I absolutely agree with your characterisation of the word "authentic". It doesn't just shift connotation depending on context it shifts meaning in quite considerable ways.
The neurodivergent framing is exactly right - and it opens a question I kept coming back to while reading: is the performance you describe structurally the same for women and disabled people, or does it differ in a way that matters?
The similarity is real. When your authentic self falls outside the template, you mask. The guilt follows. The mechanism is recognisable across all three groups.
But the difference might be this: for neurodivergent professionals, the template is primarily cognitive and communicative - the expectation is that you process, present, and socialise in a particular way. Deviate, and you are illegible.
For women and disabled people, the template is also role-based. There is a prescribed social category with its own behavioural script, and deviation from it is not just illegibility - it is transgression. The woman who is too direct is not merely hard to read. She is difficult. The disabled person who does not perform gratitude or limitation correctly is not just unexpected. They are threatening.
Which means the authenticity demand lands differently: neurodivergent masking is largely about legibility. Women and disabled people are often masking to avoid a social consequence that has nothing to do with whether they are understood and everything to do with whether they stayed in their lane.
Potter's hoax might have more layers than even he accounted for. Looking forward to where the series goes. - C
Hi Caroline, thanks for sharing! 🙏 Yes, the follow-up essays will touch upon exactly these topics. This one was the ‘sociological critique’ … next come the more psychological/organisational perspectives …
Love these series, following along your train of thought; each building on the other. I recognise a lot of what you describe in my corp life; that feeling that just having to take time to plan our tone and response makes me feel inauthentic. But it's not; it's an attempt to not lose ourselves while trying to comply with NT norms.
Hi Martin, glad that you’re enjoying it. The coming essays will take a closer look at exactly the issues you’re mentioning here. Let me know what you think once they’re out, please! Cheers, S
This really resonates with me. I think one of the biggest problems with authenticity discourse is that it ignores power. (This is predictable for me, as I'm sure you know already, Sven LOL!)
Who gets to be perceived as "authentic" is rarely neutral. For many people - especially neurodivergent people, women, people of color, queer folks, disabled professionals- the behaviors read as "authentic" are often interpreted as unprofessional, abrasive, emotional, or simply "not a culture fit."
That's why I love your shift toward alignment instead of authenticity. Alignment asks, "Am I acting in accordance with my values?" Authenticity, as it's commonly used in workplaces, too often asks, "Am I performing in ways that make other people comfortable?"
As a student of comms and political science, Foucault is part of my DNA at this point. LOL! We know by now how dangerous idolizing anyone can be (Chomky's Epstein association really got me...) and yet, I still love me some Foucault. "My role - and that is too emphatic a word - is to show people that they are much freer than they feel." SWOON! I wish he lived to see social media and talk about the Panopticonnnnn...
Wow, this spins up such a wild, exhausting paradox.
Masking is the ultimate energy drain for us. If modern workplaces wave the authenticity flag, it feels like liberation, but your piece exposes it as a performance metric trap. So if our actual authentic state at work doesn't fit the corporate image of authenticity, it's basically forcing us into Masking 2.0.
Now we have to expend even more energy performing a sanitized version of authenticity to look like good team players... It's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" loop.
Making the pivot to tactical legibility is good medicine. The shift fundamentally changes the physics of neurodivergent energy drain. But I'm curious about the somatic threshold. How does a sensitive nervous system actually tell the difference between a conscious tactical choice and a subconscious survival mask, before the battery hits zero? Curious to read the essays that follow.
Hi Alexandra, the last question you pose is an interesting one … do you have any ideas how to answer that? I suspect it’s very individual, but identifying certain markers would be helpful. Cheers, S
I suspect so too. I wonder if the main markers come down to agency and containment. One is a panicked reflex to survive, so the nervous system is locked in a threat state. The other is more like a calculated business transaction, so the energy drain is clean and the recovery is faster. Curious if that tracks with what you’ve observed in your research?
A plaque is what a city hands you instead of the thing you actually need. It costs nothing and it photographs well. The building still comes down. I know that trade from somewhere else, smaller and more polite, but the shape is the same: named valuable, treated as removable.
The same template sorts by origin, not just by wiring. Tell someone who crossed a border to just be yourself in the room, and the self that reads as real there is the one that already belonged. I code-switched across three countries for years before anyone offered me the word masking. We just called it getting through the meeting.
Being introverted, this also rings true. One of my workplace “bonding activities” was karaoke at a department event - perfect for extroverts and a nightmare for me. Yet the expectation is to “be authentic” and not only participate but enjoy!
It's also possible to enjoy karaoke to an inappropriate degree in the context of a workplace event. I'm not thinking of anyone in particular, of course. I'm merely remarking on the logical possibility.
Sven — the description-to-verdict turn is a real find here.
As someone who has often found the workplace to most definitely not want my “authentic” self, I’ve strained against the retailing of the word vs locating it. You’ve cleared ground I want cleared too. The retail version — the authentic life you buy — deserves the demolition. But there’s one place the word survives the audit: authenticity not as a possession or a verdict but as something that only happens between two people, in real time, with something at stake.
