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Welcome to the Neurodiversity and Improv Podcast from flatimprov.com.

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I'm Jen deHaan, and today we're talking about masking and improv, what that is, how it affects your improv practice, and I guess that's about it.

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Anyways, these podcasts aren't for telling anyone what to do.

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I'm not going to tell you what to do.

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I'm just going to tell you about my experience with these things and hope that they might help you learn, or adjust, or think, or something.

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I guess something more than nothing.

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These are explanations to help encourage classes and teams to be more inclusive with all of the diverse people that participate in this wonderful thing that we do.

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This isn't excuses, this isn't challenge in a note or anything like that.

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And of course, these podcasts are not for diagnosis, especially of other people.

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But if you do hear a whole bunch of things in these podcasts that seem to apply to you, maybe you want to talk to somebody who's a lot smarter than me.

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Basically, these podcasts are by and for really nerdy improvisers.

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So we're talking about masking.

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Masking is a common behavior for people who are autistic or ADHD, or both like me.

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It's sometimes referred to as camouflaging, mimicking, or being a social chameleon.

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I like that one.

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Masking is conscious or sort of part of your subconscious, unconscious, but it's essentially suppressing your natural reactions, your natural responses, your physicality or expressions, in order to hide some of your natural behaviors.

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This thing that we call masking, it can help you fit in, it can help you make connections with other people, and it can also help you avoid punishments.

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You might copy behaviors of people around you.

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You might even rehearse interactions.

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Essentially, whatever it takes to make you seem more socially acceptable in this construct we all live in.

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And a lot of us were raised, trained or conditioned to be this way.

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How intensively that happened can of course depend on your parents.

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It can depend on where you grew up or even your gender, especially your gender in some cases, actually.

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For example, if you were raised socially as a girl, you may mask more heavily because we often have more social barriers at school, at work, at other parts of the world and in certain parts of society.

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Or you might have had greater support needs.

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So the masking needed to be more extensive in order to avoid the social repercussions, like bullying.

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So we change our behavior.

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We mimic other people in order to just fit in.

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We match their characteristics and maybe even someone else's point of view.

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That alone should be a pretty big clue about how masking can affect improv.

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There's a lot of ways masking can affect your improv practice.

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But in this episode, I'm going to focus on some of the matching elements of camouflaging that can help out for some parts of our practice.

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In other episodes, I will cover topics around voice of reason and unusual, about the performance version of yourself and taking on, say, character point of view.

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So I think I got some things for free in improv thanks to masking for most of my life.

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I've had a long history of being in some kind of character to a certain extent.

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I've matched expressions, even voices and sounds, and I've been hyper aware of the point of view of people around me.

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I've certainly been hyper aware of other people's reactions, listening, observing, reacting.

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Some of this has been for safety, and a lot of it has been because of parental social conditioning.

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All of this is to act a certain way that was socially acceptable as a girl and a woman, but it wasn't really me, but also kind of me, as long as I'm understood correctly.

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I'd act if I needed to be understood in a way my voice, body and wording were letting me down about.

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So a lot of times my voice, body, wording, if I just reacted as me, would not match socially what other people were thinking I was trying to express.

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But these improv friendly skills, the things that we get for free that help, as with most things, have their cons as well as these pros.

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So I'll give you a little bit of context, the context you're dealing with, because I'm speaking at you without any visuals.

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I'm a high-masking, middle-age woman who was raised in North America by parents who really cared if I fit in properly and fit the role.

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So I've been doing this a long ass time because I'm older.

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This could mean that it's more wired in to me.

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And it might also mean that I have a slightly less accurate sense of self.

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Maybe I'm a woman, and I was socialized as one from birth to act a certain socially acceptable way at school and then at work.

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I can tell you a lot of things I did as a girl and woman that definitely would have not been my default operating mode.

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I mentally rejected a lot of that stuff.

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I suppressed a lot of stuff that the boys got away with, like the class clowns.

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I wanted to blurt out comebacks so bad.

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I tried once and I ended up in detention, unlike the boys.

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And that still messes with my brain to this day.

