How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Mask

Dispatches from the Autism Wars

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How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Mask<br>A detailed account of how I developed social skills by LARPing as Lawrence of Arabia

Christianity On The Spectrum<br>Aug 02, 2026

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Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade.<br>I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands<br>And wrote my will across the sky in stars<br>To earn you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house,<br>That your eyes might be shining for me<br>When we came.<br>~TE Lawrence, The Seven Pillars Of Wisdom

I’ve always been confused by the claim that masking starts in early childhood. As a child, I did not have the self-awareness for masking to even occur to me. I was a weird kid, and my mother, by her own account, thought of getting me assessed for Asperger’s more than once, but just never got around to it. Recently, while we were on vacation together, she commented that she had thought my two older siblings were a bit spergy until I came along, and then she thought, “Oh, never mind, that’s what it looks like.” Despite knowing I was different from the other kids, my parents did too good of a job assuring me that it was okay to be weird and that there was nothing wrong with me. It never occurred to me that I should be doing anything other than what I felt was right at any given time.<br>I always knew that I was different from my peers, but I wasn’t cognisant of just how different I was until around the age of ten. I’ve found this is a common pattern for many people my age who were diagnosed with Asperger’s. Social relationships in elementary school are quite simple. I had a social life because my mom’s best friend had a son my exact age, and that was about all it took to build and maintain a friendship. Unfortunately, that friend moved far away, and I soon discovered, like a young, autistic Joe Exotic, that I would never socially recover from this. Puberty hit right after my one friend skipped town, and suddenly social dynamics became exponentially more complicated. I went from being able to tread water hard enough to keep from drowning to sinking to the bottom of the pool like a brick. I didn’t realize the shift was occurring at first. I was like one of those lobotomized frogs that doesn’t jump out of the water as the temperature rises incrementally, until one day I finally realized that I was being boiled alive in the social dynamics of a sixth-grade classroom.<br>I first realized how much these dynamics had changed in a week when a group of my classmates asked me if I was “actually retarded” every time I tried to join them at recess. I told them that I wasn’t sure—which unfortunately didn’t help me in that situation—but even the addled musings of my eleven-year-old brain were cogent enough to see that something was not right. What exactly was not right, I could not tell you, but my working theory at the time was that, in the same way that some people were unable to understand basic concepts in math, I was unable to understand basic concepts about people. I often asked my mother what was wrong with me and why I didn’t fit in with most people in my class. I did this so often that I eventually dubbed the response she would give me as “the people person speech.” The speech was about how some people, like my siblings, were people persons, but some people, like her and me, weren’t. She would explain that God made us all different for a reason and that it was okay to be how we were. With the helpful prompting of some of my classmates, I realized this might have been her way of telling me that I was kind of stupid, and so I concluded that I probably had an unspecified type of learning disability. I knew it was not a generalized learning disability: I was always consistently ahead of my peers in math, and many of my teachers joked about me being a tiny professor, which, in retrospect, should have been a hint.<br>I felt ashamed of the hitherto unspecified learning disability that I decided I had, and I became determined to figure out how to either hide it or compensate for it. I didn’t know what to do and was too embarrassed to ask anyone about it, so I would spend most of my recesses and school bus trips unsuccessfully cooking up ineffective solutions to “my people problem.” This lasted until the serendipitous day when the government of Canada, by way of public broadcast radio, beamed into my head what I assumed was the key to my future success. My mother, a woman with a PhD in virology trapped in rural Saskatchewan and starved for intellectual stimulation, used to faithfully listen to Quarks and Quirks, a science communication program on CBC radio. On this fateful day the episode featured anthropologists describing their ethnographic research into Amazonian tribes: their field work, data collection methods, and conclusions about the tribes and their social dynamics. As I listened, I realized that...