Losing the Mask in English Class

You know you don't got this.

Welcome, new subscribers! While my recent posts revolve around the experience of being late-diagnosed autistic, I write more often as an autistic human than about being an autistic human. I will soon shift back to my usual poetry readings and flash essays about anything at all (Hello, special interests!). Here are some of my favorite posts about being neurodivergent:

Strange Lady (This one connects in time with last week’s Mute essay.)

Dispatches from an Autistic English Teacher

At the Center of a Certain Turbulence (This is the penultimate chapter of my memoir At Home with Books. Neurodivergence throughout, but especially in this segment.)

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Unsplash: 2y.kang

“Don’t you plan what you’re going to say before you say it?”

I tell my therapist how just that morning I had scripted a conversation before approaching the Old Navy returns counter to maximize the likelihood of being understood: Hi. I’d like to return this item, but exchange that one. May I leave it at the counter while trying clothes on? “Don’t you practice ahead of time?”

“No, Rebecca,” she shakes her head. “I don’t.”

“Don’t you parse through conversations afterward?” I’m boggled by her response. “You know, to make sure you didn’t miscommunicate?”

“No,” she tells me.

“When you’re in front of a group of people”— now I’m thinking of the American Lit class I teach on Tuesdays and Thursdays—“don’t you lose track of what you’re saying because all those eyes are looking at you?”

She shakes her head again.

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When you grow up autistic but you don’t know it, you know two things:

1. You’re doing the whole relational shebang wrong, and

2. You must hide this fact from everyone to stay safe from shame.

You know you don’t got this. You learn to walk down your sweat-scented high school hallways telling yourself, with exponential anxieties, that you’d better get this before turning any corner and encountering a person with whom you must socialize.

I built up my mask from birth, mirroring facial expressions, tones of voice, and cadences of laughter like an expert actor—or a survivor. By middle school, I knew never to let anyone know I didn’t know what they meant about any given thing; I could look up the answer later. By college, I was smiling and nodding and trying to follow threads of conversation while (pro tip) asking lots of questions so they would talk and I wouldn’t have to risk saying something so off-kilter that eyebrows would shoot up or scowl down: sure sign of unsafe.

I got very good at the performance, but there were always cracks, moments when I relaxed my social vigilance and took something meant to be figurative so literally that everyone in the room laughed, or maybe the acquaintance across the cafe table cocked her head, some fresh realization about my oddities flitting across her eyes, a wall between us. Mask up, even though I had no idea I was wearing one or that everyone else didn’t do the same.

That conversation with my therapist on Zoom was the beginning of the end, or maybe the end of the end. In the end, I didn’t have to take my mask off. I was forty-five years old and too tired to hold it up anymore. The next time I returned for a counseling session, I had already tried teaching my tenth-grade English class without making eye contact.

Instead of staring uncomfortably into the eyes of my class as I waxed on about Walt Whitman’s rangy verse and Emily Dickinson’s tight, subtle explosion of dashes, images, and unexpected statements, I looked elsewhere. I cast my vision downward toward the students’ grubby running shoes, upward at the poster of Hester Prynne—her own eyes cast down at the emblazoned scarlet letter that blew her own secret wide open—and out the modular window to the hot asphalt parking lot.

It worked like a dream. When I wasn’t drowning in the direct intensity of fifteen pairs of eyes, I was able to focus on the material; the students themselves seemed more relaxed, happier to be talking about American Literature than usual; I sailed home in the car stim-singing to high heaven as the Indigo Girls belted songs about bone-shaking beauty and love-lit maps.

Maybe the tires crushed my mask into bits on the blacktop. I didn’t see it happen, but my hiding self was done and gone.

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In English class the following year, I taught the mask.

Tenth Graders, meet Dunbar, meet Hughes, meet J. Alfred Prufrock, meet—my God, I pray—meet yourselves. I stopped teaching mid-year—another decision I was able to make to meet my particular needs. On the final week before leaving the classroom, I wanted to give the students something they could take and keep and hold and return to. It had to be something I knew, and by then, I knew about the mask.

