Masking is a common behaviour for autistic and/or ADHD people (or those of us who are both). It's sometimes referred to as camouflaging, mimicking, or being a social chameleon. You might mask subconsciously - you might not even realize you do it! But it's essentially suppressing your natural reactions, responses, physicality or expressions in order to hide some of your natural behaviours or instincts. Your first reaction.

Masking can help you fit in with the crowd, make social connections, or avoid punishment at work or school. It can also be exhausting, among other things.

Masking affects your improv in good ways, and also some challenging ways. It affects the way you approach grounded characters and scenes, the way you do voice of reason, host shows, and of course… helps quite a bit with peas in a pod or character matching scenes!

This episode covers the intersection of masking and peas in a pod scenes in improv, after a bit of an infodump about what masking is, and why we do it. I hope it makes sense. I don’t know if it will, this stuff is weird and imposter syndrome is real.

A future episode will infodump 2.0 about how masking affects voice of reason and grounded scenes, and I think it’ll be more useful than this one maybe.

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About

This podcast was created, written, and is hosted by Jen deHaan. Jen has certifications related to healthy communities (Tufts University Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy), nervous system regulation and soon teacher training certification on community resilience. She has a BFA in teaching creative arts to adults. You can find her full bio here.

This podcast was written, recorded and edited in British Columbia, Canada by Jen.

Mentioned in this episode:

Wired Divergent

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