ADHD and masking: what it actually costs
For anyone diagnosed later in life, and still working out what it changes.
Someone on a training course once told me that I’d never be taken seriously if I continued to move my hands like that when I talk. For the rest of the course, I grudgingly sat on them or kept them as still as I could.
I've thought a lot about that comment in the years since being diagnosed with ADHD. I’ve reflected on what was actually being asked of me. It wasn't that I should communicate more clearly - I don’t think anyone was struggling to follow me because I talk with my hands. What was being asked was that I ‘tone it down’, so that the people watching would feel more comfortable.
Masking, or taking up less space in order to fit in or be 'taken seriously', is more about others' comfort than the needs of the person wearing the mask.
It is work, and it runs all day
I don't think I understood for a long time that masking is effort. It doesn't always feel like effort in the moment, which is part of the problem. It feels like being a reasonable, professional adult. But holding back the need to move, to manage your own energy, to admit you've forgotten someone's name, to bow out of small talk, to follow the tangent your brain has already gone down – all of that is work, and it runs continuously in the background while you are also trying to do your actual job.
It took me a while to realise that this background work uses the same attention I would otherwise use to notice what is going on in my own body.
I've tended towards an abundance of energy – or rather, I used to be full of energy right up to the point where I'd burn out. I knew I needed to move a lot. I wasn't tuned into what else my body might have been trying to tell me. This restlessness has often been presented as a personality trait, or a failure of discipline in the past. Fortunately, we’re starting to understand a little more about different brains and nervous systems now. If most of your spare attention is spent on monitoring how you are coming across, there isn't much left over for noticing that your jaw has been clenched since Tuesday, or that the tiredness you're carrying isn't the kind that can be fixed by a good night’s sleep.
Burnout, when it first arrived, felt like something I could have seen coming. But I didn’t see it because I was looking in the other direction, at everyone else's faces.
You are probably not failing at this
There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from trying hard to connect with people and being told you've done it wrong.
A classic example: someone tells you about something difficult, and you respond by sharing your own version of it. For a lot of neurodivergent people, this is an attempt at connection – I’ve been somewhere near where you are, you are not on your own in this. But it can land as one-upmanship, or as making it about yourself.
This is part of what's been described in recent years as the double empathy problem. Two people with different ways of communicating are both trying to reach each other and both missing, and historically we've located the problem in one of them. The assumption has been that the neurodivergent person is less capable of empathy, when what's actually happening is a gap in understanding running in both directions.
The reframe is important, and something I need to remind myself of if I’m giving myself a hard time about an awkward interaction - the awkwardness isn’t evidence that something is wrong with me.
The trait and its mirror
Something I started doing around the time of my diagnosis, and still do: when I notice a trait that causes me difficulty, I look for its mirror.
The struggle to think clearly through a task in ordered steps has a mirror, and the mirror is the creative thinking that gave me the edge as a student in all those slightly left-field essays finished at 4am. Needing to move constantly has a mirror in the energy that lets me hold a room. The tangents have a mirror in the connections I make that other people don't.
I want to be careful here, because this can tip into something glib. Not every challenge has a silver lining, and some days, the trait is just a trait and it’s difficult. But I've found the exercise useful when I’m close to deciding that I'm the problem. Looking at things through a strengths and challenges lens provides a fuller and more accurate picture than the medical ‘deficit’ model alone can offer.
And of course, a lot of the difficulties don’t come from our brains. They come from environments that weren’t designed with us in mind.
What I'd say to the version of me sitting on her hands
I'm not going to tell you to take the mask off. It’s not that simple, and anyone who says it is probably doesn't carry the risk of it. There are places where masking is a reasonable response, and sometimes the honest answer is that you need the job.
What I would say is this: if you haven’t found enough places where you can show up in all of your flawed, messy, noisy glory, that's a problem worth addressing. The repressed version of you doesn't go away - it will likely show up later as exhaustion, resentment, a body that has been shouting for a while and finally gets loud enough to stop you.
Lately, I've been putting less effort into masking. It feels risky and exposing, and so far nobody seems to have stopped taking me seriously.
My flappy hands, for the record, have not improved.
If this feels familiar, it represents a lot of what I work on with people – understanding your own signals, working out which spaces need you to mask and which don't, and building a way of working that doesn't cost you your health. Book a free 20-minute call and tell me what you're dealing with.