Take off your mask

You walk through the supermarket and nobody is paying attention to you. Still, you’re checking all sorts of things at the same time. Are you looking at that man by the cheese for too long? Did your “good afternoon” sound normal enough? Sound familiar? Then you’re certainly not the only one, and there’s a clever idea from philosophy that explains how this works.

In the late eighteenth century, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham designed a remarkable prison building: the panopticon. At its centre stands a tower, with the cells arranged around it. From the tower, a guard can see every prisoner. But the prisoners cannot see the guard. So they never know whether someone is watching them at any given moment. And what do you do when you can never be sure whether someone is watching? To be safe, you behave yourself, always. In the end, the guard isn’t even needed anymore.

Almost two centuries later, the French thinker Michel Foucault read about this building and saw something bigger in it. According to him, our whole society works a bit like this. There are unwritten rules everywhere about how you’re supposed to behave. Nobody has to keep spelling them out, and we’ve learned them so well ourselves that we correct ourselves.

Foucault called this the norm: the idea of what is “normal”. If you stay within the norm, you don’t stand out. If you fall outside it, you notice right away, in a sideways glance or a well-meant “just act normal”. What’s remarkable is that this gaze eventually moves inwards. You no longer hear the guard outside you, but inside your own head.

Neurodivergent

The brains of neurodivergent people work a little differently from the average. And that’s while the world is set up for the average. So you’re more often the one who deviates from the norm. And that means your tower is standing extra tall.

Maybe you recognise a few of these things. You rehearse sentences in your head before saying them out loud. Or you monitor your eye contact: long enough to seem attentive, short enough not to stare. This kind of behaviour is called masking: putting on a mask to look “ordinary”. Many neurodivergent people do this their whole lives, often without realising it. It can help them avoid standing out, but it also costs an enormous amount of energy.

That explains why, after a party or even an hour of grocery shopping, you can feel as if you’ve run a marathon. You weren’t just doing your shopping. You were also acting as your own guard the whole time.

Tight

The norm is, after all, something people made up together, not a law of nature. And what people have made up can become more open. But that norm doesn’t fit everyone equally well. If you’re neurodivergent, you may notice it’s sometimes a bit too tight for you.

The good news is that there is room, really. You just sometimes have to look for it or make it yourself. There are people, for instance, around whom you can let the mask slip. Around whom you can stim or say it’s all too much. Cherish those people. Also try going for a walk without a destination. When nobody expects anything from you, the guard can take a break for a while. You’ll notice how good that can feel.

Sometimes a mask is useful, for example in a job interview. But plan some deliberate recovery afterwards: a quiet evening or an hour of doing nothing. And stand up for your own needs. Say “I need headphones” or “I’d rather reply in writing”. Every time someone does that, it becomes a little more normal. That’s how the tower gets a crack.

In the end, the guard is there for a reason. He once tried to protect you from the rejection and incomprehension you may have experienced. He’s allowed to be there, but you’re also allowed to simply tell him: “Thanks, but I don’t need you today.” Just say hello for a moment, and then carry on your way.

Take off your mask

Neurodivergent

Tight

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