The talk went well. People said so on the way out and they meant it, and I drove home pleased with how it had gone. And then the next day was shot.
I have written about that day before. Not a slow morning. A full twenty-four hours where the things that are normally automatic are not available. What I did not have, for most of fifty-five years, was a name for the part that earned it.
The name in circulation now is high-masking. It arrives sounding like a compliment with a diagnosis attached. It is worth knowing what the word describes, because it does not describe a person. It grades an output.
The research below is published and linked. The rest is mine.
What high-masking means
High-masking describes a presentation rather than a severity. It means the camouflaging is working. The eye contact lands, the small talk runs, the discomfort stays off the face. Researchers call the behavior camouflaging and Hull and colleagues built a validated questionnaire for it in 2019, which means it is a measurable thing with a structure.
That structure is the useful part. The questionnaire separates camouflaging into compensating for difficulty, masking the signs of it, and assimilating into the group well enough to pass as part of it. Three different jobs, run at the same time, in the same room, while also doing the work you were there to do.
So “high” is not a measure of how autistic someone is. It is a measure of how good the performance is. The grade is awarded by the audience, which is why the people best at it are the ones no one thinks to ask about it.
What is the chameleon effect in autism?
The chameleon effect is the everyday name for camouflaging. It describes matching the social behavior of whoever is in the room, continuously and deliberately enough that the match reads as ordinary personality. Hull’s earlier interview study with ninety-two autistic adults described the work as intensive concentration, self-control and the management of discomfort, held for as long as other people are present.
The word “effect” makes it sound like something that happens. It is something that gets done. The matching runs on the same working memory the job needs, which is the mechanism I set out at length in masking autism and will not repeat here.
What the high-masking tail adds is the social reward structure sitting on top of it. A good match is not neutral. It gets praised. People tell you that you are easy to talk to, that you read the room well, that you are good with clients. Every one of those is a description of the performance and an instruction to keep running it.
Why competence defers the question
Competence is the most effective way to stop anyone asking why something is hard for you. If the work lands on time and the meeting goes well, there is no observable problem to explain, and nothing in a performance review process is designed to detect a cost paid outside working hours.
The research supports this more directly than you might expect. Alvares and colleagues found that intelligence is an imprecise predictor of functional abilities at diagnosis, which is the dismantling of the assumption underneath the whole functioning vocabulary. Being able to do the hard thing tells you very little about what doing it costs. I have written about the label itself in high-functioning autism.
From the other side of the table, where I spent most of my career, the pattern is plain. A person who delivers gets the next piece of work. No one in that loop is being careless. The loop is reading the only signal it collects.
Consider what an annual review cycle can see. It can see delivery, deadlines, how the client described the meeting, how the team rates working with you. Every one of those readings is taken during the performance. None of them is taken on the drive home, and no process I ever ran collected a measurement from that part of the day. The instrument is not broken. It was never pointed at the thing.
Which produces a specific, repeatable error. The people paying the most are recorded as the people needing the least, and the record is accurate about everything it looked at.
Is it common for autism to be diagnosed in adulthood?
Common enough that there is a body of research about it and a well-worn path through it. Adults arrive at the question through exhaustion, through a child’s assessment, through a chance description that fits too well. I was fifty-five. What I can say with confidence is that late recognition is not rare and it is not a sign that the earlier years were imagined.
The high-masking presentation is one of the reasons the path is long. A presentation that reads as ordinary gets read as ordinary. I have written about the arrival itself in late autism diagnosis.
The invoice arrives after, and alone
The bill for a high-masking day does not come due during the day. It comes due in the car, or at home, or the following morning. That timing is the single most important fact about it, and it is the reason the cost is invisible to every system that might otherwise record it.
Consider what gets observed. The performance happens in front of people. The recovery happens alone. So the organization sees the whole of the benefit and none of the price, and builds its expectations from the half it can see.
