The Four Ways I Was Masking My ADHD Without Realizing It

Spoiler: none of these involve masking in social situations

Photo by Max Zhdanov on Unsplash

I have to admit: of all the ADHD “symptoms” I learned about after my diagnosis 4 years ago, masking was always the one that stumped me the most.

It’s hard to know exactly where masking starts and being a human begins.

I was a performer by trade (a figure skater, and later, an actor as well, albeit not a good one), so in a way, I masked for decades. I skated when I felt sad, overwhelmed, angry, or anxious. Sometimes those emotions showed in my performance; often, they didn’t.

I became used to hiding how I really felt. I often felt like an empty shell, filled with whatever people needed me to be.

The figure skater. The athlete. The CrossFit trainer. The writer. The sports ambassador.

It became hard to keep track of my personas, but I still slipped into them effortlessly.

Until, of course, in 2021, when an ADHD tipping point (a move, a global pandemic) brought me to a mental health expert. She diagnosed me with anxiety, depression, and eventually, ADHD.

“I don’t really think I mask,” I said to one fellow ADHD creator. “I’m too good at presenting myself, even if I’m not interacting with anyone.”

The creator laughed.

“That is masking,” he said. “It doesn’t always have to involve other people.”

He was right.

Masking, also known as camouflaging, is defined as the conscious or unconscious effort to hide, suppress, or compensate for ADHD symptoms to appear “neurotypical.” It’s basically hiding how we really feel or behave and copying others to “fit in.” The problem is, it costs us.

For years, I didn’t think I actually masked because I always thought I was remarkably honest with other people (sometimes to the point of bluntness). My honesty got me in trouble. I didn’t quite grasp how “normal” people communicated, made small talk, or massaged the truth to make it less offensive.

Maybe I’m more AuDHD than ADHD, but that’s a conversation for another post.

We often think of masking in terms of work, school, or other large social gatherings. But it can be more subtle, too.

In the last few months, I realized I might have been masking more than I thought. I had become very good at hiding my true needs, wants, and behaviors — even from the people who know me best.

And they are not the typical examples of masking you may have seen elsewhere. Here we go.

Trying every hack and system to finally feel productive like everyone else

The procedure is always the same. I find a productivity guru. I absorb all their teachings, convinced this is THE ONE that will help. But after a few days, or at the most a few weeks, I give up.

Over the last few years, I’ve tried: the Pomodoro method, detailed planners, waking up early, staying up late, deep work, avoiding my phone for the first hour, morning pages, time-tracking apps, website blockers to protect my focus. And on and on.

It’s not that these don’t work. They do — if I can keep using them for more than a day or three, that is. My ADHD brain just loses interest in them before they actually work.

But by trying to force myself to use ONE tool or convince myself I needed to do it consistently, I was actually masking. I thought I could magically make myself have the focus and follow-through of a neurotypical if I just did the same hacks everyone else swore by. I thought it could fix me. But it didn’t.

I used the Pomodoro method for two weeks for a consulting project a few years ago, and never used it again. I have a planner I mostly use, but before that, I had whole graveyards of them that never got filled.

The biggest realization I’ve had lately? We can cycle through productivity hacks, planners, and other tools as we need.

It’s okay not to stick with that one perfect hack, because there isn’t one.

It’s totally normal for us neurodivergents to bounce between systems and practices like a caffeinated ping pong ball.

Our brains work differently depending on situations, context, energy levels, and other factors that are often outside our control.

The best thing we can do for ourselves is to use the tools that work for us right now. And be okay if “the thing (or things) that work” change like the weather.

Trying to be more like my heroes — and buying what I couldn’t copy

I’ve been patterning myself after people I admired for as long as I could remember.

I spent much of my youth watching A&E Biographies. Curled up with a box of Kashi cereal, I’d try to figure out their secrets to success. Vera Wang competed in figure skating, like I did, so maybe I should become a fashion designer too. Will Smith started with music to get into acting, so maybe sports could be my way in.

