What Verbal Masking Took From Me—And What I’ve Gained By Unmasking It? I was recently asked this and here is my response…

There’s something electric about uncovering a truth that quietly explains everything you’ve ever doubted about yourself. Not a dramatic “aha” moment—more like gentle thunder that rolls through your history and suddenly, every contradiction begins to make sense. That’s what learning about verbal masking did for me. I didn’t expect it to change my reality—but it did. So profoundly that I still catch myself trying to reframe basic moments, now filtered through a lens I didn’t even know existed a few weeks ago.

And here’s the kicker: it’s freeing. Like finally letting out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding since childhood. But freedom often comes with cost, and this one was steep. The closer I get to being fully unmasked—the truer version of myself that doesn’t pretend speech is effortless—the more people I lose. Friends have distanced themselves. Conversations have dried up. Some family members don’t know how to respond and so… they simply don’t. No questions. No curiosity. Just absence.

It’s heartbreaking.

When you start living your truth out loud—even if it’s a quieter truth—they notice. You stop texting back right away. You stop answering phone calls with chipper efficiency. You begin to say “no” or “I’m not up for that” or “I’d rather just sit quietly,” and suddenly it disrupts the version of you they expected. A version you performed for years. A version you weren’t even conscious of creating. When they reject the change, it feels like they’re rejecting you—even though it’s actually the first time you’re finally showing up.

That pain is real. It hits harder when it’s family. These are people who watched me grow up. People who made comments like “she never stops talking” or “you could power a city with that mouth,” and who now interpret my silence as distance instead of healing. What they don’t see is how much more I can do when I’m not pouring myself into performing verbal normalcy.

Every day that I’m not pressuring myself to speak like a neurotypical, I’m writing more. Creating more. Thinking more clearly. My ability to organize, reflect, plan, and process is exponentially stronger when I’m not wrangling every conversation into coherence. Speech, for me, is not effortless. It takes spoons.

Which brings me to Spoon Theory. If you haven’t heard of it before, it’s a metaphor used to describe the finite energy units (spoons) someone has to use throughout a day—often applied in chronic illness, disability, or neurodivergent contexts. Every task costs spoons. And when you’re out, you’re done.

Now imagine a phone call—a simple, casual chat with someone you like. For a neurotypical person, that’s maybe one spoon. Maybe half, if the conversation’s easygoing.

For me, that same phone call on a good day? Four spoons. Minimum.

One spoon goes into the sensory load—the sound of the phone, the pressure of voice-only communication with no visual cues, the noise in the background.

Another spoon for emotional regulation—trying to track tone, cues, implications, holding space for what they say while curbing the instinct to ramble.

A third spoon just for speech formulation—retrieving words, constructing sentences, saying them out loud in a way that doesn’t feel rehearsed or robotic.

And the fourth? That goes toward masking the discomfort. The need to sound normal. The need to be “on.”

On a bad day? That same phone call costs every spoon I have. It leaves me drained, shaking, sometimes non-verbal after. My most dominant meltdown response in these moments isn’t explosive—it’s complete shutdown. The moment I feel safe again? I curl up and go to sleep. Not out of laziness or emotional immaturity, but because the cognitive, sensory, and emotional toll was more than I could carry.

This is what people don’t see.

This is what I didn’t see for years.

All the times I forced myself to engage. All the times I punished myself for struggling to speak. All the hours I wasted trying to rewrite my brain to fit a model it was never built for. When I learned about verbal masking, the sheer number of memories that started making sense nearly buckled me. And it wasn’t just about speech—it was about every interaction I had ever contorted myself to fit into.

And here’s something that surprised me deeply: verbal masking doesn’t just erase who you are—it builds a false self. A mimic.

AuDHD often includes a heavy dose of mimicking. We mirror speech patterns, body language, emotional responses. Not out of deceit—but out of necessity. We learn to speak like others, emote like others, pace like others, because that’s how we survive social spaces. Over time, it becomes second nature. We don’t even realize we’re doing it. But when you start unmasking, you start questioning it.

Is this my voice?

Is this how I express joy?

Do I actually respond like this, or did I learn it by watching someone else get praised for doing it?

Those questions slice through the identity you thought you had. They cause grief. They cause doubt. But they also create room—for your actual self. The one who doesn’t talk much. The one who gestures naturally. The one who writes blog posts in place of calls. The one who can do so much more when not drowning in performance.

So yes, verbal masking surprised me.

It surprised me with how deep its roots went.

It surprised me with how much life I’ve regained by unraveling it.

And it surprised me with how many people couldn’t come with me when I stopped pretending.

That grief is real. But the freedom? So is that.

And yet, with that freedom comes something most people don’t talk about: confusion. The pain of realizing you’ve been performing a version of yourself for so long, you’re not even sure who’s underneath the mask. Not just socially, but internally. If I wasn’t the talkative child they labeled, if I wasn’t the bubbly teen who chatted through anxiety, then who was I? And how do I even begin to figure that out without mimicking another version?

This goes back to childhood. Back to school.

Those moments when I was asked to read aloud, present a report, or answer a teacher’s question—all felt like slow-motion car crashes. Could I do it? Yes. I could speak, deliver, articulate. But the cost? Astronomical. What looked like “functioning” was me pouring out every spoon I had to maintain the illusion. I’d leave the room emotionally wiped, overstimulated, sometimes dissociating—while the teacher complimented my composure and classmates wondered why I seemed spaced out.

That’s the danger of societal expectations. This constant push to fit into a mold labeled “normal.” But normal, honestly, shouldn’t even be a word we apply to humans. When we describe objects—light bulbs, bricks, pencils—we expect sameness. Uniformity. A factory standard. Humans? We’re not made on assembly lines. We have texture. Jagged edges. Depth that can’t be boxed.

And yet society demands that we perform a version of sameness. Smile this way. Speak that way. React with this expression, in that tone, at that volume. It punishes variance. It rewards imitation. And worst of all, it calls those performances “normal,” while calling anything outside of that “wrong.” Even those who appear to fit within the box don’t fit completely—they’re just better at hiding the overflow.

This culture of normalcy breeds damage. It erases identities that don’t match templates. It teaches neurodivergent kids to perform rather than exist. It gaslights emotional truth by labeling authentic reactions as behavioral problems. And it makes children like I was feel broken for not being able to read a simple paragraph without spiraling into an internal war between survival and collapse.

Now that I’m unmasking, I can see how much I endured while being told I was “fine.” But I wasn’t fine. I was performing fine. And the cost wasn’t just exhaustion—it was identity loss.

So if you take nothing else from this post, take this: stop using the word “normal” when talking about people. We aren’t bricks. We aren’t light bulbs. We’re oceans. We’re storms. We’re mosaics. And the more we celebrate that—especially in neurodivergent communities—the closer we get to understanding that variation isn’t just acceptable. It’s essential. We need to stop applying this to humans in any way shape or form. Unless we are talking about the shape of an organ… oh wait there are differences there to. Normal does not belong in how we look at people, it damages ALL OF US. Think about it hard and it is hard to dismiss, after all I sure as hell don’t want to live in a world were we are ‘normal’ it would be damn boring to say the least. Yuck.