> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://gliszen.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Performance You Never Auditioned For - URL: https://gliszen.ghost.io/the-performance-you-never-auditioned/ - Published: 2026-04-04T15:41:11.000Z - Updated: 2026-07-24T21:19:31.000Z - Description: Code Switching, Masking, and What It Costs to Always Be "On" - Author: Rachelle P. Goldenberg, LCSW - Tags: Culture, Substack-Moved, Self Efficacy, Autism, Unmasking, Trauma, Newsletter, #Migrated-1784927624346, #Import 2026-07-24 21:18 Most people have heard the term *code switching*. You shift how you talk, how you carry yourself, maybe even how you laugh — depending on who’s in the room. It’s adaptive. It’s often necessary. And for a lot of people, it’s so automatic they barely notice they’re doing it. But what happens when you’re also Autistic? Also ADHD? Also a person of color navigating spaces that weren’t built with you in mind? Then it’s not just code switching. It’s something closer to a full-time performance with no green room and no days off. ![woman in gray long sleeve shirt holding green leaf](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1606570903323-d28382444009?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wzMDAzMzh8MHwxfHNlYXJjaHw3OXx8aGlkaW5nJTIwYmVoaW5kJTIwYSUyMG1hc2slMjBzbWlsZXxlbnwwfHx8fDE3NzUzMTcwODN8MA&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=1080) Photo by [Majestic Lukas](https://unsplash.com/@majesticlukas?ref=gliszen.ghost.io) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/?ref=gliszen.ghost.io) --- ## Let’s Start With the Basics Code switching, in its original context, comes from linguistics and sociolinguistics. It describes how people — especially those from marginalized communities — adjust their language, dialect, tone, and behavior depending on their social environment. A Black professional speaks differently in a boardroom than at a cookout. A first-generation Latinx immigrant shifts between their parents’ language and the one their coworkers expect. An Indigenous person navigates between their community’s relational communication style and the blunt transactional norms of corporate culture. A Pacific Islander learns to shrink the warmth and collectivist values they were raised with to fit into individualist professional spaces. It’s not dishonesty. It’s survival strategy. Now layer in neurodivergence. For people with ADHD or Autism, code switching also means suppressing neurodivergent traits — adjusting or hiding their natural ways of communicating and behaving to appear more neurotypical. Holding back a stim. Slowing down a thought spiral before it becomes a monologue. Choosing not to bring up the hyperfocus topic for the third time this week. Translating the way your brain actually works into something the room can digest. This version of code switching has a clinical name: *masking*. And it’s one of the most invisible and costly things a neurodivergent person can do. --- ## Masking and Code Switching Are Cousins They’re not identical, but they come from the same family tree. Both involve changing how you present yourself depending on context. Both stem from an instinct to avoid punishment, discrimination, or rejection. And both often start in childhood — as a way of copying others’ behaviors to fit in. The difference is that code switching is typically more conscious. You know you’re doing it. Masking, on the other hand, can become so automatic you stop knowing where the mask ends and you begin. After years of concealing parts of your identity, you don’t always know what unmasked even looks like anymore. For ADHD, masking often looks like compensation. Building rigid routines to manage time-blindness. Preparing scripts before social situations. Sitting on your hands so nobody notices the restlessness. It works, kind of. But working overtime to appear functional is still overtime. --- ## The Cost Is Real Research consistently links higher levels of masking — and frequently switching between masking and not masking — to higher levels of stress, disconnection from identity, and eventually burnout. Burnout here doesn’t mean a rough week. It means a collapse. Months, sometimes years, of depletion. Losing the ability to do things that used to feel automatic. Documented outcomes of autistic camouflaging include mental exhaustion, psychological distress, chronic anxiety, depression, an eroded sense of identity, and in the most serious cases, suicidal ideation. That’s not a side effect. That’s the cost of performing someone else’s version of normal, indefinitely. --- ## Now Add Race and Culture Into the Equation Here’s where it gets heavier. For people of color and those from non-dominant cultures, the need to code switch — adjusting speech, appearance, and behavior to be accepted within the dominant culture — compounds with neurodivergent masking into something researchers have started calling “double-masking.” A neurodivergent person of color is simultaneously hiding their neurodivergent traits and their cultural identity to be seen as acceptable, and crucially, to feel safe. Read that again. Two separate performances, running at the same time, every day. Consider what this looks like across different communities: A Black autistic professional walks into a meeting managing sensory overwhelm from the fluorescent lighting, scripting responses in real time, and simultaneously monitoring their affect and vocabulary — because being read as aggressive or difficult carries a different kind of danger when you’re Black. A Southeast Asian person with ADHD has been told their whole life that they’re lazy or disrespectful when they can’t sit still or maintain eye contact — traits that overlap with both their neurodivergence and cultural communication norms that their neurotypical white peers never have to explain. An Indigenous person with autism navigates a mental health system that has historically pathologized their community’s spiritual frameworks, communal ways of knowing, and non-linear communication styles — only to then also have their autistic traits pathologized on top of that. A second-generation Middle Eastern immigrant with ADHD learns to code switch between their family’s high-context, relationship-centered communication and the low-context, get-to-the-point expectations of American workplaces — while also managing the internal chaos of an executive function system that doesn’t cooperate on demand. A Pacific Islander raised with deep collectivist values finds that their natural instinct to defer, to prioritize group harmony, to avoid direct confrontation — all of it gets misread in neurotypical, Western professional settings as passivity, lack of confidence, or social deficits. When you’re also autistic, that misreading comes with a clinical