The mask we don’t talk about

It has been one of those weeks. Full, overwhelming, and somehow good all at once.

I recorded a podcast and a training webinar for the PDA Society, both out in a few weeks. It meant a great deal to me, because the PDA Society were so instrumental in my own understanding of my child and how we shape our life around them. Being asked to give something back felt almost full circle.

And I closed the week with a conversation about parental masking, alongside the brilliant Luisa Gray, known to many of you as LongRoadSENDMum. I came away from it feeling genuinely positive and empowered, which is exactly what I want to pass on to you today.

We talk a lot now about autistic masking in our children. The holding it together all day at school, the falling apart the moment they walk through the door at home. And rightly so, because we need schools to finally understand it.

But there is another mask that almost nobody talks about. The one we wear.

The one we put on to walk into the meeting. To stand in the playground. To answer “how are you?” with “yeah, good thanks” and move the conversation on quickly, because the truth is far too big to hand to someone who has never lived it. And for those of us who are likely neurodivergent ourselves, it goes deeper still, because we are quietly masking our own traits at the very same time.

We do it because we have to. Because our feelings get used against us. If we let the fear or the exhaustion show in a meeting, we are suddenly the anxious one, the overly emotional one, the irrational one. So we swallow it. We become the calm, capable, smiling person in the room, while inside we are a shell. Completely empty, and holding it together by our fingertips.

And it costs us. Masking takes enormous energy, and there is always a price to pay afterwards. The crying in the car outside the school. The needing to shut down, put the headphones on, take yourself off for a while. None of that is weakness. It is the most normal, human response there is to a relentless situation. The recovery is not a luxury we have to earn. It is part of the process.

But here is the shift that changed how I see the whole thing.

When masking just happens to us, when we are dragged into it without meaning to be, it feels like one more thing being done to us. One more piece of ourselves handed over to a system that already takes so much. It leaves us feeling out of control.

But when we do it with intent, everything changes. When we walk in knowing exactly why we are putting the mask on, knowing we are doing it to get what our child needs, knowing we will build in the recovery afterwards, then it stops being something forced on us. It becomes something we choose. A tool we use, deliberately, on our own terms.

That is the part I keep coming back to. Not something done to us, but something we pick up and use, then put down again. It is almost like putting on a piece of armour before we go in. We decide how we show up. We decide when we take it off. And in a life where so much feels out of our hands, taking back even that small piece of control is genuinely empowering.

So if you are the smiling, capable one in the meetings this week, and quietly falling apart afterwards, please be gentle with yourself. That is not you failing. That is you advocating for your child in the only way the system leaves open to you. That is you doing what you have to do to get your child what they need, on your own terms.

You are not the only one. Not even close.