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I deeply hate getting in trouble.

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I was also bullied to the extent the police sent me home to get homeschooled for safety.

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So I didn't mask all that well, actually, because that all happened.

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Plus, I loved being weird.

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From the time I was in kindergarten, apparently, I don't even remember this, but my mom told me that I told her repeatedly, I never wanted to be one of the popular girls.

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I really did not want to be popular.

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I wanted to be weird.

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Not surprising to some of you, I'm sure.

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Anyway, since girls and women, among others, often have more barriers in these kinds of spaces, like school and work, especially if these places are male dominated, we mask to get in.

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We mask to get by in a variety of ways.

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And luckily, I was able to do some of that to some extent, especially after I morphed into an adult.

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I have been masking and not totally realizing it for a lot of my life.

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Even knowing since my 20s that I was neurodivergent, I just for some reason thought I didn't really do it in certain spaces where I actually was.

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And the parts I did know about, I didn't think really mattered.

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And I understand this is pretty common.

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Improv and performance I did before it helped me get a new feel for acting or the performance mode.

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And this helped me understand some of the ways I mask outside of performance.

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I never really realized it before that.

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So Improv is good for starting to understand the extent that you might be masking.

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And Zoom Improv, for example, did enlighten me to the fact that my processing information face still really comes across as Jen is pissed off or upset.

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If I'm trying to like be myself or I'm not really thinking about performance mode, I look in the camera like, wow, oh, that's what I look like when I'm thinking hard about, you know, problem solving or some kind of issue.

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And I'm not mad or upset.

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I'm just deeply thinking.

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So I'm not that great at masking, maybe more than I really want to admit.

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But anyways, our experiences will all be pretty different.

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And this whole episode is primarily about some of the ways you can think about how neurodivergent masking affects your improv practice, learning, scene work, characters, and how you can take notes that you receive from teachers and coaches and apply them to improve your own practice.

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Even if what they say might not be how your brain is working, you can still take that note and just apply it to the way your brain is working, hopefully.

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So in this next section, I'm going to talk about the why behind masking a bit.

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Why do we even mask in the first place?

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And do you mask?

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I'm going to indulge in some details in this section, because I think it will be helpful for you to either understand if you mask, especially if you're newer to this idea of masking, or to understand why other improvisers mask if you don't.

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This might be quite important if you teach people who are masked.

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You'll understand a little bit more about what might be going on in our heads.

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So despite not wanting to be the popular kid and being okay with being kind of weird, I discovered after the fact, I still masked quite a bit, especially when I ended up in a corporate workplace in my mid-20s.

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Essentially, I wanted to make sure my behavior was not interpreted in an inaccurate way.

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People who are neurodivergent often really dislike being misunderstood because we are misunderstood all the time.

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And masking is one of the, I guess, best ways or one of the ways to not be misunderstood.

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You know, we want our expressions to match what somebody else has seen them as.

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So, one example of this is I can come across, as I mentioned, is frustrated, unhappy, displeased, whatever, especially while I just process information.

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I'm thinking hard.

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I'm thinking about all the details, the connections, what do I know?

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And that will sometimes come across on my face as being very upset.

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So, I will often mask if I can so other people don't think that I'm mad at them or something because I'm not.

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I'm just thinking or problem solving.

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So, I've learned this the very hard way.

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Autistic people are also known to be quite blunt at times.

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We might want to mask that, for example.

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We love to problem solve.

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We love to get in the details and fix things.

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And people might not like that, especially if you're trying to fix them.

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They just say want to be heard.

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They want to be seen.

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Apparently, fixing problems in general isn't the natural inclination for many people.

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I have a hard time understanding this, but I accept it because I've read it.

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Neurodivergent humans sometimes default to connecting socially by sharing a similar experience that they had.

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And this is widely considered apparently to be rude.

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I did not know most of this until I was pretty old and was exposed to a lot of internet articles on these kind of social dynamics.

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So not doing any of these things, which would be our natural inclination.

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We might catch ourselves and do the socially conditioned response, which would be the mask.

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And because it doesn't come naturally, and sometimes like to me, doing these things is like nails on a chalkboard.

