My AuDHD Masked Persona Helped Me Succeed at Work. Now I Can’t Let It Go.

I am convinced I probably would have been more successful in life had I not been masking for most of my career.

At the same time, masking helped me succeed.

That is the part I keep coming back to.

As an autistic and ADHD person, I have created different masked personas throughout my life. Some helped me navigate situations I didn’t understand. Some helped me figure out how I was supposed to behave around different people. And some became successful enough that I leaned into them more and more.

For me, autistic masking at work became especially powerful.

One of the strongest personas I built was my workplace persona.

The mask worked.

Maybe it worked too well.

How my workplace masked persona developed

Before I moved into corporate leadership, I worked as a broadcast journalist.

Journalism required direct language. We had to take complicated news stories and make them understandable to a broad audience.

Then I moved further into corporate work.

I worked in social media, podcasting, educational publishing, corporate communications, management, and senior leadership.

Over time, I learned the language of business. I learned how executives talked. I learned how managers were supposed to communicate. I learned the corporate voice.

Eventually, that voice became its own persona.

And there was a reason I kept using it: it worked.

I found success. I received positive reinforcement. I could see that this version of me was helping me move forward.

So I leaned into it more.

The problem was that my corporate voice wasn’t always my authentic voice.

Sometimes the two would fight each other.

Every once in a while, something more authentic would bleed through, and people often appreciated that.

One of the biggest lessons I learned during more than 12 years of management and leadership was that the more authentic, real, and transparent I could be with people, the more people seemed to trust me.

But I had still spent years developing another version of myself specifically for work.

That version didn’t simply disappear because I realized it was there.

I had been creating personas long before work

When I look back, this didn’t start in the workplace.

When I was around 12 or 13, I was obsessed with Jim Carrey and The Mask.

There was something about that movie that connected with me long before I had language for autistic masking.

At that age, I was already adopting personas I saw on television and in movies. Around people I trusted, I could be goofy, funny, raw, and much less controlled.

But I was also growing up in a high-control religion.

If I felt like I was being watched, I could immediately become another version of myself: perfectly behaved, carefully choosing my words, doing what I believed I was supposed to do.

As I got older, I collected more personas.

Different crowd.

Different environment.

Different person.

Different version of me.

When my work and personal personas collided

One of the most uncomfortable experiences for me has always been when two of those worlds meet.

I could have a work version of myself and a more personal version of myself.

Then a friend or partner who knew me personally might see the work version and react like:

Who is this?

Who are you being?

I didn’t like those paths crossing.

It made me anxious.

I didn’t want people from my personal life seeing my work persona, and I didn’t necessarily want people from work seeing the more personal version of me.

Work parties are a good example.

I would watch other people relax at a work event. They could become more casual and personal while still being around colleagues.

I struggled with that.

My brain would tell me:

I’m still at work.

All of the workplace training I had received over the years reinforced that idea. Those trainings gave me rules, and for my autistic brain, rules were useful.

Here is how you behave.

Here is what you don’t say.

Here is what you don’t do.

So I would mask up.

Especially as a manager and a boss, I felt like I needed to behave in a very specific way no matter the situation.

Then someone would invite me to something casual and I wouldn’t know how to turn that persona off.

What do I talk about?

How personal am I supposed to be?

How do I stop being the work version of myself when I am still around people from work?

A lot of the time, my solution was not to go.

Did masking help me succeed or hold me back?

Since leaving the corporate workplace, I’ve had more distance to think about burnout, unmasking, and my authentic voice.

Even though I have known I am autistic for years, I don’t think I always had the right conditions to unmask as much as I wanted to.

Now I can look back at some of the ways I talked and behaved and recognize:

That’s not really my authentic voice.

That was a persona.

I had layered so many different personas on top of myself that figuring out what was underneath them became difficult.

And I keep coming back to the same question:

Did the same masking that helped me succeed also hold me back?

There are things I’d like to write.

There are videos I’d like to make.

There are stories I’d like to tell.

And sometimes this masked persona feels like a wall.

Or a force field.

It can stop me from pushing through to the version of myself that wants to make those things.

That is the contradiction I am working through.

Why I am not trying to simply stop masking

I don’t want to pretend that my answer is to stop masking completely.

I still need masking.

For me, it can be a protective layer.

For a lot of us, the mask can help keep us safe.

So I am trying to figure out the balancing act.

How do I work through the personas that no longer feel like me while recognizing that some masking may still serve a purpose?

How do I get closer to my authentic voice?

How do I make more space for the person underneath all of those layers?

I’m still working through that.

I’m still unmasking.

And I think the closer I can get to that more authentic version of myself, the happier I’ll be.

A Few Questions I Keep Coming Back To

What does AuDHD masking at work look like for me?

For me, workplace masking included developing a corporate voice, carefully following workplace rules, adopting a leadership persona, changing how I communicated depending on the environment, and having difficulty turning that persona off outside normal work situations.

Did masking help me succeed at work?

Yes. Some of my masked personas were successful, and that success made me lean into them more. My corporate persona helped me operate in leadership and corporate environments.

Does unmasking mean I want to stop masking completely?

No. I still see masking as something I sometimes need. It can be protective. I’m trying to find a balance between recognizing that protection and working through the personas that keep me from feeling like myself.

If you’re interested in exploring your own workplace persona and thinking about what sparks your wants, desires, and needs at work—and what drains you—you can also check out my AuDHD Workplace Workbook:

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Watch the full video:

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For workplace coaching, speaking, consulting, and more of my work:

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