> Challenging the idea that you need to mask to be successful... How much of the need here is self-imposed?
Autistic people don't come into the world as fully formed adults with irrational ideas about the need to mask. They start off as children and attempt to socialize with other children. The autistic child in a neurotypical world just "being themselves" finds themselves repeatedly kicked out of friend groups and rejected by everyone sometimes including by their parents. This is deeply traumatic to a young child's psyche. Unloved and rejected, a solution appears! I'll just pretend to be like the other kids, even though they're stupid and wrong. They may actually objectively be stupid, but apparently they don't like being told that to their face. Pile on another decade or two of this, and hey, this child, now older and wiser, has autistic masking tendencies that cause them to burn out. Blame the now-adult person with autism all you want to absolve yourself of a need to concern yourself with other people's problems, but that's not actually helpful for those people suffering from autistic burnout.
Autistic people don't come into the world as fully formed adults with irrational ideas about the need to mask. They start off as children and attempt to socialize with other children. The autistic child in a neurotypical world just "being themselves" finds themselves repeatedly kicked out of friend groups and rejected by everyone sometimes including by their parents. This is deeply traumatic to a young child's psyche. Unloved and rejected, a solution appears! I'll just pretend to be like the other kids, even though they're stupid and wrong. They may actually objectively be stupid, but apparently they don't like being told that to their face. Pile on another decade or two of this, and hey, this child, now older and wiser, has autistic masking tendencies that cause them to burn out. Blame the now-adult person with autism all you want to absolve yourself of a need to concern yourself with other people's problems, but that's not actually helpful for those people suffering from autistic burnout.