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It just feels to me, rude or wrong, even though the general populace, it's the correct socially acceptable thing to do.

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So that's masking.

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And then there's the info dumping.

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I think this one is fairly common amongst neurodivergent people like me.

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That one I did know about from fairly early on in life.

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My dad was the best info dumper of all time.

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And I saw how other people looked at him when he did this.

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And I knew that I was just like him in this way.

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And I hated that I was.

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So I learned very quickly to mask that particular behavior as well as I could.

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It's sort of recognizing that flip that you feel when you want to start a goddamn monologue on something no one asked you about or expected like two sentences in response and not a 30-minute monologue.

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But it's also why I started to volunteer teaching in classrooms when I was a teenager, because I had all these young nerd kids that wanted to hear my long-winded explanations on whatever the hell they asked me about.

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I found my outlet of question askers.

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But info dumping outside of that context is seen as rude or weird.

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And God, do I still fail on that?

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Like I cleared improvisers' Zoom room quite recently, accidentally doing this.

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I was excited at what I learned in a tech thing.

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And it came up, but no one asked more.

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And I dumped my Type 5 Plus of details.

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And I did not notice the glazed over eye expressions in the Zoom little boxes, chiclet boxes that everyone had.

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And then suddenly everyone had to leave to get something to eat kind of thing.

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And I knew what I did.

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And I was mortified for days.

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That was an infodump, wasn't it?

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But hey, it's just who we are.

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Masks fail sometimes, you know?

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And you just learn and move on.

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Like this whole maybe incredibly self-indulgent podcast series is in itself an infodump.

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But at least one all of you are opting into.

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But what do I know?

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I still question everything.

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Like, are these infodumps even useful?

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So we learn to mask to keep jobs, to keep friends, to not be harassed, to be safer.

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There are lots of great valid important reasons to mask when we need to and unmask only when it's fairly safe.

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But also masking can suck.

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It takes effort.

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It's tiring.

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And we can ultimately wonder who we really are, especially in social contexts.

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So people choose to unmask in all sorts of occasions, maybe all occasions.

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Maybe they completely unmask even in social places.

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And that is cool, too.

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I'm a mix.

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I've been doing this too thoroughly for too long, and it's just a big stew bucket or something.

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And I still don't know to some extent what's the mask and what's not.

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Like I've started to see myself processing in that Zoom window I talked about for the first time a couple of years ago.

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I never realized I still look pretty pissed off sometimes when I have to heavily process something.

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So we're all still learning.

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And no wonder I still get in trouble for that.

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Anyways, I'm not afraid of being weird and unusual for the most part, but I still don't want to be misunderstood or hurt other people by how they interpret my reactions.

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We often want people to understand us accurately, which is the mask and why unmasking is hard.

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We might only do it around people who really understand us and exposing some of that kind of vulnerability, which comes up in improv.

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And that's why I'm talking about this, especially when it comes to voice of reason or unusual work when we are supposed to be our truthful selves and responding honestly, and we get notes on that.

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That's what makes it hard too, until we piece together what we're doing by the way of those notes and a lot of processing and we formulate an improv plan.

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So what about the improv?

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We're finally getting to the core of the improv part.

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I mean, I will say that obviously some of this is treading into that gray area of therapy, the thing that we leave off the stage.

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But understanding who you really are without the mask impacts improv.

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So this processing is pretty important to do off stage because we need to think about what the point of view is, what our voice of reason is, what is honest and truthful, unmasked point of view versus the masked point of view.

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How we're doing characters.

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Masking and unmasking involve understanding your own identity or how you hide it.

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And it also, of course, involves self-esteem.

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Like, is the unmasked me not good enough?

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I mean, we had a recent class posted at WGIS called Who the fuck are you?

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And diving into that, into yourself in scenes was the core part of that class.

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So, it's in there as a part of the learning improv process.

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And understanding ourself and the way that we mask or unmask, it makes us better improvisers.

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And it helps us listen to those notes and apply them in more effective ways.

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So, in improv, framing or understanding what's unusual goes hand in hand with masking and neurodivergence.

