Why I won’t tell people to rip off the mask

I will not tell people to rip off the mask.

Not because masking is harmless, and not because I think anyone should spend their life performing for other people’s comfort. I won’t say it because I know what happened when I tried to remove mine too quickly.

It did not feel like freedom.

It felt like shock.

For years, my mask had not just hidden me. It had protected me, carried me, helped me survive rooms I did not fully understand and roles where showing too much of myself felt unsafe. So when I finally started pulling it away, I expected liberation. What I found first was exposure.

That is why I think we need a more honest conversation about masking. Not the neat version where masks are bad, authenticity is good, and everyone simply steps into the world as their full unfiltered self. Life is rarely that tidy. People mask for reasons, and those reasons often started as protection long before they became a prison.

I have spoken about masking so many times now that I sometimes assume people know exactly what I mean by it, but masking is one of those words that sounds simple until you start pulling at the edges. It is also one of those topics where people can become very certain, very quickly, about what everyone else should do with their own identity, safety and coping strategies.

I do not believe masking is only a neurodivergent trait. It is not. Masking is a human coping strategy. Most people adjust themselves depending on the room, the role, the relationship, the risk and the version of themselves they think is safest to present. The difference, from my own experience and from the conversations I keep having, is that neurodivergent people often rely on masking more heavily, more constantly and at a far greater cost.

For a long time, I could not have answered the question of who I was beneath the exterior I showed the world. Not properly. Not without reaching for a role, a title, a function or a performance. I knew what I could do. I knew what people expected from me. I knew which version of me worked in which room. But if you had stripped all that away and asked who was underneath it, I suspect the honest answer would have been, “I don’t know.”

A huge part of that sat within policing. I am not saying policing made me that way, because that would be too easy and not entirely true. I was already a master of performance long before I ever wore a uniform. But I am saying that, for most of my career, I was consumed by an external mask of competence. I became very good at being the version of myself the world seemed to require: calm, capable, decisive, useful. The person who could command firearms incidents, deal with trauma, make difficult decisions and keep moving.

And, to be fair, that version of me got through a lot. That is the awkward thing about masks. They are not always bad. They can work. They can protect us. They can help us survive rooms and roles that might otherwise overwhelm us. They can buy us time, credibility and safety. The problem is not simply that the mask exists. The problem begins when it becomes the default setting and quietly starts making decisions for us.

A mask is strongest when we own it, understand it and choose when to use it.

It becomes dangerous when it starts owning us. When that happens, it stops being a tool and becomes a prison with very polite wallpaper.

I lived, breathed and accepted the performance of work in almost every part of my life. I took the idea that you are “on duty” all the time and absorbed it far more deeply than I realised. I separated my life into compartments that all seemed to orbit the role: work me, home me, author me, public me, private me. All carefully managed, all slightly disconnected, all trying to keep the whole thing upright.

What I did not understand at the time was that the calm, capable version of me was not processing things. He was storing them. Behind the walls, in the corners, out of sight. He kept calm and carried on because that was what he had been built to do, and for a long time I mistook that for strength. Eventually, all that unprocessed weight became its own toxicity. It sat inside me like a glitching film, repeating in the background, eroding things I cared about from the inside. I have said before, and I will not dress it up here, I almost destroyed my marriage and everything I had built.

That was not about status. It was survival. Or at least, it had started that way.

My neurodivergence was a huge part of that because, for years, I was running away from something I knew about myself. I had the clues. I had the recognition. I remember reading Red Dragon as a teenager and connecting with Will Graham’s visual way of exploring the world. Later, when Hannibal brought even more of that neurodivergent coding to the surface, I felt the connection again. I saw something familiar and then, in classic me fashion, did absolutely nothing useful with it.

Why? Fear, institutionalisation, bias, media stereotypes, career risk, self-doubt and the belief that if I named it, I would lose something I had fought too hard to build. I thought the label would become heavier than the evidence of my life. I thought people would stop seeing the capability and start seeing only the perceived risk.

In the end, it took my own child needing support for me to finally own what I already knew. I could hide from myself when it was only about me, apparently, but I could not hide when he needed me to stand up first. So I did, and for a while I ripped the mask off completely.

I screamed from the rooftops, in my own way: here I am, this is who I am, deal with it.

The problem was, it was too much too soon. I had spent decades masking, then expected myself to suddenly exist without any armour at all. That was not liberation. That was shock. I spiralled into rejection, fear and overexposure, because I had mistaken visibility for integration. They are not the same thing.

So I stepped back, not into hiding, but into a quieter room where I could work out what I actually wanted the world to see, what I wanted to protect, and what I wanted to keep at the core. Even then, when I asked myself who I was, the answer was still, “I don’t know.” That was the hard part. Not the diagnosis. Not the disclosure. Not the public speaking. The hard part was realising how little of myself I could identify without a mask, role or performance attached to it.

That was around 2018. Now, in 2026, I am a very different person. I am still affected by the same fears and pressures that made me mask in the first place. I still know how to perform when I need to. I still have rooms where I adjust, protect and prepare. But now I try to own the masks rather than let them own me. I know more about which ones protect me, which ones drain me, which ones were built for rooms I no longer enter, and which ones need retiring before they quietly take over again.

That is why I do not tell people to rip them all off.

I have had blunt feedback that masking is inherently wrong and should never happen because it is damaging to mental health. I understand the argument, and for some people that may be absolutely true. I am not here to tell anyone what safety should look like for them. But that position does not sit fully with my journey. For me, the work is not about stripping everything away and standing unprotected in every room. The work is awareness, choice and ownership.

Which masks protect me? Which masks drain me? Which masks are outdated? Which masks are still useful, but only in certain places? Which masks have I mistaken for personality? Which masks did I build because I thought the real version of me would not be accepted?

Those questions matter more to me than a blanket instruction to unmask.

That is one of the reasons I wrote NeuroEdge. It came from stripping back my own life and trying to understand the patterns, the coping strategies, the performances and the parts of me I had spent years either hiding or misunderstanding. It is also why the short film MASKS exists, and why I cannot wait to share it when it is ready, because it tells this story in a way words alone probably cannot. Doubt, control, survival, identity and ownership. Not ripping everything away for dramatic effect, but asking who is still there underneath.

That is also why I am now interested in building ways to support others in bringing awareness to those moments of masking before the mask becomes the whole identity. I am not interested in telling people they are wrong for protecting themselves. I am interested in helping people notice when protection has become performance, and when performance has started to cost too much.

I am an expert only in my own life, and even then I am still discovering parts of it. But I know how lonely this journey can feel. I know how convincing the mask can become when you believe it is the only reason people accept you. I know what it is like to be praised for a version of yourself that is slowly exhausting the person underneath.

So no, I will not tell people to rip off the mask. I will ask whether they know they are wearing it. I will ask whether it still serves them. I will ask who gets to choose when it appears. I will ask what would be left if they adjusted it slightly, safely, on their own terms.

Because the goal is not to live without protection. The goal is to stop disappearing beneath it.