If you are neurodivergent, you may have spent years becoming very good at something that has no name in most people's lives: performing normality. Watching how other people behave, then calibrating your responses so that you appear to fit in. This is called masking, and while it can be a genuinely useful survival skill, it comes with a cost that is rarely talked about honestly. What masking actually is Masking refers to the way many autistic and ADHD people, and those with ot

If you've ever been told you're too sensitive or too much in your head, or spent years trying to be more outgoing and more the kind of person the room seems to want, you'll recognise something in Susan Cain's work before you've finished the first chapter. Her 2012 book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking made a case that feels obvious once you hear it, and yet clearly needed saying: that somewhere between a third and a half of the population is w