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How you're grounded is involved in this.

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Responses are involved in this.

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But I want to touch on some of those things in a separate episode because this one is already getting pretty darn long.

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So let's return to the concept of mimicking, camouflaging and character matching.

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And I'll get into some of that other important stuff in another episode.

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So let's talk about peas in a pod or character matching scenes.

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When we mask, we sometimes subconsciously or consciously mimic the person or the people we are with in order to just fit in.

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That's where the word camouflaging comes in.

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This can include body movements and expressions.

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It can include turns of phrase and other ways of speaking, the tone of voice, even accents, even point of view.

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So this skill is obviously very helpful in improv for those peas in a pod or character matching scenes.

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Even if we pride ourselves on being weirdos, we might still do masking and select situations.

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Like I was mentioning earlier, I mask to keep myself interpreted correctly.

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So my internal mindset matches my socially read external expression.

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And I do this to not be misunderstood quite as much.

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Or like, you know, not go on for 30 minutes about something I learned this week when no one asked.

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So I make you download this damn podcast by choice and not force these monologues in you and some Zoom room.

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I know this next part is about to come across as boasty.

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So I want to emphasize, I've done masking since I was a kid, at least since kindergarten, which is some of my earliest memories of like coming home and letting go to be what my mom called actually Jenny after throwing my lunchbox across the kitchen, which is in fatigue from masking all day long.

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That's apparently quite common amongst neurodivergent kids.

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My mom always said that I was two kids.

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I was school version and a home version.

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So basically I've done some element of peas in a pod like stuff for more than 40 years.

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And in other episodes, I'll also be talking about how this masking makes improv harder or more of a struggle.

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And I'll get into a little bit of that even in regards to peas in a pod.

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So this part right here is just mostly the good stuff, the stuff we get for free.

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So, what do we get for free?

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Well, I can just talk about what I sort of had my earliest experience in improv as, where it kind of this particular, I guess, built up skill set became apparent to me.

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So I think this is probably what we really get for free in improv.

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So my very first peas in a pod experience was in the short form game Hitchhiker, which I did at Second City, probably like level two or three.

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And we all had a chance at being the driver of the car.

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And then you pick up passenger after passenger after passenger, and each passenger does their own great big character, and you just match them in all regards.

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So I was really surprised because this is the first time that I'd ever done that, that it just happened automatically without much effort.

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I had never tried this before.

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I was nervous.

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I'd never done most of the characters that were thrown at me by the other people, because before that point, I'd always just made my own characters in my own internal way, and I had very little to no experience with character endowments or assignments.

00:20:45.142 --> 00:20:47.742

So I'd never done this copy thing before.

00:20:47.742 --> 00:20:57.702

But even, and this is my strongest memory of this one exercise, was somebody came in as a Valley Girl type character, and I'd never attempted it.

00:20:58.362 --> 00:21:05.102

I never thought I even could do it because it was so dramatically different from me and every character I'd done.

00:21:05.102 --> 00:21:08.602

But somehow it just materialized.

00:21:08.602 --> 00:21:11.642

And I, you know, knew I probably couldn't even do it on my own.

00:21:11.642 --> 00:21:16.462

I knew it was only happening because I was copying someone else in the moment.

00:21:16.462 --> 00:21:23.062

So I really remember that Valley Girl being my first moment of how the hell did that just happen.

00:21:23.282 --> 00:21:24.462

Maybe that's normal.

00:21:24.462 --> 00:21:26.362

Maybe that happens to a lot of people.

00:21:26.362 --> 00:21:32.262

But I kind of attribute that to having so much practice masking my whole life.

00:21:32.262 --> 00:21:40.842

It's also quite common for people who do heavy masking to take on accents and vocal cadence of people that they're with.

00:21:40.842 --> 00:21:48.782

I've noticed this now myself, but only through actually being very conscientious about it and like looking for it specifically.

00:21:49.102 --> 00:21:59.022

And then I can kind of remember back in the past where people have noticed that I've taken on certain vocal cadences in certain circumstances.