I did the same with writing and skating, my two special interests.

When I read the entire Little House on the Prairie series the summer before first grade, I wrote what ended up looking like fan fiction with slightly different characters. I copied Ingalls Wilder’s syntax, her style, her storylines.

“Adults sat in the general store talking about politics and such,” my babysitter read aloud, laughing but trying not to. I stopped letting adults read my writing after that.

I kept doing it anyway. When I switched to the Anne of Green Gables series, all my stories — composed in my head during boring interludes like church and math class — were set on Prince Edward Island, with characters an awful lot like Anne and her friends.

On the rink, I’d enrage my fellow skaters by skating to their programs, trying to copy them. They thought it was gamesmanship. Really, I didn’t know how to use the style I already had, so I pretended to be someone else.

My coach once told me to picture myself as Olympic silver medalist Sasha Cohen before I got on the ice. I did. I won.

Being someone else had its advantages. It also had its costs. I thought I was being clever. In reality, it was a complicated form of masking and mirroring — meant to help me fit in.

ADHDers and autistic folks do this a lot, often without realizing it.

We quote movie lines. We piggyback on other people’s stories and claim something similar happened to us. We try out phrases and styles because someone we admire did it first. It doesn’t earn us friends — usually it just makes us look like we’re trying too hard.

But it’s a form of survival.

If we act like the people we admire, we think we’ll get accepted. We’ll be safe.

I did that for most of my life.

I also didn’t have a strong sense of self — another common, lesser-known part of being neurodivergent.

If all your selves are constantly shifting, and partially composed of other people, how do you build one that’s actually yours?

I thought I’d left this behind. I hadn’t. A few months ago, I took part in a workshop held by a writer I admired.

His words cracked my brain open.

Soon my writing was shifting — sounding more like what he believed, not what I actually thought. I had a hard time teasing apart what I believed from what I wanted to believe, because believing it had made him successful.

Here’s the thing, though: I’ll never be someone else, no matter how hard I try. I’ll just be a lesser version of them instead of the only version of me.

As a comedian once said — I’m paraphrasing — don’t try to become the next me. I already exist. Be yourself. Easier said then done, when you don’t know who “yourself” is.

This showed up in more insidious ways, too. When I couldn’t copy someone directly, I found another way to borrow them: I bought what they had.

Years ago, I bought a paddleboard. I’ve used it a handful of times. It’s in my shed, waiting.

What mattered was why I bought it. A friend of mine paddleboarded — she’d post sunny photos of herself in a bathing suit, abs on display, broad smile, phone reflected in her sunglasses. That should be me, I thought. So I bought the board.

It didn’t last, because I bought it to become someone, not because I wanted to paddleboard.

ADHDers do this a lot. We get obsessed with something — because we’re genuinely interested, or because we think we should be — and we buy the gear: the sports equipment, the $200 of yarn from my annual knitting phase, the perfume-making kit.

We want to be the kind of person who does that thing.

The kind of person who plays tennis on weekdays. Who knits everyone scarves for Christmas. Who smells so good people ask what perfume that is.

This is just a more sophisticated form of the same masking. Our sense of self is usually faint to begin with — years of being told our instincts aren’t correct will do that.

We’ve learned the safest way to get along is to want what everyone else wants, and stick with it.

When I bought that paddleboard, I wasn’t just trying to be more like my friend — I wanted her qualities. Disciplined. Athletic. Tan. I thought if I paddled hard enough, I could have them too. I lost interest instead, and felt like I’d let myself down again.

It’s not just me. It’s why marketing works — convincing us that the right bag or the right sunglasses gets us into the club. They don’t actually make us anything. They just make it look that way.

The fix, for me, has been asking what I actually want before I spend the time or the money. Do I want to do hot yoga because I like it, or because I want to be the kind of girl who does hot yoga?

It was the latter, by the way.

I also let my interests change without apologizing for it.

