You know which version I mean.
The one that arrives first in a new room. The one that scans the space in the first thirty seconds — reads the energy, the expectations, what this particular configuration of people is going to need from you — and adjusts before you’ve even sat down. The one that leads with the things people find acceptable and holds everything else in reserve. Competent but not intimidating. Interested but not intense. Present but not too much.
The one that is not quite you.
You have been doing this for so long that sometimes you forget the complete catalogue exists.
I built mine early. I was the child who learned that being too much — too loud, too fast, too interested, too certain, too detailed, too everything — produced a particular kind of discomfort in the adults around me. Not cruelty, mostly. Just the specific exhaustion of people who couldn’t quite keep up and didn’t know what to do with me. I learned to modulate. To read the room. To give people the version of me they could hold.
I got very good at it. Most of us do.
What masking actually is
There’s a clinical term for this: masking. It’s used most commonly in discussions of autism and ADHD, and it refers to the process of suppressing, modifying, or concealing neurodivergent traits in order to appear more neurotypical. To fit in. To avoid the friction that comes from being visibly different in a world that wasn’t designed for you.
The clinical description is accurate as far as it goes. What it doesn’t fully capture is the texture of it from the inside.
Masking is not just hiding things. It is the active, ongoing, exhausting work of constructing and maintaining a version of yourself that other people find manageable. It is learning which parts of you are safe to show in which rooms. It is monitoring your own responses in real time and editing them before they arrive. It is the gap between what you actually think and what you say. Between what you actually feel and what you perform. Between who you actually are and who you are in any given moment, presenting yourself to be.
For neurodivergent women — particularly those of us who came to a diagnosis late, which for many means somewhere in our thirties, forties, fifties, or later — the mask is so well-established by the time we understand what we’ve been doing that it can be genuinely difficult to locate where it ends and we begin.
The catalogue that stays private
Here is what I mean by the complete catalogue.
There is the version of you that shows up to work. The version that shows up at family gatherings. The version that shows up to friendships — and often there are different versions for different friends, because you have read each of them carefully and know what each relationship can hold. The version that shows up to doctors, to practitioners, to anyone in a professional context where you need to be taken seriously and have learned that certain things about you make that harder.
And then there is the rest. The intensity that you turn down in most rooms is because it makes people uncomfortable. The knowledge you don’t lead with because it has historically been read as showing off or as intimidating. The opinions you hold more lightly in conversation than you actually hold them, because certainty is unwelcome. The connections you make between things that others don’t seem to see, which you have learned to present carefully or not at all. The questions you don’t ask because they go too deep too fast. The feelings you don’t show because they are too big for the context.
All of that is the complete catalogue. And for most of us, it stays largely private. Not because we are dishonest. Because we learned a very long time ago that bringing all of it into a room produces more friction than the room can absorb.
The mask is not dishonesty. It is the reasonable adaptation of a person who learned early that she was too much for the containers available to her.
What it costs
I want to be specific about this, because the cost is often described in general terms — exhaustion, burnout, disconnection — that don’t quite capture what it actually feels like from the inside.
The cost of masking is not just tiredness at the end of the day. It is a particular kind of depletion that comes from spending your cognitive and emotional resources on performance rather than on living. It is the energy that goes into monitoring and editing yourself rather than into the things you actually want to do and think and be. It is the accumulation of small suppressions across decades — each one minor, together enormous.
It is also loneliness of a very specific kind. The kind that can exist inside full relationships, full lives, full rooms — because the people around you know the version of you that showed up, not the one that stayed home. You can be surrounded by people who like you and still feel fundamentally unseen, because what they like is the edit.
I have sat in rooms full of people who were genuinely fond of me and felt entirely alone. Not because they were unkind. Because I had given them a version of me that was designed to be easy to be fond of, and the actual me was somewhere else entirely.
That experience — the loneliness inside full rooms — is one of the most common things I hear from the women this practice serves. They have friends. They have relationships. They are not isolated in any conventional sense. And they are profoundly, specifically, quietly alone in a way they have rarely been able to name.
Why the mask that is that version of yourself is so hard to take off
The mask is not easy to put down, even when you understand what it is and what it costs.
Partly this is because it has been in place for so long that it has become structural — not a costume you put on but a way of being in the world that is woven into how you move through rooms, how you speak, how you present yourself. Dismantling it is not a decision you make once. It is an ongoing process of noticing, choosing, and adjusting.
Partly it is because the mask was built for real reasons. The discomfort it prevented was real. The friction it smoothed was real. The people who found you easier to be around when you modulated yourself were real. Removing the mask does not automatically remove the conditions that made it necessary, and until those conditions change, dropping it entirely carries genuine risk.
And partly — this is the one that is hardest to say out loud — it is because some of us are not entirely sure who is underneath it. The mask has been present for so long and has been so thoroughly integrated into how we function that the question of who we actually are without it is not a simple one. Not because we don’t exist without it. But because we have had so little practice at being that person in the presence of anyone else.
Removing the mask does not mean becoming someone new. It means becoming more accurately yourself. The person was always there. She just hasn’t had many rooms that were built for her.
What changes when the correct explanation arrives
For most of us who come to a neurodivergent diagnosis or self-identification later in life, there is a moment when the mask makes a different kind of sense.
Not that it was necessary — though it was. Not that it was understandable — though it was that too. But that was the predictable, rational response of a person who understood early that she was not quite the shape that the available containers were built for, and adapted accordingly. The mask was not a flaw. It was a solution. A costly one, built for conditions that were not of your making.
That reframe does not undo the cost. But it changes where the cost is located. It moves it from a story about what is wrong with you — too much, too difficult, too sensitive, too everything — to a story about a mismatch between a person and the environments she was placed in. That is not a small shift. For many women, it is the first time they have been able to look at decades of exhausting adaptation and not find themselves at fault.
The correct explanation does not instantly dissolve the mask. But it gives you somewhere different to stand while you work out what to do with it.
You don’t have to figure this out alone
If any of this is landing — if you’re reading it and recognising the specific texture of it rather than just the general shape — then you are probably someone who has been doing this work largely in private for a very long time. Carrying the gap between the version that shows up and the complete catalogue. Managing the cost of that gap. Wondering, sometimes, whether there is a version of your life that doesn’t require so much of this.
There is. But it is very difficult to find it alone, from inside a mask you have been building and maintaining for decades. It helps to do it with someone who has built her own, who understands from the inside what the cost is and what the process of putting it down actually involves, and who is not going to need you to perform okayness or manage her response to what you bring.
That is what this practice is for.
If you’d like to know more, the Practice page explains how the coaching works. If you’re ready to find out whether this is the right fit, get in touch. The first conversation is free, and you don’t need to have the right words yet.
About the author
Deborah Mason is a late-diagnosed neurodivergent woman and the founder of Not Broken. Just Different. — a coaching practice for late-diagnosed, self-identified, and exploring neurodivergent women, based in Adelaide, South Australia. She writes from lived experience. She also writes the JD Series of young adult novels under the pen name Claudia Weaver.
