For decades, I relied on complex social scripts to navigate the world—but I didn’t know that’s what I was doing.
In the neurodivergent community, this is known as social masking: the subconscious or conscious suppression of your natural neurodivergent traits, behaviors, and sensory responses in order to conform to neurotypical societal expectations. It is the act of hiding the internal struggle to appear “normal,” blending in at the immense cost of personal energy.
For me, masking wasn’t a choice I consciously made every morning. It was an involuntary reflex. Years of subtle social conditioning and survival adaptation had built an invisible internal muscle, one that ran continuously in the background like software I didn’t even realize was installed. Because it operated automatically, I had no concept of how many cognitive resources it was consuming. I was just living.
Then came five years of societal retreat, brought on by remote work and pandemic isolation.
Living in a controlled, quiet environment, that invisible muscle was finally allowed to go completely dormant. For the first time in my life, the background software stopped running.
The trouble with an involuntary muscle, however, is that once it stops its flexed conditioning, it doesn’t just seamlessly switch back on. Like an unexercised limb, my masking muscle memory atrophied.
When I was finally forced back into full-time, in-person office work after nearly five years, I made a jarring discovery: the process that used to happen automatically was gone. Suddenly, I was forced to manually operate a muscle I didn’t even know existed.
Every single interaction required deliberate, exhausting effort:
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Manually monitoring my eye contact
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Manually calculating my facial expressions and posture
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Manually constructing socially approved words and phrasing
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Manually predicting the behaviors and responses of those around me
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Consciously filtering the relentless ambient chaos of an office, all day long, rather than in brief, manageable bursts
What used to be an invisible background process had transformed into a heavy, manual lift.
That is what made the shift back to in-person work so immensely difficult. It wasn’t just that the environment was loud; it was that the automatic armor was gone. Manually carrying the weight of it every single day was simply unsustainable.
After nearly two years of straining this voluntary masking muscle—following five years of complete reprieve—the weight gradually built toward another cognitive breaking point. Only this time, it didn’t manifest as a sudden ten-second shutdown like the one I experienced years earlier in Atlanta. It manifested as a deep, suffocating emotional exhaustion that looked and felt like depression.
That’s what I assumed I was suffering from—until I finally sought professional guidance, uncovering the true root of my lifelong taxation: neurodivergence.
