The fun thing about strategically masking rather than just going cold turkey, is that you spend a lot of your life workshopping when masking is worth it. It’s like an ongoing scientific theory. How and when to mask.
(And by fun I mean god I wish I was in a socioeconomic position where I could just unmask all the time. I’m so tired.)
So as evidence for my fellow masking scientists (I’m a humanities major), allow me to share my newly developed hypothesis:
Masking in Long-Term Jobs
Scientists know that the panic instinct to mask in a job interview and first few weeks of a job is strong, however, our hypothesis is that if you don’t need to mask to do the actual job, please consider resisting. Because the evidence shows that it really sucks to trap yourself in a persona. There are two observed phenomena that cause this:
Magneto’s theory from that scene in X-Men First Class that because Raven’s camouflaging she’s only paying half attention to everything else: Magneto is once again correct. The participant cannot fully focus on the job because they’re too busy masking for their coworkers. The outcome of this is massive frustration, exhaustion and eventual burnout.
Invitation to imposter syndrome: If you make any friendly acquaintances or get any positive reinforcement, evidence shows that you will feel like it’s not real. Participants describe being haunted by the idea that they are not an acceptable employee and/or person, only their mask is. Due to phenomena yet to be examined, this somehow leads to one believing their work actually sucks and they’re just pretending it’s good. This phenomena is objectively terrible. Participants in this experiment would not recommend.
Outliers to this hypothesis include the following:
Social service or customer service jobs: Job compliments are reportedly received fine, because masking is incredibly relevant to the ability to do the job well. Reported responses include: 🥰 oh thank you 🥰 I am trying to emotionally manipulate people 🤗 However, research also shows that the outcomes “burnout” and “exhaustion” are sooner reached by these jobs. This research is only preliminary and as of now it is unclear what phenomena cause this.
Jobs you’re just doing for money and you don’t actually care about: This is a false outlier. Autistic people never give 50% on anything. All evidence shows you will end up caring about this job.
The two current theories as to why Autistic participants can’t not care about their job performance are:
Holders of the “Autistic black and white thinking trait” are more likely to think they have a duty and responsibility to the job. (They don’t. We’re in late stage capitalism. You have no responsibility to any business.)
It is one of the behaviours that correspond to the Autistic core emotion: “desperate need to prove themselves worthy and superior because otherwise the damage they got for being different isn’t worth it.” (Other behaviours include: never giving self a break; always pushing self to do better; believing one is both the smartest and worst person in the room; fear and panic about doing something one could be bad at; and inability to sit with own thoughts.)