00:21:59.022 --> 00:22:04.662

So I do believe that probably some of that comes for free through masking as well.

00:22:04.662 --> 00:22:21.242

I think this all sort of just gives you a head start in this part of improv, especially if you start noticing it in yourself and sort of, I guess, emphasizing that skill and trying to grow that skill, because you already might have a little bit of a head start in it.

00:22:21.242 --> 00:22:30.082

So use it, try things, just try it and see if you can be that valley girl or whatever, something that you wouldn't normally try yourself.

00:22:30.082 --> 00:22:34.582

Get someone else who maybe has done it and try mimicking them if you haven't already.

00:22:34.582 --> 00:22:43.982

And also remember that if you haven't done this, you're not a masker and you maybe see someone that just gets it, that hasn't, you know, tried it in improv before.

00:22:44.742 --> 00:22:55.102

Don't be discouraged because they've maybe been doing it subconsciously for decades of exhausting reps just so they're not ostracized by society.

00:22:55.102 --> 00:23:00.702

So know that some people might have experience that they don't even understand that they have.

00:23:00.702 --> 00:23:06.342

But everyone, no matter what, if they're a masker or not, still needs reps.

00:23:06.342 --> 00:23:08.502

You still need to go the rest of the way.

00:23:08.502 --> 00:23:15.402

You're just getting a head start in this, especially for me, with understanding the point of view matching part.

00:23:15.402 --> 00:23:19.162

People who mask might do some of that point of view matching.

00:23:19.162 --> 00:23:22.942

People who mask might do some of that point of view matching as well.

00:23:22.942 --> 00:23:31.942

But I don't feel like I got much of that for free through my masking, because it's just not automated feeling like the other parts are.

00:23:31.942 --> 00:23:41.762

But I will say that because some of the vocal and physical masking that I can do, that's very subconscious and automated feeling.

00:23:41.762 --> 00:23:52.222

That helps because I can just put that on autopilot, or I've been able to do that while I focus more on some of the point of view matching parts of P's in a pod scene.

00:23:52.222 --> 00:23:57.602

So let's talk about what's harder when you're a high masking neurodivergent human.

00:23:57.602 --> 00:24:03.602

This is when the assignment is that you can't do matching, you can't P's in a pod.

00:24:03.602 --> 00:24:11.562

And this is of course harder because this is something that our bodies might subconsciously want to do a lot of.

00:24:11.562 --> 00:24:24.582

But in this case, it's not right for the scene because say you need to do the correct positioning and that is not P's in a pod, or maybe it's just the assignment from the teacher or the coach.

00:24:24.582 --> 00:24:25.802

Then what happens?

00:24:25.802 --> 00:24:33.742

Because occasionally this sort of thing can put you firmly and squarely in your head.

00:24:33.742 --> 00:24:44.722

You're monitoring to make sure that you don't do it until you're really far into that scene and you're like, okay, I'm not at risk of mimicking, you know, my scene partner.

00:24:44.722 --> 00:25:00.022

Early on, that was pretty hard for me in some cases, because early on I would feel this sort of subconscious drive to want to match my scene partner, especially physically or vocally, but also the point of view.

00:25:00.022 --> 00:25:08.622

And if you're not supposed to match or it's not right for the scene, you are just constantly trying to make sure that you aren't subconsciously ending up there.

00:25:08.622 --> 00:25:18.842

Luckily, point of view, for me, at least luckily for me, point of view is the thing that I'm least likely to subconsciously match.

00:25:18.842 --> 00:25:23.202

It's sort of the least likely automatic reaction that I tend to do.

00:25:23.202 --> 00:25:32.142

So for me, I'm very thankful that this hasn't been, you know, a real issue or a real problem for me, but it's still there and I notice it sometimes.

00:25:32.342 --> 00:25:39.542

So that's why I want to call it out, in case it's something that you might need to watch out for, too, you know, even a little bit.

00:25:39.542 --> 00:25:49.402

But for some of you, it might be just something that you've done a lot of throughout your decades, and it might be just something that you need to watch for a little bit more.

