On masking, work, and the radical act of playing the work ‘game’ on your own terms
There’s a line from Shakespeare that surfaces in my mind more often than most. You’ll know it: “All the world’s a stage.” It opens a speech in As You Like It — one of those observations so plainly true that we’ve repeated it for four centuries without quite stopping to think about what it means for us, here, now, trying to get through a job interview or a difficult week at work.
It came to me again recently when a young person asked for my advice whilst preparing for their first job interviews. And I found myself reaching for that phrase not as a comfort, but as a framework.
The advice that sounds wise but isn’t
We live in an age of authenticity. You’ll hear it everywhere — from well-meaning friends, from career coaches, from social media posts that gather thousands of approving reactions. Just be yourself. It comes from a good place. The wish behind it is real: that you might feel at ease, that the world might meet you where you are.
But here’s what that advice misses: the world, in many professional contexts, is not actually set up to meet you where you are. Workplaces are structured around a dominant mode of operating — a pace, a communication style, a set of unspoken expectations about how emotions are displayed, how ideas are shared, how attention is managed. That structure was not designed with everyone in mind.
For many neurodivergent people, this isn’t a revelation. It’s a Tuesday.
The cost of masking — and the reason we do it anyway
Let’s say what is rarely said loudly enough in public: masking is exhausting. Performing the version of yourself that a workplace will accept, flattening out the edges that make others uncomfortable, sustaining that performance for eight or more hours — it takes a toll. A real one. Cumulative and compounding.
And yet. Most people who mask do so for reasons that make complete sense. It’s not self-betrayal. It’s strategy. The job provides the money that provides the stability that makes everything else possible. That’s not a small thing to sacrifice on the altar of authenticity.
The problem with the be yourself advice isn’t that it’s wrong about what would be nice. It’s that they underestimate what it costs to do otherwise, and they overestimate how much most environments will genuinely accommodate difference when it arrives unfiltered.
So — what then?
This is where Shakespeare becomes useful.
Knowing the world is a stage doesn’t mean you have to disappear into the role. It means you can hold two things at once: who you actually are, and what this particular scene requires.
That’s not dishonesty. That’s aligning, as far as possible, to reality.
A skilled actor doesn’t lose themselves in every performance. They bring craft to the work. They understand the text, they know the audience, they make deliberate choices. The performance serves a purpose — and then they go home.
The insight for navigating work — especially job interviews, especially the early weeks in a new role — is similar. Engage with the process as it is, not only as you wish it were. This isn’t about suppressing yourself indefinitely. It’s about having enough self-awareness to ask: what does this moment require, and can I offer a version of that without it costing me everything?
Your brain wants more than you might think
There’s one more thing worth naming directly. The cynical framing — “I’m just here for the money” — is honest, as far as it goes. Money matters enormously. Financial precarity is one of the fastest routes to anxiety, and anxiety is expensive in ways that go far beyond the financial.
But it doesn’t go far enough.
Whatever your brain’s particular wiring, it is almost certainly seeking more than a pay cheque. Dopamine hits from completing something difficult. The specific satisfaction of working alongside people who share a goal, even if you’d never choose them as friends. The sense that what you’re doing is building toward something — an outcome, a skill, a reputation, a record of having contributed.
These things matter to brains that are wired for novelty and intensity. They matter to brains that struggle with motivation until something genuinely clicks. They matter to everyone, in fact.
Knowing this is useful. It means that when you’re evaluating a role, an interview, a workplace, you’re not just asking will they accept me? You’re also asking will this give my brain what it actually needs to function well?
Back to the stage
Here’s what I want to leave you with.
Knowing the world is a stage — that professional settings have scripts, that interviews have performances baked in, that your colleagues are also playing roles they didn’t entirely choose — this knowledge is not depressing. It’s freeing.
It means the performance isn’t you. It means you can learn it, adapt it, feel more comfortable in it. It means you can choose, with some deliberateness, when to hold back and when to let more of yourself through. It means you are not failing at authenticity every time you adjust your register for the room.
The most successful navigation of work and neurodiversity that I’ve seen doesn’t come from refusing to engage with the stage, nor from disappearing completely into the role. It comes from people who get in to the game, accept it (without ignoring their boundaries), learn to play it with skill when they need to, and protect enough of themselves in the process that they’re still feeling themselves at the end of it.
That, to me, is worth more than any advice to simply be yourself.
How have you found your own balance between performing and being?
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