Such a good abstraction to take apart in a series, Sven. I look forward to reading the rest of this series. I spent a while mulling over the term "authenticity" a few years back, too, when I was focusing on the work of Kazimierz Dabrowski. You're familiar with him, right? His theory of positive disintegration? Because the way you define it here --
"The answer this series builds toward is not authenticity but alignment: the ongoing, active, deliberate work of bringing your behaviour into relationship with your values, in each context, with each audience."
-- is exactly how Dabrowski defined it, and he called it a "dynamism," which is one of the forces for intra-psychic change in his theory of growth and development for the sort of people many now call neurodivergent.
And quite a different thing from the way most people use it, as you have lain out so well.
Your post confirmed what I began to understand a few years ago: “be yourself” is just a fucking corporate slogan. The truth is that you can be yourself as long as you’re like THEM. And this is true not only within corporate walls, but even outside them since we humans are a tribal species and we don’t really accept people that are not part of OUR tribe (as Jane Goodall demonstrated already in 90s).
You know, as Asperger I often struggled to accept that people and organizations use words that they don’t really mean as this is a logical inconsistency for me, so it took me years to learn to “read between the lines” and understand that (neurotypical) people need these things. I can’t count how many times my bosses asked me to be “proactive”, “collaborative”, or something else that sounds like corporate fluff, and I struggled to understand what the real problem was. Then, I understood that it’s all about perception: you don’t really need to be “proactive” or “collaborative”, you just need to be perceived like that from your bosses, sponsors, and key people that have the power to promote you.
When I was young one of my lost dreams was to become an actor, and now I often joke about the fact that I’m paid to take part in corporate theater. However, as you can imagine, it’s really hard to wear a mask all the time and pretend to be like THEM, but no one can really see how much effort I put on that, nor that I am often at risk of autistic burnout. And the worst thing is that I barely get a reward for my acting performance, as if they sense that I'm not really like them.
On the other hand, the only one trick I found to preserve my sanity is to remember that their perception of me has nothing to do with my worth. I’m not interested anymore in pre-packaged and linear career paths, and most of time I try not to care what they think of me and just focus on my goals.
I absolutely agree with your characterisation of the word "authentic". It doesn't just shift connotation depending on context it shifts meaning in quite considerable ways.
The neurodivergent framing is exactly right - and it opens a question I kept coming back to while reading: is the performance you describe structurally the same for women and disabled people, or does it differ in a way that matters?
The similarity is real. When your authentic self falls outside the template, you mask. The guilt follows. The mechanism is recognisable across all three groups.
But the difference might be this: for neurodivergent professionals, the template is primarily cognitive and communicative - the expectation is that you process, present, and socialise in a particular way. Deviate, and you are illegible.
For women and disabled people, the template is also role-based. There is a prescribed social category with its own behavioural script, and deviation from it is not just illegibility - it is transgression. The woman who is too direct is not merely hard to read. She is difficult. The disabled person who does not perform gratitude or limitation correctly is not just unexpected. They are threatening.
Which means the authenticity demand lands differently: neurodivergent masking is largely about legibility. Women and disabled people are often masking to avoid a social consequence that has nothing to do with whether they are understood and everything to do with whether they stayed in their lane.
Potter's hoax might have more layers than even he accounted for. Looking forward to where the series goes. - C
Hi Caroline, thanks for sharing! 🙏 Yes, the follow-up essays will touch upon exactly these topics. This one was the ‘sociological critique’ … next come the more psychological/organisational perspectives …
Cheers, Sven
Love these series, following along your train of thought; each building on the other. I recognise a lot of what you describe in my corp life; that feeling that just having to take time to plan our tone and response makes me feel inauthentic. But it's not; it's an attempt to not lose ourselves while trying to comply with NT norms.
Authenticity is such double speak.
Hi Martin, glad that you’re enjoying it. The coming essays will take a closer look at exactly the issues you’re mentioning here. Let me know what you think once they’re out, please! Cheers, S
Double-speak for sure ... to the point of weaponization, really!
This really resonates with me. I think one of the biggest problems with authenticity discourse is that it ignores power. (This is predictable for me, as I'm sure you know already, Sven LOL!)
Who gets to be perceived as "authentic" is rarely neutral. For many people - especially neurodivergent people, women, people of color, queer folks, disabled professionals- the behaviors read as "authentic" are often interpreted as unprofessional, abrasive, emotional, or simply "not a culture fit."
That's why I love your shift toward alignment instead of authenticity. Alignment asks, "Am I acting in accordance with my values?" Authenticity, as it's commonly used in workplaces, too often asks, "Am I performing in ways that make other people comfortable?"
Those are very different questions.
Hi Kate, exactly, and this is where the whole series is headed. We have definitely internalised Foucault, haven’t we?
As a student of comms and political science, Foucault is part of my DNA at this point. LOL! We know by now how dangerous idolizing anyone can be (Chomky's Epstein association really got me...) and yet, I still love me some Foucault. "My role - and that is too emphatic a word - is to show people that they are much freer than they feel." SWOON! I wish he lived to see social media and talk about the Panopticonnnnn...
I’m wondering how people like him would fare in today’s university systems …
great start Sven, looking forwards to where the next three take this.
