The primary function of our masks is to fit in. There is no greater imperative for a kid growing up in school than to be accepted to some extent. Getting ahold of the right clothes, toys and vocabulary is an obvious way to fit in, but it goes a lot deeper than that.
There are ridiculous rites of passage every other day on a playground—with imperative stunts to pull off, people to bother or competitions to win—to stay in the good graces of the right people. It was an exhausting trial by fire for no particular reason, and I could never figure out who was making up the rules anyway.
One familiar autistic experience is rehearsing anticipated interactions. You aren’t ever sure what scenarios are going to come up the next school day, but many of us would lie in bed going through the motions in our minds. We’d try to guess what the day would look like, whom we’d talk t and what would be expected of us. Of course, this was only after we’d finished unpacking the day we just finished—reviewing what worked, what didn’t and what caught us off guard.
While many kids do this, autistics do it to a pathological extent. We review our actions and words obsessively throughout our lives, always second-guessing whether we’re coming across as “normal enough.”
Many autistics I’ve talked to say that this constant review was one of the primary reasons they saw themselves as an “alien” sent to Earth to study human behaviour or the subject of a scientific documentary being watched on another planet, through which the complex society of Earthlings was picked apart. The impression of “otherness” becomes deeply embedded at an early age and never leaves.
I have a feeling that, for many people, the routine of going to school became familiar and OK. For me—and many other autistic people I know—it was always exhausting. I couldn’t believe it was being asked of me day after day. I’d panic if I thought about it too much, especially towards the beginning of the school year. And if it were one of those years when I had to take the school bus, my entire life was worse.
Not once did I take the bus without being severely anxious. There were a whole different set of kids on the bus than there were at school, and they had different interests and senses of humour. Not only that, but I had to switch buses at a particular stop.
Despite the fact that this was always done without complication, I was certain that the bus driver wouldn’t remind kids going to my school to switch or tell us the right bus number. I’d worry that the right bus wouldn’t be there or that I’d just miss it. Once on the bus, I had zero confidence that I was ever getting to school or seeing my family again.
Naturally, I couldn’t show anyone this lack of confidence. I couldn’t tell people how panicked I felt. No one else was panicked. They were even having fun! It was unimaginable to me that they could lay their worries down and just passively sit there, not keeping track of the passing landmarks and calculating probable outcomes.
They carelessly caused a ruckus, pushing the driver’s buttons until he was yelling at us—another unthinkable act in my mind. Through all of it, I knew I was fully expected to follow this routine: from the bus, to class, to recess, to class and back to the bus. It was an endless ordeal of trying to hide my discomfort.
And that’s really the root of the mask—covering up discomfort. But the longer you wear it for that purpose, the harder it is to take off.
The drive to please others everywhere
A lot of high-masking autistics are chronic people pleasers. I don’t want to preach some kind of toxic individualism and suggest that any action done to please others is an unwelcome act. I like making people happy, and it’s an excellent source of dopamine. The issue is that once your identity and self-worth merge with making others happy, you can drift further from knowing yourself.
When you learn how to mask, you learn how to people-please. And if you’re a high-masking autistic who was also considered “gifted,” you earned a black belt in making your teachers happy long before you knew what you wanted out of life.
If you’re a high-masking autistic who was also considered “gifted,” you earned a black belt in making your teachers happy long before you knew what you wanted out of life.
People-pleasing is the highest form of masking because you learn not only to fit in but also to reflect back the person others want you to be. It’s obvious with teachers because they wield the power of the gold star, the hand-drawn smiley face and the A-plus.
For many autistic students, their relationship with a teacher is more important than any of their peer relationships, from kindergarten through college. After all, peers can be threatened and bothered by your accomplishments or your info dumps, but your teacher never will be.
Because teachers occupy a different role, the normal rules of masking and fitting in are severely relaxed. Yes, you do have to keep impressing a teacher with your work or astute observations to keep the relationship up. But it doesn’t matter if you’re not wearing the right shoes, and you never have to deal with metamessages or (presumably) flirting.
Tasks in school can be somewhat addictive because they follow a pattern: an achievable goal is set up, and you decode the teacher’s expectations to do what it takes to elicit praise. Most of the time, it becomes more of a puzzle about each teacher’s expectations than about the subject at hand or your own passions.
So many autistic people are considered gifted as children because of their ability to think laterally and read teachers. They continually surprise with innovative ideas that are impressive but still relevant to the assignment. Of course this can backfire when the magic tricks stop working with a particular teacher or a transition to a higher level of schooling is too dysregulating. The autistic student can then feel that the whole thing is pointless and check out of schooling, since they never found themselves in the work anyway.
The pattern doesn’t do much to prepare autistic people for employment. There are few parallels between teachers and bosses. Teachers never treated you as a threat but rather as a human with real thinking and feeling abilities.
This isn’t always how a boss will treat you. Bosses tend to see threats if you’re trying to impress them too much, and they’re far more suspicious and egotistical than teachers because your respective roles don’t have the clear dividing lines that exist between teachers and students in a school setting. Plus the factory system of employment makes sure you’re replaceable.
Bosses’ expectations are more veiled than teachers’, and workplace goals are rarely designed for successful completion the way school assignments are. The lesson that bosses aren’t teachers, and therefore you can’t people-please them in the same way, will rarely take root before an autistic is out of their twenties—but this is an anecdotal statement and may not reflect the majority experience.
This behaviour often bleeds over to friends, parents and potential partners. People-pleasing isn’t exclusive to autistics (remember, our behaviours are only particular human behaviours in atypical, life-altering proportions), and not all autistics people-please; however, undiagnosed autistics often see it as part of their mask in retrospect, at least through a good portion of their schooling history.
The ability to fit in is closely tied to achievement and adult approval, hiding many of our differences. The tendency to people-please may diminish for some but remain for others, depending on environmental factors.
Sol Smith is the author of The Autistic’s Guide to Self Discovery and of the manager of the Neurospicy Community, which is the largest support network for autistics and ADHDers in the world. He’s a certified autism specialist who is autistic, dyslexic and living with ADHD. He spent more than two decades as a college professor before shifting his professional focus to coaching other autistic and ADHD people to gain autonomy in their lives. Sol’s speaking skills have earned him a following of hundreds of thousands on TikTok and led to educational seminars about neurodiversity with corporations around the world. He lives in Southern California with his wife and four children and you can find him online
at www.ProfessorSol.com.
Adapted from The Autistic’s Guide to Self-Discovery: Flourishing as a Neurodivergent
Adult. Copyright © 2025 by Sol Smith. Reprinted with permission from New World Library. www.newworldlibrary.com
images: Depositphotos
