Unmasking, Safety, and Processing Cost
Why authenticity does not automatically eliminate the cost of navigating social environments
Unmasking is often described as freedom: the opportunity to stop hiding, become more authentic, and allow other people to see who we really are.
That framing captures something important, but it can also leave out a difficult reality. For many late-identified and late-diagnosed neurodivergent adults, the mask developed for a reason. It developed in response to what happened when difference became visible.
When the Mask Began as Protection
Research on autistic camouflaging suggests that people may mask not only to fit in or form relationships, but also to reduce their exposure to bullying, retaliation, discrimination, and social exclusion.
Participants in qualitative studies have described changing their behavior, suppressing visible traits, copying socially successful peers, rehearsing interactions, and closely monitoring other people’s responses. These strategies can support access to education, employment, relationships, and social spaces. They can also function as protection in environments where visible difference has previously been punished (Hull et al., 2017; Cage & Troxell-Whitman, 2019).
This concern also emerges in my clinical work, particularly among neurodivergent people whose earlier experiences taught them that visibility could make them vulnerable. When someone was bullied, teased, rejected, or socially isolated for being different, unmasking may not automatically register as liberation. It may register as renewed exposure to the same danger they once learned to manage.
Part of why I am choosing to share more of my own experience is that these fears are often carried privately. Naming them may help someone else feel less alone and more understood in the tension between wanting to live authentically and needing to consider whether it is safe to do so.
The Island of Misfit Toys
More than ten years ago—when I already strongly suspected that I had ADHD but had not been formally diagnosed, and long before I recognized my autistic traits—I remember talking with a supervisor while going through the loss of a friendship that I deeply valued.
I told her that I honestly felt like I belonged on the Island of Misfit Toys, referencing the 1964 Rankin/Bass Christmas special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
At the time, I did not yet have the fuller neurodivergent framework that now helps me understand that persistent feeling of existing somewhere along the perimeter.
I did not understand why I could be surrounded by people and still feel outside. I did not understand why friendships and group dynamics seemed to contain rules that everyone else could see—but that I often discovered only after I had apparently violated them.
I simply knew that I frequently felt different: like the fringe friend who was included enough to remain near the group, but never secure enough to feel fully inside it.
Looking back now, that “Island of Misfit Toys” statement feels much more significant than I understood at the time.
Looking Backward With a Different Framework
As I have learned more about my own ADHD and autistic traits, I have reconsidered experiences of being teased, misunderstood, socially excluded, or professionally judged.
I have wondered how often neurodivergent differences were assigned meanings that did not accurately reflect my intentions.
How often was directness interpreted as hostility?
How often was confusion interpreted as defiance?
How often was a request for clarity interpreted as argument?
How often was emotional intensity interpreted as instability?
How often was verbal processing interpreted as something calculated or malicious?
I have also considered how much masking can develop in response to those experiences.
A person may learn to monitor facial expressions, rehearse conversations, suppress natural reactions, study other people’s behavior, and search for social rules that were never explicitly communicated. What later looks like effortless social functioning may actually depend on extensive invisible labor.
The risk of bullying is not hypothetical. In a nationally representative U.S. study, parents reported that 46.3% of adolescents receiving special-education services under an autism classification experienced bullying victimization during the school year (Sterzing et al., 2012).
That finding should not be treated as a universal prevalence estimate for all autistic adolescents. It does, however, illustrate why histories of victimization must be included in any responsible discussion of unmasking.
When someone has repeatedly learned that being visibly different can result in ridicule, exclusion, or shame, the mask may become more than a social performance.
It may become protective architecture.
The Professional Disclosure Dilemma
These questions have followed me into professional spaces as well.
As I have become more open about my neurodivergence on professional social media, I have wondered whether colleagues see me differently. I have questioned whether greater honesty about my internal experience affects how people view my competence, credibility, judgment, or professionalism.
Some of that concern comes from experiences in which my openness has been interpreted as evidence of poor boundaries.
What I experience as intentional transparency—or as an effort to name something that other people may also be carrying privately—may be interpreted by someone else as oversharing.
That possibility creates its own form of monitoring. Before sharing something personal, I may find myself considering whether the disclosure serves a meaningful purpose, how it might be interpreted, whether it could alter someone’s perception of me, and whether that vulnerability could later be used to question my judgment or credibility.
Context, purpose, and discernment matter, particularly in professional spaces. But openness and poor boundaries are not inherently the same thing. Personal disclosure can be intentional, bounded, and connected to a larger professional purpose.
Part of my purpose in writing this is to name experiences that are often carried privately. I am choosing to be somewhat more vulnerable because doing so may help another neurodivergent person feel seen, validated, and less alone in the tension between wanting to live authentically and needing to consider whether it is safe to do so.
