This won’t be an essay about two selves: the masked and the unmasked. That’s too easy, too binary, too “Instagram-carousel-about-healing”-coded. What follows is a glitch-text. A fragmented exploration of how it feels to be a queer, neurodivergent person in a world where “authenticity” is aestheticised. Where it’s cute to cry on camera, but unsettling to stim; cool to overshare, but only if it’s curated; quirky to be awkward, but not dissociative. A world where actual weirdness still makes people scroll away.

Unmasking isn’t a one-time reveal. It’s constant calibration. It’s eye contact in three-second bursts. It’s asking “How do normal people act here?” while also being too tired to care. It’s scripting and unscripting and oversharing and regretting it but still posting anyway.

TikTok, for all its chaotic intimacy, has become a space where identity can shimmer in and out of legibility. There is realness there, but also a pressure to perform the “authentic self” in increasingly intelligible ways. The early internet—fanfiction forums, LiveJournal confessionals, colourful yet anonymous avatars—offered a different kind of unmasking. One that was less about visibility and more about expression without consequence. Before there was an audience, there was just a screen.

Still, people use filters as shields, captions as confessionals, and bag charms as code. Digital life is full of rituals and shortcuts that allow us to say: I’m here, I’m somehow weird, and I’m trying to survive.

Masking is deeply tied to survival. It’s how neurodivergent people move through neurotypical expectations, and how queer people shapeshift through heteronormative spaces; constantly decoding, constantly negotiating which parts of themselves are safe to show. It’s more about adapting than it is about hiding. 

It’s all fragmented, a bit poetic, a bit absurd. A haunted house of selves trying their best. This is a text that reads: “Sorry, I’m not masking right now. System rebooting. Please hold.”

3-C’s of Life: Code, Confession, Chaos

There is a specific intimacy in building a self online. Before content strategy, before “niche internet micro-celebrity,” there was the forum signature. The MySpace Top 8 Friends. The fanfiction header that read: “I don’t own these characters, but I do own my pain. Oh, and there’s a major character death inside!” The internet was once a place where we created identities that weren’t necessarily aspirational—they were just extensions of the parts we didn’t know how to name IRL.

To unmask doesn’t mean to tell all. Sometimes it means writing in code. Sometimes it’s a pseudonym. Sometimes it’s talking in the third person. These are still ways of being real. It’s not the rawness that matters—it’s the intent. The way we carve space for ourselves in systems that don’t want us legible unless we’re profitable.

TikTok is messy, yes. It’s glitchy, chaotic, and allows for softness in strange ways. But there is still a choreography. The algorithm rewards coherence, duh. And for those who live at the edge of discernibility—those who stim, who drift, who dissociate, who re-encode themselves in memes and half-sentences—there’s always the risk of being misread. Or worse: ignored.

So much of neurodivergent and queer life is about negotiating that space of being partially seen. The fear is not only that the mask will slip, but that no one will understand what lies beneath. That the unmasked self is too weird, too much, too boring, too glitchy to be held.

But sometimes, just sometimes, someone sees your bag charm and gets it. Or someone reads your oversharing and lingers before scrolling. That’s unmasking in its smallest form—not a dramatic unveiling, but a brief transparency. A moment where the mask doesn’t disappear, yet someone still sees underneath. Where your weirdness resonates instead of repels.

The Body Remembers

Offline, masking lives in the body. It’s holding your hands still when they want to flap. It’s monitoring your tone, counting your breaths before you speak, softening your voice so you don’t sound “too much.” It’s clenching your jaw during small talk, rehearsing laughter, avoiding texture, holding back tears as your body registers the room before you do.

For many neurodivergent people, masking shows up as physical exhaustion at the end of a “normal” day. For queer people, it shows up as second-guessing whether a touch, a pronoun, or something as small as how you show up might out you in a space that isn’t safe. Masking is muscle memory. It’s coded into posture, pace, pitch. It leaves traces.

Unmasking, when it happens, is often so small it can go unnoticed: Sitting cross-legged in public. Dropping the eye contact. Wearing what actually feels good instead of what looks correct. Letting yourself stim. Letting yourself be seen (not for performance, but existing).

And yet, these moments can be terrifying. Like jumping into cold water: shocking, exhilarating, disorienting. They leave a mark, not because they are revolutionary, but because they feel like tiny ruptures in the system. Like glitching, on purpose.

The body knows. It flinches before the mouth apologises. It aches before the brain admits burnout. It remembers the scripts. And maybe unmasking is just slowly, gently, letting it forget them.

No Updates Required

There is no clean ending to this. No perfect, clinic-ready unmasking, no linear upgrade. That’s a fantasy written by systems that can’t process contradiction. No final flourish, no makeover montage, no Princess Diaries moment where the mask is cast aside and a true self emerges, radiant and lucid. That’s another fantasy built from systems that prefer perfection over presence.  

Self 2.0 isn’t a version you download. It’s a version you notice. When the mask slips and you don’t rush to put it back on. When the glitch doesn’t feel like an error, but like evidence that you’re still here.  

Maybe the self was never broken. Maybe it was just always too much for a world not built for more than one truth at a time. This is not the self that wins. It’s the one that lives. System running. Multiple selves detected. No update required.