What Is Normal in a World of Infinite Possibility?

There is a particular kind of tired that comes from spending an entire day translating yourself into a language you didn't choose. Not translating your words, but your whole way of being. The way you think, the way you move, the way you process a room full of noise and light and expectation, all of it quietly converted into something that reads as normal to the people around you. Most people never notice they're doing this, because most people are never asked to. That is the entire point.

There's a name for that translation. Researchers call it camouflaging; most of us just call it the Mask. And neurotypical people tend to have the same reaction the first time they hear about it. That's not real, they say. That's dishonest: if you have to perform a version of yourself just to get through the day, you must be lying about who you actually are. I understand why the word lands like that. Mask implies disguise, a false face hiding a true one. But they've identified the wrong lie. The Mask is not the lie. The Mask is the tool built to survive one.

Here is the lie it's built to survive: that the world we've made is a safe, neutral place to simply exist as yourself. For a lot of neurodivergent people, that promise was never true, and the body learns this long before the mind can name it. Hull and colleagues, in one of the studies that first mapped camouflaging properly, found it is driven by two very human motivations: the desire to fit in, and the desire to connect. Reasonable desires, worn down into a daily performance because the alternative was never actually offered.

And that performance has a cost. The same research, and the work that's followed it, keeps landing on the same finding: sustained masking is strongly linked to exhaustion, burnout, anxiety, depression, and a corroding sense of who a person actually is underneath the performance. We have built a world where an entire population must run an unbroken, invisible shift of translation just to be allowed into the room, then we call the tool they built to survive it a lie, without ever asking who lied first.

No two nervous systems on this planet are wired the same way (closer to a mathematical fact than a figure of speech, given the variables involved in building a human brain). And yet we talk about neurodivergence, autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, and the many other ways a mind can be wired, as though it's a deviation from one fixed, correct standard, as though somewhere in that infinite range there's exactly one blueprint that counts as normal. But that blueprint was never neutral. It was built, mostly without anyone deciding to build it, around whichever nervous systems already held the power to decide what counted as normal. Every school timetable, every fluorescent-lit office, every job interview rewarding fast eye contact over careful thought, was designed around that one kind of mind, then quietly presented as universal.

In 1998, Australian sociologist Judy Singer gave this problem a name. Neurodiversity: the idea that neurological variation is not a list of malfunctions to be treated, but a form of biodiversity, as real as any other kind of human difference. Singer's framing drew on the social model of disability: that what disables a person is rarely their body, but a world built without their body in mind. A wheelchair user isn't disabled by their legs. They're disabled by a building with no ramp. A neurodivergent brain isn't disabled by how it processes the world. It's disabled by a world that only ever built one door, in one shape, and called that shape “normal.”

Sit with the mathematics of that. In Australia, the unemployment rate among autistic people is 31.6 per cent, three times the rate for people with disabilities generally, and almost six times the rate for people without disabilities. Labour force participation among autistic Australians of working age sits at just 40.8 per cent, against roughly 83 per cent for people without disability, and that gap has barely moved across more than a decade of strategies that promised otherwise. Somewhere between wanting to work and being hired sits a system of interviews, open-plan offices and unwritten social rules never built to let a different kind of mind through the door. That's not a personal failing, repeated across tens of thousands of people. That's the proof the Mask was answering to something real.

There's a name for the other half of this too. Autistic researcher Damian Milton called it the double empathy problem, and it dismantles one of the oldest assumptions about neurodivergence: that the person struggling to connect is the one with the deficit. Milton's argument, now well supported, is that miscommunication between autistic and non-autistic people runs in both directions; non-autistic people misread autistic expressions and cues just as often as the reverse has always been assumed to happen. The mismatch isn't a one-way failure inside one type of brain. It's a gap between two equally valid ways of experiencing the world, and for decades we decided, without evidence, that only one side of it counted as broken.

None of this means pretending difference never costs anything. It means asking a more honest question: which parts of the difficulty belong to the mind, and which belong to the building? When we design for more than one kind of mind, almost everyone benefits. Disability advocates call this the curb-cut effect, named for the ramps cut into footpaths that wheelchair users originally had to fight for, ramps parents pushing prams and travellers dragging suitcases now use just as often. Captioning, built for deaf viewers, is now used by people scrolling with the sound off. Clear instructions, predictable routines and quiet spaces, built to support neurodivergent people, tend to make life easier for almost everybody who encounters them. Accommodation was never a favour extended to the few. It was always a better design, waiting to be asked for.

So here is the question I actually want to leave behind. In a species capable of producing an almost infinite range of nervous systems (no two people, autistic or not, wired identically), what does “normal” even mean, beyond a description of whoever happened to be in the room when the rules were written? We do not need to fix neurodivergent minds. We need to build a world honest enough that the Mask stops being necessary: rooms, schedules and workplaces wide enough for the minds that already exist, in all their infinite, ordinary variation. The Mask was never the lie. It was the proof one was already being told.

Sources: Singer, J. (1999). ‘Odd People In: The Birth of Community Amongst People on the Autism Spectrum’, University of Technology Sydney; Oliver, M. (1983), the social model of disability; Australian Bureau of Statistics, Disability, Ageing and Carers, Australia (2022) and Autism in Australia; Hull, L. et al. (2017), ‘“Putting on my best normal”: Social camouflaging in adults with autism spectrum conditions’, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders; Milton, D. (2012), ‘On the ontological status of autism: the “double empathy problem”’, Disability & Society; and general research on the curb-cut effect and universal design.