Masking is hugely mentally draining.
I masked for years but recently (possibly linked to some bereavements in the family, who knows what the actual trigger was if there even was one single trigger) the constant effort required just burned me out. Anxiety spiked, depression symptoms loomed, and I just felt exhausted all of the time.
I've spoken to many people in the past 10 years or so who were in a crisis/burnout/depression or however they personally labelled their situation with varying degrees of bad mood, depressed affect, and reduced energy. Every single one of them had a mask they had been wearing for a very long time, and which was hugely mentally draining on them. Most of them wore the mask especially when interacting with themselves, interestingly. Some of them self-identified as neuro-atypical (with or without professional diagnosis), others didn't. Some of them identified their situation as a co-morbidity of being atypical, others as a result of it, or as a pure coincidence. It's not clear to me whether the masks themselves and/or the current inability to wear them were a reason, a symptom, or just a coincidence of said situations and/or the subjective or objective atypicalliness. But whenever I hear that masking has such a huge drain on people with ADHD/autism I wonder about the questions of cause and effect, the question of correlation and causation, and the question of (self-)selection bias. It's really a mess and it's very difficult to make sense of any of that. But mostly, I feel that discussing ways how society could reduce the pressure to mask might be more beneficial to everyone than finding the perfect definitions for groups of people who have an accepted reason to be drained by their masking, while others must still endure because their masking is not socially or medically recognized as unnecessary suffering.
p.s.: hope you're doing better now.
> Masking is hugely mentally draining.
Sounds as though this is not a universal truth?
Masking is defined by being a maladaptive strategy, so I don't think that it being in general mentally draining is disputed. The issue is that sometimes there is a tendency to call any coping strategy as masking. There are coping strategies that can be successful, and there are reasons to adopt them other than to hide not being neurotypical or to make neurotypicals happy.
"Sounds as though" based on what?
The literal comment above the one I replied to.
> Not the OP, but after a couple of decades of people pointedly talking about eye contact, small talk, and body language, you learn “coping mechanisms” to deal with neurotypicals and make them more comfortable.
Why the snark? How are you concluding from that, that masking isn't draining? I don't see a connection