The concern about how disclosure will be received is not necessarily irrational. In research on workplace disclosure, autistic adults have described potential benefits, including increased understanding and support, alongside negative outcomes such as stigma, discrimination, and changes in how other people perceived them (Romualdez et al., 2021).
Disclosure may create greater access and understanding in one environment while increasing vulnerability in another. The outcome depends partly on the surrounding culture, the people receiving the information, and the protections available to the person disclosing.
Masking and Unmasking Can Both Consume Bandwidth
Sustained camouflaging has substantial reported costs. Autistic adults have described exhaustion, anxiety, isolation, poorer mental health, identity strain, unrealistic expectations from others, and delayed diagnosis in connection with camouflaging (Bradley et al., 2021).
Masking can preserve outward performance while consuming the internal resources required to maintain it.
The processing cost of masking may involve continually monitoring our expressions and behavior, suppressing visible traits or needs, translating implicit social rules, rehearsing and performing expected responses, and recovering from the sustained effort required to appear socially acceptable.
Unmasking may reduce some of that internal labor, but it can introduce a different form of processing cost.
A person may need to determine whether greater visibility is safe, anticipate how other people might interpret them, monitor for changes in other people’s reactions, manage possible stigma, rejection, or exclusion, and continually decide what can be revealed, in which environments, and with whom.
Within the Bandwidth Model, I call this form of labor social-exposure cost.
Social-exposure cost is the cognitive, emotional, and nervous-system labor involved in determining whether visibility is safe, anticipating how other people may interpret us, monitoring for changes in their reactions, managing stigma or rejection when it occurs, and deciding which parts of ourselves can safely be revealed within a particular relationship or environment.
Social-exposure cost is a proposed Bandwidth Model concept rather than an established research term. Its underlying elements, however, are reflected across research on masking, bullying, stigma, and diagnostic disclosure.
The concept names a practical tension within that evidence:
Unmasking may not eliminate processing cost. It may change the type and location of the cost.
When masking, much of the cost may be directed inward through suppression, rehearsal, translation, and self-monitoring.
When unmasking, some of the cost may shift outward toward evaluating safety, anticipating social consequences, interpreting other people’s reactions, and managing the vulnerability of being more visible.
Neither experience is cost-free.
Unmasking With Discernment
Unmasking does not have to mean removing every layer of protection, disclosing everything, or presenting the same version of ourselves in every environment.
It can involve gradually determining where, with whom, and to what degree it is safe to become more visible.
The question may not be simply:
How do I stop masking?
A more useful question may be:
Where can I be more genuine without abandoning the protections I developed for a reason?
That question leaves room for both authenticity and safety.
It recognizes that some environments welcome difference while others continue to punish it. It also avoids turning unmasking into another performance standard that neurodivergent people are expected to meet correctly.
Unmasking can be a gradual process of discovering where we no longer have to work so hard to remain acceptable.
It can also include grieving how often we once felt that we had to disappear, suppress ourselves, or remain at the perimeter in order to preserve connection.
The goal is not maximum visibility in every setting.
The goal is greater access to relationships, communities, and professional spaces in which authenticity does not require sacrificing safety.
Darcy Stephens, LPCC
References
Bradley, L., Shaw, R., Baron-Cohen, S., & Cassidy, S. (2021). Autistic adults’ experiences of camouflaging and its perceived impact on mental health. Autism in Adulthood, 3(4), 320–329.
https://doi.org/10.1089/aut.2020.0071
Cage, E., & Troxell-Whitman, Z. (2019). Understanding the reasons, contexts and costs of camouflaging for autistic adults. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 49(5), 1899–1911.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-018-03878-x
Hull, L., Petrides, K. V., Allison, C., Smith, P., Baron-Cohen, S., Lai, M.-C., & Mandy, W. (2017). “Putting on my best normal”: Social camouflaging in adults with autism spectrum conditions. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 47(8), 2519–2534.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-017-3166-5
Romualdez, A. M., Walker, Z., & Remington, A. (2021). Autistic adults’ experiences of diagnostic disclosure in the workplace: Decision-making and factors associated with outcomes. Autism & Developmental Language Impairments, 6, 23969415211022955.
https://doi.org/10.1177/23969415211022955
Sterzing, P. R., Shattuck, P. T., Narendorf, S. C., Wagner, M., & Cooper, B. P. (2012). Prevalence and correlates of bullying involvement among adolescents with an autism spectrum disorder. Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, 166(11), 1058–1064.
https://doi.org/10.1001/archpediatrics.2012.790
#BandwidthModel #Unmasking #LateIdentified #LateDiagnosed #Autism #ADHD #AuDHD #Neurodivergence
