Pippa Hennessy, Beyond the Spectrum Creative Consultant and Lead Writer, shares her experience of Autistic masking. Blog post edited by Alessandra Leone.
“Autobiographical descriptions and clinician observations often suggest that camouflaging unfortunately comes at a cost: it often requires substantial cognitive effort, can be exhausting and may lead to increased stress responses, meltdown due to social overload, anxiety and depression, and even a negative impact on the development of one’s identity.”
It’s strange, looking back, how a mask can be stitched so finely into your life that you forget where the mask ends, and skin begins.
When I broke down in 2015/16, it felt as though the seams had finally come apart. For months, I had been sinking into a darkness I couldn’t name – yet outwardly, the fabric still held. Only a few close friends – H, V, R, and partly J – caught sight of the frayed edges. To everyone else, including my family, I appeared intact: laughing, sociable, seemingly fine. The mask was so carefully stitched that even as I unravelled inside, it stayed in place.
Even after being admitted to a psychiatric unit in 2016, I kept it on like a well-worn cloak. I remember gliding through those first few weeks – chatting, reading, filling the hours with gentle, familiar habits – and feeling like an imposter. How could I truly be unwell when I could still speak, still smile? The nurses and HCAs, though, saw the torn lining beneath; they knew what I couldn’t yet name.
Sometimes I wonder when the stitching first began. Maybe it was always there, quiet threads laid down in childhood:
- A household where feelings were tucked away, hidden like sharp pins in a drawer
- Learning that honesty could leave me bloodied, while silence kept the fabric smooth.
- A childhood that never quite matched my peers’: no watching TV, only books whose words could comfort me yet still leave me feeling alone.
- A child who read fluently but never quite learned the language of belonging.
- Realising too early that intelligence could isolate as easily as it could protect.
- And the small, indelible moment at six when I was told I was “too loud” – how, from then on, my voice frayed into something quieter, almost threadbare.
- Beneath it all, a longing to weave myself invisibly into the tapestry of everyone else.
Writing this feels like pulling at those old seams – uncertain how far to unpick, and what might fall apart if I do. After so long, the mask isn’t just something I wear; it’s something I’ve sewn into the shape of who I believe myself to be.
My reluctance to see myself as autistic was another patch carefully stitched over the truth. I had rehearsed neurotypical patterns so long they felt real, even as they chafed. The camouflage became a second skin – strong enough to fool even me, until the cost grew too heavy to bear.
And yet, something shifted. Maybe a thread pulled loose; maybe the fabric simply wore thin.
Meeting Rachel was part of it. Listening to her describe how autism drapes itself differently over women and girls felt uncannily familiar – like recognising the weave of my own life in her words.
I saw the same patterns in my non-binary child and my mother, and helped my child seek a diagnosis. But turning that gentle gaze on myself took longer. Perhaps it’s always easier to mend someone else’s torn seams than to face your own frayed cuffs.
In recent years, I have found quiet belonging among other autistic people – a gathering of cloth cut from shapes closer to my own. Around them, I didn’t have to keep tucking away the loose threads; conversation could wander without fear of catching. Rachel, too, would gently point out the places where my mask slipped, the seams visible to her. And as the fog of depression lifted, I began to see the stitching clearly for the first time.
Now, I carry a complicated bundle of feelings: anger at the years spent hemming and patching myself to fit, at the exhaustion of always reinforcing a disguise. I once told myself I celebrated my difference, but the celebration itself was tailored to be acceptable, carefully stitched not to draw too much notice.
Yet under that anger is something softer: relief and hope. Hope that by seeing where the fabric was falsely pieced together, I might unpick what no longer serves me, and stitch something truer in its place.
I don’t yet know what shape I will take without the mask, without the old seams holding me tight. Perhaps, that’s the quiet, necessary work of the years ahead: to gather every thread of who I really am – unpick, reweave, and finally wear something of my own making, cut to my true shape.
Stitched not to please, but simply to belong to myself.