00:25:49.402 --> 00:26:01.382

The other thing that's been hard in the past for me, I notice that I always gravitated to, and probably still to, to just peas in a pod scenes a lot, you know, if it's open and it can happen.

00:26:01.582 --> 00:26:04.162

A lot of times, I will just go there.

00:26:04.162 --> 00:26:05.542

I think this is pretty normal.

00:26:05.542 --> 00:26:09.802

I think a lot of us do that, no matter what type of neuro type we are.

00:26:09.802 --> 00:26:13.322

Even if you're not neurodivergent, it's fun.

00:26:13.322 --> 00:26:15.622

It has a very natural feel, at least to me.

00:26:15.622 --> 00:26:18.082

It feels very natural to do.

00:26:18.082 --> 00:26:19.262

I think it's quite easy.

00:26:19.262 --> 00:26:20.562

It's usually fun.

00:26:20.562 --> 00:26:32.582

Maybe most of us are just cheap lemmings or whatever, but we don't want to do anything so much in improv that it becomes a habit or a crutch or boring and way too repetitive, way too much of that.

00:26:32.582 --> 00:26:35.522

You know, there's scenes obviously that can't be like that.

00:26:35.522 --> 00:26:41.842

So sometimes this can be somewhat hard when the reaction is very automatic or natural for us.

00:26:41.842 --> 00:26:49.522

But we can always remember that we can match physicality and expressions and voice, but not the point of view.

00:26:49.522 --> 00:26:53.862

The point of view is the core part of a peas in a pod scene.

00:26:53.862 --> 00:27:08.322

So maskers, you can still use those skills or that subconscious response quite safely in a lot of scenes, as long as you focus on an appropriate point of view type positioning for the scene.

00:27:08.322 --> 00:27:10.542

And just do those reps.

00:27:10.542 --> 00:27:13.482

The more reps you get, the less of a thing this is.

00:27:13.482 --> 00:27:25.342

So that's what I have for point of view character matching, the addition of camouflaging and mimicking.

00:27:26.222 --> 00:27:27.282

What an info dump!

00:27:27.282 --> 00:27:35.262

And we'll get into some of these other aspects of masking and improv, that stuff around voice of reason in future episodes.

00:27:35.262 --> 00:27:43.222

Well, you've made it to the end of another episode of the Neurodiversity and Improv Podcast.

00:27:43.222 --> 00:27:45.062

I'm going to do some plugs.

00:27:45.062 --> 00:27:53.282

I have online classes at and I work with the World's Greatest Improv School, also known as WGIS, also known as WGIS.

00:27:53.622 --> 00:27:57.442

The school has online classes, jams, teams and more.

00:27:57.442 --> 00:27:59.922

The more includes also in-person stuff.

00:27:59.922 --> 00:28:03.222

So go check out the school at wgimprovschool.com.

00:28:05.322 --> 00:28:18.222

I have a website called flatimprov.com and I might write some of these episodes out as blog articles if you would prefer that or know somebody who would.

00:28:18.242 --> 00:28:22.702

And I also have a lot of other online improv related content on the site.

00:28:22.902 --> 00:28:26.862

And I also publish a newsletter twice a month.

00:28:26.862 --> 00:28:28.822

And that's just a whole lot of improv stuff.

00:28:28.822 --> 00:28:39.122

And I invite all of you to add your improv related content, as long as it's online, on that website, like your podcasts or your online classes.

00:28:39.122 --> 00:28:41.822

And I will put those out in the newsletter as well.

00:28:41.822 --> 00:28:44.442

This podcast lives on Substack.

00:28:44.442 --> 00:28:49.342

And I invite you to have a word on this podcast.

00:28:49.342 --> 00:29:07.202

You can even join me as a guest, or you can just send me some text comments to read, if you want to say something in regards to something I've said in the past, or send me a voice message, or send me topics to talk about.

00:29:07.202 --> 00:29:10.362

All of that is invited at flatimprov.com/substack.

00:29:12.702 --> 00:29:15.562

So please contribute, and I hope to hear from you.

00:29:15.562 --> 00:29:16.822

And thanks for listening.