Thanks heaps! 😀
Wow, this spins up such a wild, exhausting paradox.
Masking is the ultimate energy drain for us. If modern workplaces wave the authenticity flag, it feels like liberation, but your piece exposes it as a performance metric trap. So if our actual authentic state at work doesn't fit the corporate image of authenticity, it's basically forcing us into Masking 2.0.
Now we have to expend even more energy performing a sanitized version of authenticity to look like good team players... It's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" loop.
Making the pivot to tactical legibility is good medicine. The shift fundamentally changes the physics of neurodivergent energy drain. But I'm curious about the somatic threshold. How does a sensitive nervous system actually tell the difference between a conscious tactical choice and a subconscious survival mask, before the battery hits zero? Curious to read the essays that follow.
Hi Alexandra, the last question you pose is an interesting one … do you have any ideas how to answer that? I suspect it’s very individual, but identifying certain markers would be helpful. Cheers, S
I suspect so too. I wonder if the main markers come down to agency and containment. One is a panicked reflex to survive, so the nervous system is locked in a threat state. The other is more like a calculated business transaction, so the energy drain is clean and the recovery is faster. Curious if that tracks with what you’ve observed in your research?
A plaque is what a city hands you instead of the thing you actually need. It costs nothing and it photographs well. The building still comes down. I know that trade from somewhere else, smaller and more polite, but the shape is the same: named valuable, treated as removable.
The same template sorts by origin, not just by wiring. Tell someone who crossed a border to just be yourself in the room, and the self that reads as real there is the one that already belonged. I code-switched across three countries for years before anyone offered me the word masking. We just called it getting through the meeting.
“Getting through the meeting …”, yeah, exactly! 😉
I’m curious: What three cultures? Best, S
Being introverted, this also rings true. One of my workplace “bonding activities” was karaoke at a department event - perfect for extroverts and a nightmare for me. Yet the expectation is to “be authentic” and not only participate but enjoy!
Update: although I’m not sure it’s going to happen, one idea being floated this year is a workplace “talent show.” 🫣
“The horror, the horror …”
It's also possible to enjoy karaoke to an inappropriate degree in the context of a workplace event. I'm not thinking of anyone in particular, of course. I'm merely remarking on the logical possibility.
😂 Yes, I trust the possibility exists somewhere in a parallel universe …
Gosh, that’s devilish! I think that one would have brought out the corporate rebel in me, for sure.
Sven — the description-to-verdict turn is a real find here.
As someone who has often found the workplace to most definitely not want my “authentic” self, I’ve strained against the retailing of the word vs locating it. You’ve cleared ground I want cleared too. The retail version — the authentic life you buy — deserves the demolition. But there’s one place the word survives the audit: authenticity not as a possession or a verdict but as something that only happens between two people, in real time, with something at stake.
Thanks for writing. This sharpened me.
Thanks, Joseph! That was the Prologue … there’s more to come. And I’m keen to get your perspective on it when they’re out. Take care, S
Such a good abstraction to take apart in a series, Sven. I look forward to reading the rest of this series. I spent a while mulling over the term "authenticity" a few years back, too, when I was focusing on the work of Kazimierz Dabrowski. You're familiar with him, right? His theory of positive disintegration? Because the way you define it here --
"The answer this series builds toward is not authenticity but alignment: the ongoing, active, deliberate work of bringing your behaviour into relationship with your values, in each context, with each audience."
-- is exactly how Dabrowski defined it, and he called it a "dynamism," which is one of the forces for intra-psychic change in his theory of growth and development for the sort of people many now call neurodivergent.
And quite a different thing from the way most people use it, as you have lain out so well.
Hi Sven,
Your post confirmed what I began to understand a few years ago: “be yourself” is just a fucking corporate slogan. The truth is that you can be yourself as long as you’re like THEM. And this is true not only within corporate walls, but even outside them since we humans are a tribal species and we don’t really accept people that are not part of OUR tribe (as Jane Goodall demonstrated already in 90s).
You know, as Asperger I often struggled to accept that people and organizations use words that they don’t really mean as this is a logical inconsistency for me, so it took me years to learn to “read between the lines” and understand that (neurotypical) people need these things. I can’t count how many times my bosses asked me to be “proactive”, “collaborative”, or something else that sounds like corporate fluff, and I struggled to understand what the real problem was. Then, I understood that it’s all about perception: you don’t really need to be “proactive” or “collaborative”, you just need to be perceived like that from your bosses, sponsors, and key people that have the power to promote you.
When I was young one of my lost dreams was to become an actor, and now I often joke about the fact that I’m paid to take part in corporate theater. However, as you can imagine, it’s really hard to wear a mask all the time and pretend to be like THEM, but no one can really see how much effort I put on that, nor that I am often at risk of autistic burnout. And the worst thing is that I barely get a reward for my acting performance, as if they sense that I'm not really like them.
On the other hand, the only one trick I found to preserve my sanity is to remember that their perception of me has nothing to do with my worth. I’m not interested anymore in pre-packaged and linear career paths, and most of time I try not to care what they think of me and just focus on my goals.
Cheers,
Alessio