label. None of these are edge cases. They are the everyday reality for millions of people navigating multiple marginalized identities at once. --- ## The Diagnosis Gap Makes It Worse There’s another layer that doesn’t get talked about enough: many people of color and people from non-Western cultures don’t receive an autism or ADHD diagnosis until well into adulthood — if ever. Black children are more likely to be misdiagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder before anyone considers autism. Hispanic and Black youth are underdiagnosed with ADHD at significantly higher rates than white peers. Indigenous children’s neurodivergent traits are frequently dismissed or attributed to trauma, poverty, or cultural difference — which means they never get evaluated at all. Asian American children, particularly girls, are often praised for being quiet and compliant, which masks autistic and inattentive ADHD presentations so effectively that families and clinicians miss them entirely. The behaviors that prompt a referral for a white child often prompt a disciplinary response for a child of color. Or silence. Or a shrug. So these kids spend years masking, code switching, and compensating with no framework for understanding why everything feels so hard. No language for it. No support around it. Just the creeping sense that something is wrong with them, and the exhausting work of making sure nobody else finds out. Late diagnosis doesn’t erase that history. It just finally gives it a name. --- ## What About Immigrants and Multicultural Identities? This isn’t a simple two-group conversation. It never was. First- and second-generation immigrants, people raised between cultures, multilingual individuals, anyone who has ever felt like they live in two worlds at once — they know this terrain. The pressure to assimilate. The grief of feeling like you’re losing something essential about yourself in the process. The exhaustion of translating not just language, but *self*. For neurodivergent people navigating bicultural or multicultural identities, the layers compound in ways that research is only beginning to describe. Bilingual autistic individuals code switch linguistically and neurologically and culturally — sometimes all at once. A Haitian Creole-speaking autistic child, a Tagalog-dominant ADHD teen, a Navajo young adult who thinks in a language that structures the world differently than English — these are not deficits. They represent an extraordinary amount of cognitive and emotional work that rarely gets acknowledged, let alone supported. Cultural values also shape how neurodivergence gets interpreted within communities. In many East Asian cultures, the expectation of academic excellence and emotional restraint can make ADHD look like moral failure and autism look like rudeness. In some Latin American family systems, the idea that a child might need a diagnosis — rather than more discipline or more prayer — is met with shame or disbelief. In certain African and Caribbean communities, neurodivergent behavior may be understood through spiritual frameworks first, delaying access to clinical support. None of these responses come from ignorance. They come from cultural coherence. But they can leave neurodivergent people of color stranded between their community’s understanding of them and the clinical world’s understanding of them — belonging fully to neither. --- ## This Is a Systemic Problem, Not a Personal One It’s tempting to frame all of this as an individual coping challenge. Learn better strategies. Build more self-awareness. Work on unmasking. And yes, that work matters. But let’s be clear about something: the reason people mask, code switch, and double-mask is because the environments they’re in have made it necessary. The burden of adaptation has been placed almost entirely on the people with the least power in the room. Autistic communication isn’t inferior to neurotypical communication. Black vernacular, Indigenous oral tradition, high-context relational communication, non-linear storytelling — none of these are less than. They’re different. The hierarchy that ranks them is constructed, not natural, and it causes real harm to real people. The goal isn’t to get better at performing. The goal is to build environments where the performance isn’t required. --- ## So What Does This Mean For You? If you recognize yourself in any of this, a few things worth sitting with: The exhaustion you feel after social interactions isn’t weakness. It’s the cost of running multiple systems simultaneously for hours at a time — neurological, cultural, linguistic, relational. That’s a physiological and psychological reality, not a character flaw. If you’re neurodivergent and from a marginalized culture, you may be carrying a load that most people around you cannot see or fully understand. You don’t have to explain it to everyone. But finding spaces where you don’t have to explain it at all — that’s not a luxury. That’s a necessity. And if you’ve spent years not knowing why you were so tired, why fitting in always felt like a translation project, why you could perform competence beautifully and still feel completely unknown — there may be a reason. Getting curious about that, with support, is worth it. You were never the problem. You were solving one. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/2f/0c/2f0c8843-4e19-4a64-82b3-1d14728eb05b/content/images/2026/07/ea78b815-578c-41fa-bcf8-3807f1de89ae_1080x565-png-1.jpg) --- ## References - Hull, L., et al. (2017). “Putting on My Best Normal”: Social Camouflaging in Adults with Autism Spectrum Conditions. *Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.* - Hull, L., et al. (2021). Is Social Camouflaging Associated with Anxiety and Depression in Autistic Adults? *Autism.* - Cage, E., & Troxell-Whitman, Z. (2019). Understanding the Reasons, Contexts and Costs of Camouflaging for Autistic Adults. *Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.* - Cassidy, S., et al. (2020). Autism and Autistic Burnout. *Autism in Adulthood.* - Baker-Bell, A. (2017). For Black Language Matters. *Harvard Educational Review.* - Ruffin, N.M., & Sanusi, P. (2025). Race/Ethnicity and Diagnostic Characteristics Among School-Aged Youth with Autism. *Autism & Developmental Language Profiles.* - Williams, et al. (2022). Examination of Race and Autism Intersectionality Among African American/Black Young Adults. *PMC.* - Ventour, T. (2022). Autistic While Black in the UK: Masking, Codeswitching, and Other (Non)fictions. *NeuroClastic.* - Radulski, E.M. (2023). What Are ‘Masking’ and ‘Camouflaging’ in the Context of Autism and ADHD? *The Conversation.* - Miller, D., Rees, J., & Pearson, A. (2021). “Masking Is Life”: Experiences of Masking in Autistic and Nonautistic Adults. *Autism in Adulthood.*