Masking is the constant, often unconscious work of suppressing natural behavior to appear neurotypical. For a lot of late-diagnosed adults, masking is so automatic it doesn’t even register as effort.
Chronic masking is linked to exhaustion, anxiety, and burnout that looks unexplainable from the outside because everything looked fine.
Unmasking doesn’t mean abandoning professionalism. It means finding the smallest version of ‘normal’ that a context actually requires, instead of the maximum version you’ve been defaulting to.