🧠 Weekly MindSweep No. 242 | Curated Conversation | Masking
September 2026
*Week 242 | Curated Conversation | Masking
Week 243 | Mind Your Business | Masking
Week 244 | Manage Your Mind | Masking
Week 245 | Manage Your Mind | Masking
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🧠 Weekly MindSweep No. 242 | Curated Conversation | Masking
Masking: Showing Up Without the Show
I drafted an email six times before I sent it.
All I needed was for someone to move a meeting by thirty minutes. A simple ask that most people would type in ten seconds and hit send without a second thought.
Instead, I wrote three sentences about why I needed the change. Then I added a line offering to make it up to them, though I wasn’t quite sure how I’d do that yet. Then I softened the whole thing with an apology for the inconvenience, even though nothing had actually been inconvenienced because I hadn’t actually sent it yet. Then I read it back, decided it still sounded like too much of an imposition, so I added one more line thanking them in advance for their flexibility.
By the time I hit send, my simple ask had become a small essay full of justification, compensation, and gratitude, before anyone had said a single word back.
They replied within two minutes: “Sure, no problem!”
Two words. No problem. I’d built an entire defense for a request that apparently needed none.
I sat with that for a minute (or sixty), because this isn’t really about the meeting. It was about a rule I’d unconsciously made up that an ask has to earn its own existence before I’m allowed to make it. Simple isn’t allowed just to be simple. It has to come fully loaded, pre-apologized, pre-justified, so that if anyone ever pushed back, I could point to everything I’d already offered in exchange.
I hadn’t asked for a favor. I’d performed one.
Last month’s topic of Interdependence left us with an idea I couldn’t stop obsessing over: everyone wants to be liked, because somewhere in our evolutionary wiring, being liked meant being kept, being part of the tribe, being safe.
I was left thinking about how much of what we do, especially the parts that look like professionalism or thoroughness, are actually just that instinct in disguise. Performing and curating who we are, to earn the acceptance of others.
My six drafts weren’t really about the meeting; they were an audition.
What We’re Actually Talking About
There’s a name for what I was doing.
Masking, sometimes called camouflaging, is the effortful, often exhausting practice of concealing or suppressing traits to appear more typical, composed, or acceptable than what’s actually happening underneath.
The concept started in autism research, where clinicians broke it into three parts:
Compensation: finding workarounds for social or communication difficulty,
Masking: active strategies to hide traits, and
Assimilation: suppressing your own real preferences or reactions just to fit into the room you’re in.
In ADHD, this concept shows up a little differently, but it comes with the same underlying motivation. It looks like suppressing visible hyperactivity, restraining impulsivity, forcing stillness or engagement your brain isn’t actually producing, and using perfectionism as a strategy to look controlled and put-together, whether or not you feel that way internally.
Masking can be a conscious strategy you choose to use in a specific, high-stakes moment, or it can be unconsciously automatic, running constantly in the background without you ever deciding to turn it on.
Naturally, the unconscious kind is the harder one for us to catch ourselves, because after enough years of practicing it, it stops feeling like a performance and just feels like your personality.
My six drafts didn’t feel like a strategy to me while I was living in the moment. Internally, it felt like being thorough, considerate, and professional.
It took the two-word reply to show me they were something else entirely.
Turns out, that email wasn’t an isolated incident.
Where This Can Show Up for Creative, ADHD Entrepreneurs
Once you know what to look for, it tends to show up everywhere:
The calm delivery that is hiding a chaotic process. Clients see the polished result. They don’t see the three false starts, the all-nighter, the moment you genuinely didn’t know what you were doing.
The smile that doesn't match what your body is doing. Nodding along in a room while your leg won't stop bouncing under the table, or holding a pleasant expression through sensory overwhelm you'd never name out loud, because naming it might make the meeting about you instead of the work.
Over-preparing to avoid embarrassment. Rehearsing conversations that don’t need rehearsing. Over-researching decisions that don’t need it. All so nobody ever catches you not already knowing.
Forcing stillness or forcing engagement. Performing focus in a meeting your brain isn’t actually offering that day, or suppressing the tangent your brain wants to follow because it might read as scattered instead of curious.
Teaching the people closest to you that you don’t need anything. Not just clients. Family, too. The people who’ve learned, over years, that you’re the fixer, the one who’s fine, the one who doesn’t ask, because you were so convincing about it for so long.
The inbox that looks nothing like the brain behind it. Color-coded folders, templated replies, a system that reads as effortless organization, built entirely to compensate for a brain that would otherwise lose track of everything. The system isn’t dishonest. But it’s often mistaken for natural order, when really it’s constant maintenance.
Saying yes to the meeting time that doesn’t actually work. Agreeing to a 7 am call because saying “that doesn’t work for me” felt like handing someone a reason to see you as difficult, disorganized, or high-maintenance, so you rearrange your whole morning instead of naming the real constraint.
The pricing that hides the true cost of the work. Underpricing a project because the honest number might reveal how long certain tasks actually take you, and that felt like a confession you weren’t ready to make.
Small talk as a rehearsed script, not a real exchange. Running the same three questions on repeat at networking events or client calls, not because you’re not interested, but because scripted small talk is far less taxing than the version where you have to track the conversation live.