When Paul Laurence Dunbar says, “We wear the mask,”¹ he’s not talking about autism. He is talking about being a black man, being part of a community of African descent, the children of slaves, slavery in living memory in post-Reconstruction America, in the face of fresh-born Jim Crow. We wear the mask, he says, “that grins and lies, / It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,” and the whole point is to hide the true experience of the self, because the white people around him would not be receptive to what he’s really thinking on the inside, that “torn and bleeding heart” he covers with a smile. Let them think I’m fine, he says.

When Langston Hughes says, “And they will see that I am beautiful”² three decades later during the Harlem Renaissance, Jim Crow grown big and strong, he is talking about mask down. Hughes bears an optimism that one day he’ll “be at the table / when company comes”; no one will be embarrassed of him. And he declares:

Besides,

They’ll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed—

He rejects the shame of being an outsider. Mask down, he believes he is worthy. That’s a difference between him and me, and sometimes I read that last line of his and I weep for the child and the preteen and the teenager and the young woman and the middle-aged woman I was up until just a few years ago, masking my neurodiverse ways because I didn’t believe that the full expression of myself was anything lovely to look at.

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“No, Rebecca, I don’t script,” my therapist tells me. “When conversations end, I can walk away.”

I’m aghast at the possibility, but her eyebrows remain at-level, unjudgmental. She gazes at me through the computer screen, which makes a helpful buffer for eye contact.

“You’re not alone, though,” she clarifies. “Many people feel this way. I’ll help you learn yourself,” she smiles, and I know I am safe.

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During my last week teaching English to those complicated, shimmering teenage souls, I gave them Dunbar and I gave them Hughes, and then I gave them J. Alfred Prufrock,³ who can’t bring himself to sing the song in his heart because he’s so afraid of rejection, of being laughed at, of not being taken seriously. “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” T.S. Eliot’s creation cries.

And then I gave them an assignment: respond however you want. The next day, the students brought poems of their own, drawings and paintings, and letters to Prufrock urging him not to be so down on himself, but also telling him how often they feel the same, hiding themselves, terrified of rejection.

Some of the responses involved weeping: tears streaking the face of a Greek drama mask, the image of a young woman bent and crying. What feels surprising but shouldn’t is the way so many of us wear masks for all kinds of reasons that hurt, and how we wish we didn’t have to hide ourselves just to feel safe – from cruel laughter, from deep loneliness, from sheer embarrassment about our inner selves.

I wear a mask, too, hung in the air between teacher and student, friend and friend, and there was suddenly a freedom that felt like buoyancy, and a selfhood that felt like affirmation, because to be able to say they will see that I am beautiful, you have to lower the mask and let yourself be seen.

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Every day, I lose my mask. In the words of Elizabeth Bishop, it isn’t hard to do, and every day I find myself “losing farther, losing faster.”⁴ On that road home from teaching. In the woods behind my house where sometimes I speak out loud now to the birds and the plants and the creatures I can hear scurrying under the brush in a sort of free and happy verbal stim, and I swing my arms and snap my fingers to let the electricity out.

I lose it in the car while singing my heart out, unembarrassed in front of anyone who might be riding along. I lost it in the classroom, and it was for the good of everyone around me, because, statistically, I know there were other neurodiverse individuals sitting in those desks, and there are other reasons for masking, which some of my students have dealt with, and maybe me crushing my mask underfoot gave some of them permission to do the same, and maybe they’ll be better and freer than I ever was at their age, and as I drove away on my last day of teaching, the Indigo Girls sang that bone-shaking beauty of the world from the speakers, and I rolled down the windows and soared.

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This essay was originally published in January 2024 at Midstory Magazine.

Unsplash: Claudia Wolff

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1. We Wear the Mask | The Poetry Foundation

2. I, Too | The Poetry Foundation

3. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock | The Poetry Foundation

4. One Art | The Poetry Foundation