I know what you are talking about. For me the dread of being pervceived has lessened significantly since realizing I am trans and living closer to my true self.

I feel like the stress of being perceived is exactly what drives me to need to be masking all the time, but when I am able to start my hyperfocus I stop noticing the perception as much. I think it’s moreso the actual masking that drains me. But now that I think about it, I remember living with my family and how I would get stressed when other people were awake because they might come to my room and try to talk to me so I ended up doing most of my work at night so I wasn’t keeping my mask on standby to use your words. I ended up being pretty much nocturnal. I don’t think my awareness of the sounds in the house were quite as acute as yours but it was definitely a Thing for me to be bothered by noises in the house when trying to focus, especially when near burnout. And honestly I feel drained just by being in public, even without interacting with anyone. It’s probably a mix of both.

I can relate to a lot of what you’ve written here though. I mask all the time, I don’t really know how to stop, but it just leaves me completely wrecked after just a few hours of doing it.

I’m working on finding ways to maybe not unmask, but find more sustainable lower energy masks with safe people. Part of that I guess is finding more safe people. I can pretty much unmask with my partner, but that’s taken a long time to get there. I’d like to be able to spend time with more than exactly one person without burning all my energy on my dumb mask.

My primary form of masking is just not talking or drawing attention which doesn’t work for small social environments like roommates or workmates. I don’t understand how others are able to mask all the time as masking for me is literally me putting on a performance with my voice and facial expressions. Any time I’m tired or focused on something like eating I can’t mask. I wish I could just mask all the time with little effort. I don’t experience normal speech so to even have a normal back and forth conversation is hard since I also have to talk slow and in a normal tone.

One tip though, look for roommates and friends who are also neurodivergent.

Yeah. It sucks because many of us are inherently noticeable simply because we are different. I find myself trying to obscure my activity patterns often, which is particularly stressful given the neighbors I have who comment on my lack of activity or increase in activity. Good strong fences aren’t enough to keep these people out of my business lol

I think being aware of the masking might make it easier to communicate with a potential roommate or live-in partner, but I still end up with a very strict “this is my decompressing room, please give me peace when I’m in here” policy and one of those Bluetooth lamps that can be turned on/off/color changed by the other parties so I’m not startled or worse.

I can relate to this, infact in addition to these experiences I have chronic muscle pain from tension which primarily comes from being in contact with others.

Being isolated and in control of my environment has been pretty much the only way to minimize it.

As for which of the causes you described are behind the energy drain; for me being perceived automatically turns on what feels like a background awareness that cannot be turned off until no one is there.

I consider masking to be part of this awareness; a self-defense mechanism that we learn early in our development to protect ourselves from harm by calculating how we react in order to minimize potential harm. In those situations it is impossible to feel entirely safe because we cannot control our environment and if we won’t react carefully we might end up with even more interaction we desperately don’t want.

Perhaps it is similar in nature to how something that lives in the wild has to maintain a constant awareness to avoid being caught off guard and potentially killed. An activation of fight-or-flight/primitive brain centers in the brain.

That is one source of energy drain in itself

There is also the energy drain from the much higher amount of sensory input we are being fed from our brains having many more synapses than those without autism. We can’t simply filter out or ignore everything we are receiving, there’s simply too much of it. It has to be stopped at the source before it can become sensory input. Isolation is the easiest way to accomplish this.

masking isn’t something that I can “stop” doing, it generalized and became permanent at age 12.

I have been quite fairly described by more than one shrink as having blunted affect, which describes my level of displayed emotion, not how strongly I feel it.

so, I can only “unmask” to some degree around … well, he’s dead. so nobody.