Losing the Mask in English Class

A personal essay by Rebecca D. Martin about the masks many of us wear throughout our lives

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I was blown away by Rebecca Martin’s essay and can’t stop thinking about it. As the mom of a neurodiverse son, I wish this essay had existed many years ago. It’s true; so many of us wear masks for so many reasons. I hope you love it as much as I do. - Jessica

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“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 push, “to make sure you didn’t miscommunicate?” Or figure out what strange thing you must have said, the way that person cocked her head like you were some bizarre zoo creature.

“No,” she tells me. 

“When you’re in front of a group of people,” thinking of the American Literature class I teach on Tuesdays and Thursdays, “don’t you lose track of what you’re saying because all those eyes are trained on you?”

She shakes her head again.

***

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 keep shame at bay, to feel safe.

You know you don’t got this. You learn to walk down your sweat-scented high school hallways telling yourself, with exponential anxieties, You’d better get this before you turn any corner and encounter 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 or ask someone else. By college, I was smiling and nodding and trying to follow the thread of conversation while (pro tip) asking them 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 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, but I had no idea I was wearing it or that everyone else didn’t do the same. 

Photo by John Noonan on Unsplash

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 came back for a counseling session, I had taught my high school English class the way I needed to: no eye contact. Instead of staring uncomfortably into the eyes of my students as I waxed on about Walt Whitman’s rangy verse that was unlike the formulated poems that had been written before, or Emily Dickenson’s tight, subtle explosion of what the poetry world expected, I cast my vision downward to grubby running shoes resting on the bars of rolling pine desks, or upward at the poster of Hester Prynne, her own eyes looking down at the emblazoned letter that blew her own secret wide open, or out the modular window to the hot asphalt parking lot. 

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

Maybe the tires crushed my mask into bits on the blacktop. I don’t know, but my hiding self was done and gone. 

***

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

Tenth Graders, meet Paul Lawrence Dunbar, meet Langston Hughes, meet J. Alfred Prufrock, meet—my God, I pray—meet yourselves. I finished teaching mid-year—another decision I was able to make to meet my particular needs—and on the final week before leaving them, I wanted to give the students something they could take and keep and hold and come back to, and obviously it had to be something I know, and by now we all know that I know about the mask. 

When Dunbar says, “We wear the mask,” 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 and all. 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 truth, or 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.

When Hughes says, “And they will see that I am beautiful” three decades later during the Harlem Renaissance, Jim Crow grown and going strong, he is talking about mask down. It’s a different kind of mask than an autistic one, yeah; it isn’t borne of the same kind of shame, of trying to be right, but it has definitely been crafted in order to meet the expectations of his countrymen who don’t look like him, crafted to stay safe. Safety is what Dunbar is talking about, too. But 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 - well, I’ll let him say it in his own words:

Besides,

They’ll see how beautiful I am

And be ashamed—

That’s right. The shame isn’t on him for being on the outside. 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 year or two ago, masking my neurodiverse ways because I didn’t believe that the full expression of myself was anything lovely to look at. 

***

“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, and 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. 

***

During my last week teaching English class, those complicated, shimmering teenaged souls sitting at their desks before me, I gave them Dunbar and I gave them Hughes, and then I gave them J. Alfred Prufrock, 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 in 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, feel hidden and terrified of rejection. 

A number 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 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 believe that you yourself are beautiful, mask down, and it makes all the difference when other people believe it about you, too. 

***

Every day, I lose my mask. In the words of Elizabeth Bishop, it wasn’t hard to do, and every day I find myself “losing farther, losing faster.” 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 now, 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, too, that 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 belted the bone-shaking beauty of the world out of the speakers and I rolled down the windows and soared. 

Rebecca D. Martin lives in Central Virginia with her husband and two children. Her work has been published in the Curator, the Brevity blog, Isele, and Susurrus, among others. She can be found at her Substack, where she talks about her favorite things, including poetry, books, and neurodiversity.