A Journey in Masking
A Journey in Masking
on birth, rebirth, covering, unveiling, blending, standing out, shedding...
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This newsletter rests at the intersection of the unserious ramblings of a woman full of buttered rice and dad jokes and the somewhat sophisticated stories and essays of someone who knows just enough “smart” words to sound super intelligent and insightful.
What will today’s newsletter be? Hmm…
One of the biggest things I hear within the Autistic community is unmasking.
I need to be in control of the unveiling of myself. The revelation of who I am in this skin, must occur as I allow it. There’s no timetable on self-discovery. Others cannot rush a process that is not their own. Unmasking is deeply personal and individualistic. Mine won’t look like yours, yours won’t look like another’s. Allow those like me the time to discover who we are through this process. My masks are multilayered, thick like armor, and took years to craft. Each layer carries trauma and to peel back each layer means I must revisit old wounds that never healed. I started unmasking several times, but as I peeled each trauma-filled layer I retreated into myself and created a new, thicker layer.
Masks have protected me. Shielding my true form from others but also locking me inside myself. I grew into my masks. Its seams blend into my skin. I don’t know where the mask ends, and I begin. If I take off too much, I risk pulling myself apart. If I remove it too fast, I’ll peel myself raw. And that nakedness is something I am not always willing to face.
Its removal must be surgical, tactical, and done by me alone. I can’t move at a pace that is convenient for others. I teeter between being confident in who I am and being swallowed whole by all that I am not.
I am told how harmful masking is. I see the anger at those who loudly claim they still mask. Oh, how they make it seem easy to pull those layers back. Freedom is just one yank away. Yeah…
I don’t know who I am without masks. I don’t know that I want them gone. All that I know is I am not safe bare faced.
I don’t carry privilege that allows me to shed skin that has acted as glue without serious consequences. We are products of our situations and circumstances, and this doesn’t always allow for some dramatic revealing of our true nature.
I am a Black Autistic mama raising children with the same diagnosis, living in the South, with almost 100K followers on all platforms, and my audience knows of a diagnosis I have carried with me for twenty years and my own mama does not. Years I have spent helping others navigate their own way through their individual journeys and I haven’t yet found a way to say, “mama, I’m Autistic.”
I still wear masks.
The more I reveal myself, the louder my autism becomes. This means it will be more difficult to keep my behaviors under control and in a world that polices skin like mine the way it does, masking can be a matter of survival as it is a method of hiding.
Masking is such a huge part of mainstream Autism advocacy. Especially for those who are autistic themselves, and honestly, I can’t relate to most of it. The discussion is dominated by white folks, and they have yet to figure out how to address issues that are specific to those who live outside of whiteness. Truthfully, they don’t have to acknowledge what we go through. Their lives aren’t peripheral to ours as ours is to theirs. They don’t have to document nor name our pain. And for the most part, they do not concern themselves with our grievances. Also, I don’t feel much of the conversation white folk have regarding masking comes from a place of respecting just how complicated masking really is. It’s rare that they are curious about the origins of a mask in a way that generates a path toward eliminating the circumstances that lead to layering skin like armor. Masking, even though they acknowledge society’s role in the construction of masks, is looked at as an individual problem that can be fixed on our own. They approach masking as if the fix were simply to unmask. And within a world in which darker skin is seen as provocative enough for us to teach our children how to make white people feel safe and comfortable around us, that we earned the things we worked twice as hard to get and/or accomplish, and that we are just as worthy, simply dropping the veil isn’t something that often works out in our favor.
Even with all that is required of us, I still don’t know that I believe the masks I create are solely the result of living within a world that wouldn’t dare allow me to live as I truly feel myself to be. Humans are probably the most adaptable species there is. Variation is deep within our bones. This necessity to build ourselves around the environments that we inhabit for our survival is remarkably human. The world around us changes us, from the inside out.
Biology would tell us that our bodies have adapted to increase our chances of surviving the terrain. And even beyond biology, our culture can be shaped by the soil beneath our feet. Humans have changed over vast periods of time, and we evolve over the course of our lifetimes. So, people had to learn the lands we called home. We had to mold ourselves to our surroundings.
By nature of who we are as a species and how the world operates, everything around us constantly changes. I am aware of all the things outside of my control (my Blackness, my disability, my womanhood, etc.) that have made my life exponentially more challenging, and I didn’t deserve one bit of what I endured, but I am also cognizant of fact that I would not be where I am today if not for the faces I tried on yesterday. I cannot deny that having performed as others expected of me prepared me for the person I am today. I cannot hide that there are masks of my own design that I chose for myself because I felt it was necessary for growth.
I wasn’t born void of landscape. Roots have taken hold within me long before I was born. There’s always been something in me that was drawn to the lives of others. I was connected to certain people in ways I did not understand. I studied people not because this was what I was taught to do as a matter of protection, and I did do this because I was taught to, I studied them because I just knew they held the key to traveling the uncharted parts of myself.
Can I tell you that every mask I have worn has been the consequence of my wanting to fit in? That I was pressured into every mask I created?
No, I cannot.
