On Masking

Thus ornament is but the guiled shore
To a most dangerous sea.

Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (Act 2, Scene 6)

In more or less the final discussion in Plato’s Republic, Socrates and Glaucon (Plato’s elder brother in real life) agree that a person who has lost a son—a much more common experience in Plato’s day than it is in ours—does well to maintain some self-control in public, but may (without, or without too much, reproach) cry and wail in private. (“When left alone, I fancy, he will permit himself many utterances which, if heard by another, would put him to shame.”)

I first read this passage while crouching behind a sofa in my Midwestern (Wisconsin) childhood home. I must have been around 10 years old. Books were not a big deal in our house, but my parents did have a bookshelf that contained, among other things, a collection of six or eight books of ‘philosophical classics’, including Plato’s Republic. (They didn’t survive the Book Tossing. Sorry.) I have no idea why these books felt off limits, but for some reason they seemed so, and (limits typically being an invitation rather than an obstacle) I swiped the volume of Plato from the shelf and, over the course of several weeks, read it, lying low behind the sofa the while, and carefully replacing the volume on the shelf after each secret session. I also have no idea why, out of all of the amazing and memorable passages from that book, the one about not crying too much in public stood out.

But it did, and I still don’t know quite what to make of it.

Fast-forward fifteen years or so. I had been been hospitalized a couple of times, and had come out the other side sort of, kind of, OK, but still pretty confused about the difference between ‘what one does in public’ and ‘what one does at home’. The passage from Plato came back to me an at opportune time, during a discussion with a nurse, and it seemed to light a candle for her too. She had been very patiently coaching me about how to figure out basic interpersonal interactions in real time (the sort of thing that was free in the UK at the time, but would probably cost $100/hour now), and when I mentioned the passage from Plato, it must have struck her that what I needed was something to read. The really fortunate part was that she was able to make a recommendation, Erving Goffman’s book Forms of Talk. I read it, and then a couple more of his books. They taught me two things.

First, these books are full of concrete lessons about (as Goffman writes early in Forms of Talk) the “implication and meaning” of peoples’ “tone of voice, manner of uptake, restarts” and more. He categorizes types of talk (lecture, ‘radio-talk’, conversation, etc.), and explains what he takes to be the ‘rules’ of these types of talk, based on the purposes that they serve. Things that had previously made no sense to me began to make some sense. I began to understand, for example, that there are points in a conversation when you are supposed to acknowledge that you are listening. (It isn’t that I wasn’t listening before. I just didn’t understand that you are supposed to indicate that you are listening.)

Goffman’s rules (even if they are sometimes justified in somewhat cynical fashion) have proven very useful for one who has almost no ‘intuitive grasp’ of social cues (especially facial expressions). I learned to use Goffman’s ideas to sort out basic things such as ‘what is the other person hoping to get from this conversation?’, ‘is it my turn to talk or not?’, ‘is it time to make eye contact?’ and so on. (It’s a work in progress. I make mistakes. Somebody who knows me well said to me the other day “we talked for 20 minutes and you never looked at me.” Sorry. Sometimes I get it wrong.)

The second sort of thing that I learned from Goffman, and perhaps the more important sort of thing, is that understanding interpersonal interaction can be learned by paying careful attention and studying other people. I was a pretty awkward young adult (to put it mildly), but always intensely desired to fit in, to go unnoticed, to avoid social gaffs. Goffman’s book convinced me that, despite whatever inherent challenges one may face to accomplishing those goals, there is hope. It is an ongoing business to study people and to try to understand how to interact well with them. And I’ve been told, on occasion, that I’m pretty good at it. Thanks, Erving.

All of the above might sound a bit controversial to some. Are we really supposed to ‘make ourselves fit in’? It is well known, and somewhat well studied, that people with various mental health diagnoses, and also people with no such diagnosis, are prone to ‘masking’, which more or less means suppressing one’s natural or instinctual inclination for the sake of social propriety, for ‘fitting in’. Sometimes the practice of masking can feel like an imposition, and there is evidence that those who feel the need to mask a lot suffer from it.

At the same time, at some level it’s a normal part of getting along with other people. When (as a professional philosopher) I go to a philosophical lecture that is ill-prepared, for example, I keep quiet rather than telling the speaker “gosh you really dropped the ball there.” At the other end of the spectrum, when the lecture is brilliant, I’ll certainly thank the speaker for a wonderful talk, but to harp on and on about just how great it was will also come across as ‘weird’.

But when people talk about ‘masking’ in the context of certain mental health diagnoses, they aren’t talking about that kind of normal politeness. Masking is on the spectrum of politeness (please pardon that double entendre), so not completely foreign to most people, but masking isn’t just ‘being polite’ (the occasional difficulty of which I do not mean, at all, to diminish.)

If you are a reader with autism (or an ‘autistic reader’ — I’m (genuinely!) sorry but I can never remember the preferred way to say it) please do share how masking works for you. For me (not diagnosed autistic) the most common scenario when I mask is hearing voices. I am, thankfully and with the benefit of hard lessons, aware enough to be able to determine, most of the time, when voices are ‘just for me’ and when they are ‘for everybody’. And I’ve learned (thank you again, Erving) that you don’t publicly mention, or even react to, voices that are just for you. Even with my best friend of over 20 years (around whom I am very comfortable), I think I’ve acknowledged it in the moment (and even then perhaps obliquely?) maybe just once or twice. And I think that’s about right. (There are many reasons not to mention it in the moment; preserving interpersonal inertia is just one.)

Sometimes I wish it were different. Sometimes I wish I could just say “yeah, I’m hearing a voice right now and she’s kind of loud and demanding my attention, so please forgive if it takes me a few tries to understand what you are saying.” It would be amazing if people could hear that and just accept it. (And I am sure that my best friend could do so.)

And yet, what if everybody had to deal with “I’m hearing a voice right now, and it sounds ‘out there and real’, but actually nobody else hears it”? I think it might actually make social interaction very difficult. It’s probably a good thing that only a relatively few people have to deal with that issue.

But, and this is a huge ‘but’ (oh gosh I’m really sorry but I just thought of this), it would also be really nice if people wouldn’t automatically react with social censure when those of us with good intentions but poor social perception make a mistake. The next time you think that somebody around you might be hearing voices, or worried about demons behind mirrors, or just needing to move their body in some ‘odd’ way (‘stimming’), maybe you can just say to yourself ‘well, that’s just them and it’s fine; it’s still just a person’. What you are seeing is most likely not anti-social behavior. In fact, it is most likely a sincere attempt to be social. Accept it as that. Let us fit in.