Who Exactly Am I Masking For Now?
I've been masking since before I had the word for it. You learn the choreography early if you're autistic and nobody around you knows it yet: watch the room, copy the cadence, hold the eye contact a beat longer than feels tolerable, save the stimming for the car. It's exhausting in a way that's hard to explain to someone who's never had to perform a personality as a second job on top of the actual job. But it always had an audience I could at least picture — a manager, a coworker, a room full of people whose approval or suspicion I was managing in real time. This year I learned the audience has changed shape. A test run on AI-trained performance-management software found that the sentence "I have autism" scored as a worse signal than "I am a bank robber." Worse. Not a rounding error in a training set — a direct readout of what the system considers a threat to normal. Sit with that specific comparison for a second, because it's not abstract. A...
