Autistic masking, neurotypical mindshaping, and self-understanding

Autistic people often hide or alter their behavior in order to meet societal expectations and fit in—a phenomenon known as masking. Masking has important benefits for neurodivergent individuals, from increasing social acceptance to enhancing their career opportunities and ability to navigate social hierarchies. But it also comes with significant costs. It often leads to mental and emotional exhaustion, increased anxiety, delayed or missed diagnosis, or even suicidal ideation. In this paper, we focus on a relatively underexplored cost of masking, namely, its negative impact on subjects’ self-understanding. We appeal to the framework of mindshaping, which suggests that our thoughts, behaviors, and mental states are shaped by the social norms and expectations to which we are exposed, and argue that masking can be conceptualized as a natural reaction of neurodivergent individuals to neurotypical mindshaping. As a result, we suggest, masking commonly leads to an experience that can be characterized as “self-mask ambiguity”—a failure to demarcate and differentiate oneself from one’s mask. In light of this, we consider ways in which masking and self-mask ambiguity can diminish individuals’ self-understanding. We finish by discussing how diagnosis and unmasking can lead to a deepening of one’s self-understanding.