MASKING

Masking refers to the constant performance that many neurodivergent people are compelled to sustain in social environments built around arbitrary yet standardised norms. Within it, every deviation becomes something to be scrutinized or misunderstood, turning ordinary interaction into an exhausting work of adaptation of self-surveillance.

The work reflects on the true cost of this labor. The relentless regulation of gesture, language, reaction, and emotion beneath forms of judgement that rarely question their own authority.

At the same time, it reverses the direction of the gaze. Those who have long lived under observation reclaim the right to look back, and to speak. Neurodivergence is understood as a vital plurality of perception, a human biodiversity that widens the ways reality can be felt and inhabited.