuine interests that I'd buried so deep I'd forgotten about them.

Weird interests, like specific interests, the things I used to hide because they weren't cool or relatable enough. I was realizing that I don't actually have to be good at everything, that I can genuinely, authentically be bad at things, and that's okay that you don't have to perform competence all of the time.

It was learning that the exhaustion, I felt wasn't a personal failing. It was more of a signal. It was like my nervous system was telling me that I was living in a way that wasn't sustainable for my own brain. Processing, how it actually processes. And here's what's wild, once you start actually being yourself, once you let that mask slip, you're just, you and people really respond to that.

They may not like it. That's information that you need, but the people who do they actually like you, not the performance. You. And you know what I found profound is that imposter syndrome starts to dwindle. And that's a completely different experience. That's what real connection feels like. I wanna be real about this.

Finding your authentic self, um, after years of masking is not just a good a feel good journey. It's also about reckoning with what you've lost. You've lost time. You lose relationships and experiences and opportunities. Parts of yourself that maybe got buried, you'll never fully recover. That's grief.

That's real, legitimate grief. And then there's anger. Anger at the systems that made you feel like you had the mask. Anger at the people who couldn't accept you as you are anger at yourself for believing that you had to earn acceptance through performance. Some of the anger needs to be felt. It needs to be sat with because it's pointing to something true that you are never the problem.

Your brain wasn't the problem. The world just wasn't built for how you work. And here's the thing I think that's important to say that I want you to hear. Um, if you're in the middle of burnout right now, if you're exhausted and don't know why, if you're stand, uh, starting to realize that maybe you've been masking, you didn't fail.

You didn't break. You've just reached your limit or your capacity and reaching that limit is actually information. It's your nervous system saying this isn't working. The path isn't sustainable for who I am. And I know this feels catastrophic. I know it feels like everything you built is now suspect. If I was masking at work, does that mean my whole career is a lie?

If I was masking in my relationship, are those even real? And the answer is complicated. Some of it was probably real. And you can perform and still genuinely care about people you can mask and still be competent in your job. What's also true is that you were doing all of this while maintaining, uh, and managing that constant exhausting process of translation from PC to Mac, Mac to pc, like we talked about earlier, and you were doing it while parts of yourself were just dormant, not expressed, or just not fully alive.

So when the burnout hits, when the system finally says no, it's a sign that. You failed. It's not a sign that you failed. It's a sign that you deserve better, that you deserve to live in a way that doesn't require constant performance. Let me circle back to something I said at the beginning. You wake up one day and you realize you just can't do it anymore.

You've hit that wall and you think, who am I if this is not the person everyone knows? And the terrifying beautiful answer is you don't know yet. You get to find out, you get to experiment all over again. You get to try things. You get to be weird and specific and too much and not enough, and exactly enough for yourself.

You get to discover that maybe the thing you thought you should, um, want aren't actually what you. That maybe you're allowed to want something different. You get to grieve what you've lost, feel the anger about what you had to hide, and then slowly, so slowly sometimes start to become yourself. And that process is messy.

It's not linear. Some days you'll unmask and feel liberated. Some days you'll unmask and feel exposed and shamed, and some days you go right back to masking because you're exhausted and you need, you just need to need a break. Of that self-discovery and all of that is okay. All of that is part of becoming yourself.

Here's another thing, there's no perfect version of yourself waiting for you. On the other side of unmasking. There's just. Frankly, you flawed, um, specific. Sometimes too much, sometimes not enough, genuinely authentically you. And once you've tasted that, once you've felt what it's like to be seen for who you actually are, you can't really go back to the full performance.

Oh, you'll, you're gonna mask sometimes again, we talked about safety and masking sometimes keeps you safe. You'll still code switch. You'll still moderate yourself in certain situations, but it's a different, it's different to me. It's very different when you have that choice. It's different when you know who you are underneath, and it's not a default setting.

So if you're listening to this and you're recognizing yourself, if you're in that burnout, if you're just starting to realize you've been masking, if you've, you're just grieving that person you thought you had to be, I want you to know. This is survivable. It's brutal and it's messy and it's completely lonely at times, but it's also the beginning of actually becoming yourself, and that is so worth it.

That's it for this episode. That's one. This is one going to sit with you, I think, and if it does, if it brings something up. You don't have to do anything with it right now. Just let it sit. Let yourself feel whatever's coming up. And if you're in the thick of burnout, if you're in the middle of realizing you've been masking, um, be gentle with yourself.

This is hard work. This is soul work. So thank you for sitting with me. I.