I’ve been thinking a bit lately about masking. I previously felt that I don’t mask much, but on reflection I think I do. I don’t stim much, but I try not to do it in public. I avoid talking about my interests for fear of the response it will get. I don’t show my social anxiety, I try to consciously control my eye contact and body language, and I use social scripts a lot to manage conversations with people.
It occurred to me that I deal with another layer on top of this because of my intersecting identities. Code-switching is the linguistic term from changing from one language or dialect to another. It can happen in an oppressive way (between classes and with regional dialects as well as between races), but it can also be a fairly inevitable product of cross-cultural contact. As a Jew, even more so as an Orthodox Jew, I code-switch all the time. I have a certain amount of Hebrew or Yiddish in my internal monologue. In situations with non-Jews, I would use no Hebrew or Yiddish, even if that meant using weird (to me) English translations. With my family, I would probably use language similar to my internal monologue, although perhaps with slightly less Hebrew and Yiddish, but with very religious Jews, I would use more Hebrew and Yiddish. It’s a balancing act and one that I feel quite conscious of, like most spoken communication.
I feel like I’m masking and code-switching all the time and it feels really hard to cope at the moment. It’s hard masking autism and social anxiety at work, because it’s uncomfortable and probably contributes to my feelings of exhaustion and some of my stupid errors in the workplace. It’s hard masking autism and code-switching in the Jewish world, because that feels like a more conformist community generally. I hide other aspects of my personality and interests too, in different situations. I got so used to being mocked, judged and silenced as a child that it became second-nature to hide myself and my interests. I do it automatically.
That said, I don’t know how much I want to unmask. The assumption in the autism world is that masking is bad, but I feel that everyone masks to some extent. We don’t go around telling everyone our deepest feelings or talking/singing to ourselves in public even if we might in private. But I do feel that I need to mask less even if I still mask a bit. I’m just not sure how to do it.