The version of “fine” you give people who are actually checking on you. A friend or family member asks how you’re really doing, and the automatic, well-practiced “I’m good, just busy!” comes out before you’ve even considered whether it’s true, because it’s the answer that requires nothing further from either of you.
This is different from being private, being professional, or maintaining boundaries; those are choices.
Masking is a performance, and performances take energy you don’t get back.
What Masking Actually Costs
None of this is free, even when it works. It comes with tremendous cost.
A 2026 study out of Simon Fraser University found that 91.6 percent of adults with ADHD surveyed reported masking, hiding, suppressing, or compensating for their traits in at least some social situations. Nearly all of us. Most commonly at work, in public, and in our closest relationships.
Separate research from 2024 found that higher levels of masking were associated with poorer mental health, lower self-esteem, and a reduced sense of authenticity. That research held regardless of which specific diagnosis was driving the masking behavior.
Our capacity is being managed: masking spends our time, energy, and attention. All three, and often at once.
Time gets spent rehearsing, rewriting, over-preparing for things that didn’t need it.
Energy gets spent holding a posture, a tone, a pace that isn’t natural, for as long as anyone’s watching.
And attention gets split in two, one part actually doing the task in front of you, the other part constantly monitoring how you’re coming across while you do it.
That split-attention tax can be really easy for us to miss, because it doesn’t show up as a single dramatic cost.
It shows up as being more tired than the day should have made you.
It shows up as forgetting something simple right after a meeting where you performed total composure.
It shows up as needing far more recovery time than the actual task seemed to require, and not understanding why, because from the outside, all you did was “sit in one meeting.”
And then there’s the crash.
For a lot of us, the collapse doesn’t happen during the performance. It happens right after, the second the mask is no longer required. You get through the client call, the school pickup, the networking event, holding it together the entire time, and then you get in the car, or close the laptop, or walk through your own front door, and there’s nothing left.
A complete depletion.
The version of you that was capable, engaged, put-together for the last two hours needs the next several hours or days just to come back online.
For people managing both autism and ADHD (AuDHD), this compounds even further: two demanding performances running at once, competing for the same limited regulatory resources.
Researchers have pointed to this combined load as one likely explanation for the exhaustion that hits hardest right when the mask finally comes off, in the safety of home, at the end of the day, the specific, particular collapse of finally being somewhere you don’t have to perform, and discovering there’s no energy left to be present in either.
The bill always comes. Masking just decides when: a little at a time, all day long, or all at once, the moment nobody’s watching anymore.
This Week, We Notice
We’re not trying to unmask everything all at once this week. That’s not realistic, and for a lot of us, it isn’t even safe yet. But together, let’s begin to start noticing where the performance is running.
The meeting where you nodded along.
The ask you padded with justifications it never needed.
The moment you said “I’ve got it” to protect the appearance of having it, rather than because you actually did.
If this feels familiar, it might be because we’ve been here before. Back in June, we sat with Visibility, the fear of what happens if someone actually looks at you closely. Masking is close kin to that fear, but it’s not quite the same thing. Visibility asks what happens if I’m seen. Masking has already tried to answer that question in advance, by making sure there’s nothing unedited left to look at.
Masking helped a lot of us survive rooms never built for how our brains actually work. Let’s begin naming it with compassion, not shame.
Surviving and thriving aren’t always the same practice. This month, let’s get curious about what’s waiting on the other side of the performance.
My questions for you this week:
Where do you perform composure that your body isn't actually producing?
Where does looking put-together cost you more than it's actually earning you?
Reply and share with me!
✨ You Belong Here. I can help.
This week's piece kept circling one idea: masking is a performance, and performances take energy you don't get back. If you recognize yourself in the fully-loaded ask, the calm delivery hiding a chaotic process, or the pricing that quietly protects a secret you're not ready to tell, that recognition is worth more than noticing alone.
A MindSweep Mapping Session is a space to bring the parts of your business, and yourself, that you've been carefully curating, and actually look at what's underneath. Not to perform it better. To understand what it's costing you, and what might be possible without it. If you're not sure where to start, a free 30-minute consultation is the easiest first step:
Curated Conversation
We gather every Monday to sit with exactly this kind of thing out loud, together, in a room built specifically to not require the performance. This month, we're unpacking Masking, and there's no better place to practice showing up without the show than with people who already know what that costs.
Every Monday at 8am EST, Curated Conversation Evolution is a room full of creative entrepreneurial brains that get it. Bring the version of you that's been performing. This week, that's exactly the one we want to see.
Listen if you want. Speak if you're ready. Stay if it feels like home.
Mondays at 8 a.m. EST. We start with coffee and belonging is included. 💜
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What I’m reading
Awaken Your Myth
by Erik Ireland
I found Erik Ireland the way most people do — through his voice. He's the host of Listen to Sleep, a podcast where he tells bedtime stories and reads meditations from what sounds like a cabin somewhere in the mountains. I put it on one night, heard him mention growing up in New England, time spent in Rhode Island — where I grew up — and something in me just went: this is my person.
What's Inspiring Me: Being fully seen isn't the same as being “real” for an audience — it's the harder, quieter choice to stop editing yourself down to something palatable.
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