It's hard for me to claim that every layer of skin I have acquired in my life served no purpose other than to cause me pain. There are masks I have worn that have taught me valuable lessons in how to be more human. I won’t deny my evolution is not in part due to the people I have “pretended to be” over the years. I have lived so many lifetimes. Multiple lives. I haven’t lived just once. I become other people and they become me. Their lives on loan as a mask for my own until I learn to take the pieces that have served me well and discard the ones that don’t. The mask doesn’t always stay a mask, sometimes they become part of who I truly am. Parts that I am okay with. Parts I have grown to love. I know that now. And I also know that part of my adaptation to the world around me requires that I shelve pieces of myself to mitigate the pain that will come due to this skin being seen as maladaptive. There’s no amount of masking or code switching that is going to cover me whole and shield me from the realities of my circumstances. My presence is a message that I am not always in control of. I am what many label me to be.
How many do I own? Masks, I mean. How often do I wear them? Am I truly myself when I feel safest? Am I truly free if I were to drop the masks? What is free anyway? What does liberation look like for me?
I don’t know what a free me would look like. Maybe it’s one of those, “you gotta see it to know it” kind of things? I do know that I experience moments of easy breaths when I drop a mask or two for a little while. When I am home with my husband and children, I find the peace that comes with letting it all go. But I know I will cover back up once I leave the comfort and safety of my home. Or the embrace of my husband.
I am grappling with the feelings that I have about a freer version of myself with the fact that I won't ever be that free in this diagnosis. Facing the reality that because of who I am and who my children are that we are not afforded the privilege of a maskless existence. I can, do, and will teach my children to mask.
All bodies are not created equal. Ableism is secondary to the racism I face. Our disability serves to further paint us as dangerous, unfeeling, uncaring, devoid of feeling pain, deserving of harsh medications, and institutionalization. Unmasking fully, at many times of our lives, is not safe for us until we live in a world that doesn’t treat our skin alone as maladaptive.
I had to learn how to exist in a world that is inaccessible, unkind, and doesn’t consider bodies like mine. I grew up learning the things that so many find harmful. I grew up forced to learn the things many find harmful. I was taught in a way that many would find harmful.
And guess what? It was indeed harmful. There was no pleasure derived from my family having to teach me those things in those ways. However, they know the world we live in. It’s the same one they grew up in. They knew I needed more preparation.
Oh, but it hurt. And it sucked. But what hurts worse is to know that I would have been far worse off if not for what they taught me. I am stuck in a space where I feel as though I haven’t prepared my children enough for this world because I got caught up in being shamed by people who have no clue about how we live in these bodies and this diagnosis. I will know no world in which I will carry no mask whatsoever.
And in some ways, I feel this is how it is supposed to be just as there are many ways in which I know it shouldn’t be. I cannot tell you how hard it was to write this. I kept thinking you would want me to take a stand, “is masking wrong or not?” The thing is, I can’t answer whether it’s good or bad. I really can’t…I can only tell you that I am not going to live a life that doesn’t allow for masking. That is my reality. I feel as though I have learned to live within this acceptance, and I grew from there.
I have spent a lifetime as many versions of myself, and others. For a time, I wondered where I began, and the others ended. The seams of my life and theirs blend. Almost perfectly but there’s always this thread that could be pulled that would tear it all down. I shed old skin for new all the time, this constant state of laying to rest old selves in preparation for rebirth. I am always progressing forward even when the mask I hold has been worn before or recreated from pieces of past lives. I still hold onto masks as I move into a newer skin. I think for many who mask, they think of its removal as something that propels them forward or they are stuck in place. They have either grown to the point where they feel they don’t need that mask, they want to explore who they are without being bound to societal demands and expectations, and they are pushing forward. New face, who dis? Or, they have ripped off this foreign skin they’ve carried for years as their own and all that’s left is trauma and pain that holds them in place, and they feel as though they need to have it all figured out and fixed before they can move forward.
Whatever direction they feel unmasking takes them, forward or standing still, it almost always involves removal or destruction. But what happens next is they try to make it appear as though they do not create any new ones. I no longer lie to myself in this way. I am in a constant state of creation, in all things; including the masks I wear, the ones I reserve, and the ones I repair. I break myself apart and put myself back together again. I am the sum of my contexts and histories. Who I am today, what I require to navigate this world, and how I survive this world is predicated upon how best I can mimic life around me. I create new life, with leftovers from previous lives and inspiration from the lives of those around me. I am more aware of who I truly am, but I am also more aware of who everyone else is as well. I make it a point to know how society is moving at any given moment. And I have learned how to take on just enough of them while maintaining a whole lot of who I am in the process.
I write all this to say, I don’t know how I feel about masking. Some masks hurt to form. Some are forced through force. Others, protection. Some I deliberately craft because I want to be a better friend, daughter, sibling, community member, etc. Some bring me immense pain. Others taught me lessons that I carried onto my next life, made me a better version of my previous self.
It’s complicated for me. I don’t have the luxury of unmasking in the way so many advocates do. And I don’t even try to emulate their lives or take a serious listen to what they say on the matter.
I am just out here, trying to sort it all out for myself. And documenting what I feel and experience along the way.