Ep 3. The Cost of Hiding (Masking)

Liz Buggy: Welcome to Spicy Brain Phoenix Heart, the podcast where we honor the beautiful complexity of neurodivergent minds and the resilience of the human spirit. I'm Liz Buggy, a big hearted human, neuro spicy, certified transformation and neurodivergent coach. as well as a breathwork practitioner. I'm here to walk alongside you through the messy, the overwhelming and the deeply human parts of healing. you've ever felt burnt out, disconnected, stuck in survival mode or like somewhere along the line you've lost yourself. then you're in the right place. This space is for the sensitive, the overthinkers, the feelers, the survivors, navigating trauma, dissociation, and the weight of a world that doesn't fully understand how your brain operates and how much you feel within your heart. Here we don't rush the healing, we don't bypass the hard stuff. We feel everything and we rise anyway. Together we'll explore nervous system healing, self-trust, identity, and what it really means to come home to yourself. So you can remember who you are beneath noise, the patterns, the pain. Take a breath and let's begin. Hello everyone. Welcome to today's episode. This episode is about something many neurodivergent people know intimately. It's something we all do and we don't always notice that we're doing it. It's called masking. Not the kind you wear at a party. but the kind that you wear in order to survive, to fit in. It's the way you adjust your voice, your body, your expressions, your entire personality, just to move through life a little easier, feeling a little bit of safety. If you've ever felt like you've had to perform just to fit in, then this one's for you. Neurodivergent masking is the conscious or unconscious suppression of natural traits like stimming, sensory needs, communication differences, emotional expression. They do it in order to appear more socially acceptable. Often it looks like forcing eye contact, even when it feels overwhelming. Rehearsing conversations in the head before speaking. Copying other people's tones, gestures or social rhythms. Hiding sensory distress, for example, lights, noise, textures that irritate. Smiling when you're confused, anxious or overstimulated. and often we don't realise we're even doing it because it starts young. I know for myself I've lived my whole life masking. It begins often as a survival strategy, a way to avoid bullying, rejection, punishment, misunderstanding. For many, especially autistic and neurodivergent in the forms of ADHD. dyslexia and so forth, it becomes second nature. Not because it feels good, but because it works. At least at first. Now let's be really honest here. Most neurodivergent people don't start masking because they're trying to be deceptive. They do it because it feels safe in a world that responds to harshly when they don't. Often neurodivergent people may get told things like stop being weird, look at me when I'm talking to you, why are you so sensitive, you're too much. Or stop being passive aggressive, it's learnt behaviour, you learn to observe, adapt, it becomes a kind of social translation system. where you say, I'll turn myself into something easier to understand. Often it helps in the short term, but it often also reduces immediate conflicts. helps with school and workplace expectations. It makes social situations feel more predictable, create a sense of control in unsafe environments. For many, masking is what gets them through. interviews, classrooms, customer service jobs, relationships. It's not imaginary, it works, but the cost is often invisible at first. Masking often helps, but it does slowly harm. The complicated truth is masking is protective. It's also exhausting and often it occurs at the same time. When you mask, you're running a constant internal processing of what is my face doing? Did I say that right? Am I being normal? Am I being normal enough? Am I slipping? Often it creates a split between the self that is experienced internally and the self that is performed externally. Over time that split becomes tiring in such a way that sleep doesn't fix it. You might notice chronic fatigue after social interactions. Needing long recovery time after what is normally a normal day. Feeling detached from your own preferences or personality. Difficulting knowing what you actually feel versus what you're performing. And this is where masking starts connecting to something deeper. masking burnout, dysregulation and dissociation. Neurodivergent burnout isn't just tiredness. It's like a system overload where your body just shuts down. Long-term masking contributes to this because your nervous system is constantly in a state of regulation effort. Suppressing stims, suppressing emotional responses, managing sensory inputs without external supports, constantly monitoring social performances. Eventually, the system just can't keep up. You can't keep compensating. And that's when you become dysregulated. And this can show up as emotional flooding or shutdown, increased sensory sensitivity, loss of executive functioning. Difficulty speaking or thinking clearly. And sometimes dissociation enters the picture. Dissociation isn't fun. And often, your divergent burnout isn't always dramatic. It's often subtle and you don't realize it until it's almost too late. You start watching yourself interact instead of being inside it. Emotional numbness in social situations, memory gaps after high social periods. Dissociation can come. in the form of survival masking. If you can't safely be you, you might learn to mentally leave. And while that protects you in the moment, it can deepen the long-term disconnect from self. The emotional core behind masking is validation and reflection. One of the hardest parts of masking is people often only see the version of you that's being carefully edited. So when you're alone, you often wonder, who am I when I am not performing? Truth is, you are not the mask. The mask is something you built to move through life, through environments that didn't fully support and accommodate you. It was adaptive. It was intelligent. It was protective. It also deserves rest. You can't live your entire life in performance mode without consequences. Unmasking for many doesn't mean suddenly dropping everything. It often looks more like noticing what feels safe to release. Finding spaces where regulation is supported instead of being forced. Allowing small, private moments of authenticity. Rebuilding trust with your Nova system. It's not about becoming less functional. It's about becoming less split, less reactive. So if you've taken anything away from this episode, let it be this. Masking once made sense. It helped you survive. But you don't have to keep paying for survival with your whole sense of self. You deserve spaces where you don't have to translate yourself to be understood. Where you dim yourself down, where you mask, where you fit in. Thank you for listening. I will see you next in the next episode.