One recent paper sits on this territory and I want to name both what it shows and what it doesn’t. Erdal and colleagues ran a grounded Delphi study with five autistic employees and six professionals, and their participants described masking as essential for coping with work demands. Eleven people is a small sample and the paper’s frame is close to the opposite of mine. It inventories masking as a coping strategy to be catalogued, where my argument is that it is the cost driver and the environment is the variable. The tension is worth seeing. The field is still partly classifying the invoice as a payment method.
Why being good at it makes the bill bigger
Here is the part that took me longest to see. The quality of the performance sets the expectation for the next one, and the expectation is what the cost is measured against.
Raymaker and colleagues, working with autistic adults rather than about them, define autistic burnout as chronic exhaustion, loss of skills and reduced tolerance to stimulus, and locate the cause in a sustained mismatch between expectations and capacity without adequate support. Read the expectations half of that sentence again. A good mask does not lower the demand. It raises the expectation, and it raises it in the minds of people who have no information about the capacity.
So the trajectory is not a plateau. Each successful performance recruits the next one at a slightly higher level, the support stays at zero because no need was ever visible, and the recovery window has to grow to cover it. That is a compounding structure. The better you are, the longer it runs before anything forces a change, and the larger the thing that eventually does.
There is no version of this where the skill is the problem. The skill is real and in my case it paid for a career. The invoice is also real, it is unbudgeted, and it is paid by one person in private.
What this does not tell you
I lack a general solution and I am suspicious of anyone offering one. I cannot tell you whether to unmask at work, because the answer depends on the environment, and some environments punish it accurately. What I can tell you is what the word means, where the cost lands, and why the people carrying the most of it are the least likely to be asked.
The insight about camouflaging and its price came from autistic adults describing their own lives, decades before it had a questionnaire attached. The vantage point is mine. The insight is theirs.
High-masking is not a description of how autistic someone is. It is a measure of how much work is happening off the books.
Sources
- Hull, L., Mandy, W., Lai, M.-C., Baron-Cohen, S., Allison, C., Smith, P., & Petrides, K. V. (2019). Development and Validation of the Camouflaging Autistic Traits Questionnaire (CAT-Q). Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 49(3), 819–833. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, Development and Validation of the CAT-Q
- Hull, L., Petrides, K. V., Allison, C., Smith, P., Baron-Cohen, S., Lai, M.-C., & Mandy, W. (2017). “Putting on My Best Normal”: Social Camouflaging in Adults with Autism Spectrum Conditions. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 47(8), 2519–2534. Qualitative study, 92 autistic adults. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, “Putting on My Best Normal”
- Raymaker, D. M., Teo, A. R., Steckler, N. A., Lentz, B., Scharer, M., Delos Santos, A., Kapp, S. K., Hunter, M., Joyce, A., & Nicolaidis, C. (2020). “Having All of Your Internal Resources Exhausted Beyond Measure and Going Back to Baseline”: Defining Autistic Burnout. Autism in Adulthood, 2(2), 132–143. Community-based participatory research with autistic adults. Autism in Adulthood, Defining Autistic Burnout
- Alvares, G. A., Bebbington, K., Cleary, D., Evans, K., Glasson, E. J., Maybery, M. T., Pillar, S., Uljarević, M., Varcin, K., Wray, J., & Whitehouse, A. J. O. (2020). The misnomer of “high functioning autism”: Intelligence is an imprecise predictor of functional abilities at diagnosis. Autism, 24(1), 221–232. Autism, The misnomer of “high functioning autism”
- Erdal, K., Kröger, M., & Finnemann, J. (2026). Developing an Inventory of Workplace Stress Coping Strategies Among Autistic Adults: A Grounded Delphi Study. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. Grounded Delphi, five autistic employees and six professionals. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, Developing an Inventory of Workplace Stress Coping Strategies
Peter Allen Mann is the author of The Perception Revolution (Fast Company Press, 2026). He spent thirty-seven years in leadership, including four years as a Navy Surface Warfare Officer and two companies founded and run, and was diagnosed autistic at fifty-five. He writes for executives and system designers at SHIELD Perception.