I used to get annoyed at myself for losing interest in a hobby and force myself to keep going. Now I let it shift, seasonally and situationally.

Hiding what I like for fear of being judged

The other day, I was watching Scandal. I heard my mom coming into my room. I shut it off and pretended to be listening to YouTube focus tracks instead.

I’ve been touchy about showing what I like since I was a kid. The times I did, I was judged. “This is stupid,” my dad said when I tried to watch a Disney channel show with him. When I shared my love of Broadway musicals with my classmates, they looked at me like I just announced I enjoyed eating grass.

There were a few friends I could share my weird special interests with — improv comedy, Pokemon, graphic novels — but for the most part, I hid them.

This continued into adulthood, to the point where I don’t want to share the TV, movies, and interests I have because I’m afraid people will judge me. Like they did when I shared my love of cults. As if I was saying I wanted to be a member of the Manson family instead of saying I was fascinated by it.

Special interests for ADHDers are all-consuming, intense, and sometimes short-lived. They’re also often offbeat.

We can’t always control what captures our imagination — but we can control whether we share that interest with others. So we don’t.

So when I shut off Scandal, it’s not that it’s that weird of a show (although it did weirdly predict the rise of certain political figures). It’s that I don’t want to be judged for liking it, because I’ve been burned before.

Masking isn’t just pretending to be neurotypical; it’s hiding our neurodivergent special interests. It’s protecting ourselves from judgment. It’s feeling safer enjoying what we like on our own, because we don’t have to defend our interests.

But it’s also lonely.

The best solution I’ve found is to share my interests with others — either online or IRL — who have similar interests. I can join Reddits. I can chat online. I can be myself.

Acting like I knew what I was doing even when I was overwhelmed

The nonprofit website hadn’t been updated in years. It was on me to fix it.

I kept saying I would. I’d upload the files, get it done — soon. But every time I sat down to do it, I got overwhelmed. Something else came up. So I kept putting it off.

I didn’t want to admit why, though.

Admitting it meant saying I couldn’t handle things — that I needed help. So I stayed stuck in limbo instead, quietly failing at something nobody else even knew I was failing at.

That’s masking too. Not the dramatic kind. Just the quiet refusal to say “I’m drowning” while play-acting cool competence.

I’m very good at what I do. But I’m also very good at taking things on before I figure out if I can actually do them (physically or executive-function wise) and hoping it just works out.

Sometimes, this “fake it till you make it” approach worked.

At press conferences next to sports journalists like Christine Brennan, I had to project confidence asking questions in a room full of people who’d been doing this for decades. Interviewing people who intimidated me, I learned how to not let them see me sweat.

But the same instinct that got me through a press conference also kept me from raising my hand when I actually needed help. Asking meant admitting I couldn’t handle it — meant proving I was just as flaky as some people already suspected. Being several decades younger than almost everyone else in the room didn’t help.

So I didn’t ask. I just kept performing “I’ve got this” until it became its own kind of trap.

Until I realized that the less I asked for help, the more overwhelmed I got. My attempts to hold on to control by doing more were hurting more than they were helping.

I was essentially shoveling more dirt on top of my coffin even while I tried to claw my way out.

Now, I change how I do things. If I need help, I ask for it. If I can’t take on something else, I don’t do it. And I’ve learned to get out of things I can’t commit to by saying, “Sorry, I can’t right now.”

Here’s the through-line

I never had a strong sense of self. So I built one out of borrowed parts — systems that promised to fix me, a writer’s voice instead of mine, a paddleboard gathering dust in the shed, things I liked but never said out loud.

None of it worked. None of it was mine to begin with.

I still catch myself doing this. But I ask the same question now before I act — is this coming from me, or from someone else?

That question is the whole unmask. Just one moment, repeated, where you choose yourself over the performance.

Even if you’re awkward, or weird, or imperfect.

I’m still working this out.

But I’m doing it as me — paddleboard gathering dust, Scandal back on with the volume up, no set system in sight.