What the Diagnosis Explained

Long before 41, I built systems. Not because anyone asked me to — because certain rooms were hard in ways I hadn't examined, and building a system around them was easier than asking why.

Here is the part that still catches people when I say it out loud:

• I could run global event logistics for years — coordinating tours and venues for musicians most people have had on a playlist somewhere — and still find a small dinner party the harder assignment.
• I could give a keynote to a room of a few hundred people, and not have a single sentence ready for the elevator afterward.
• I could build a plan for almost any professional situation, and file the one gap where a plan wasn't possible under "just not my thing."

None of this read as unusual to me. It read as personality. I called it being organized, or being private, or being someone who does better with structure than with small talk. Which was all true. It just wasn't the whole explanation.

A stage, a spreadsheet, a fully built itinerary — those hand you a role. A small dinner party doesn't. Neither does the ten minutes after a talk, when nobody hands you an agenda and you're expected to simply be a person in a room. I had built an entire career on the first kind of room. I had never been able to explain, to myself or to anyone else, why the second kind cost so much more.

At 41, I had a word for that. Masking1The word was not new. It was new to me — which is the entire reason I write about it now. — the work of appearing not to notice what a room is asking of you, while doing the work of noticing constantly, underneath. I'd gotten very, very good at it. Good enough that people who had known me for years were surprised, not because it seemed implausible, but because the entire point of masking is that it isn't supposed to show.

That's the sentence I keep coming back to, because it's the honest one. Not a discovery that improved how I lead. Not a hidden strength that had been there all along, waiting for a name. Just an explanation, finally, for choices I had already made — for the systems, the scripts, the very specific way I have always preferred a room I control over a room I don't.

Masking well for twenty years is not free, even when it looks, from the outside, like competence.

It costs the hours before and after — the preparation nobody sees, the recovery nobody accounts for. It costs a version of a relationship that could have been built honestly from the start, rather than through a performance good enough that the other person never knew there was one. It costs a particular kind of loneliness: being fluent enough in a room that no one thinks to ask whether the room is hard.

I don't say this to be dramatic about it. I say it because I think it's the part that's hardest to see from outside a late diagnosis, and the part most worth saying plainly to a woman currently doing what I did for twenty years, without a name for it yet. Competence and cost aren't opposites. They can sit in the same person, at the same time, for a long time, without either one canceling the other out.

Late diagnosis still gets treated like an edge case. From where I sit, it isn't one. There are a lot of us, quietly, often arriving at the word after a crisis, or after years of managing the gap between how a room reads us and what the room actually costs us.

I support AANE, the Asperger/Autism Network,2A network for late-diagnosed autistic adults, and for the women who suspect and have not been diagnosed at all. because they hold space for exactly that: women late to the word, or still without it. I speak about masking and late diagnosis publicly, not as a credential, but because it was easier for me to recognize this in someone else's account first, before I could recognize it in my own.

I'm still the same CEO I was before 41. I run the company the same way, largely for the same reasons. What changed is smaller than a transformation, and more useful than one: I stopped treating my own workarounds as evidence that something was wrong with me, and started treating them as evidence that I'd been figuring out, correctly, what I needed all along.

If part of this sounded familiar — the elevator, the dinner party, the twenty years of managing a room before anyone told you why it was harder than it should have been — I wanted it written down somewhere plain.