Masking Runs 24/7 and Bills You for It
Ico Fish calls themselves the autistic love mystic. In this episode of Energy Economics for Parents, they gave host Christopher Fern something more concrete than a title: an accounting of what masking actually takes out of a person, and what it takes to stop.
Masking is the work of pretending to be neurotypical—holding eye contact you don’t want to hold, standing at the culturally approved distance, tracking the flow of a conversation that a neurotypical person tracks by reflex. Ico’s point is that none of it is free. It runs around the clock, it draws on the same reserve everything else draws on, and the person doing it usually doesn’t count it as work.
Spoon theory, applied to masking
Ico borrows spoon theory from the chronic illness community. A person has a set number of energetic spoons in a day. A shower takes some. Laundry takes some. Dishes take some. The count is finite and it doesn’t reset because the day got harder.
For a neurodivergent person who has been masking a long time, masking is the item at the top of that ledger that never gets itemized. Which produces a result that catches people off guard: unmasking usually starts with exhaustion getting worse. Naming how depleted you are is its own expense before it is any kind of relief. Christopher Fern pushed on exactly this—a parent with no reserve left is being asked to spend more, on the promise of getting more back later.
Ico’s answer is that the alternative doesn’t have a long-term version. Mask hard enough and long enough and the inauthenticity can build to a genuine mental crisis. The end of that road is a breakdown, arriving on a schedule nobody picks.
Rebuilding the count from the floor
Asked how to raise the ceiling rather than just sleeping under it, Ico started at the bottom. Neurodivergent people frequently run disconnected from the body and will go hours without eating or drinking without registering it. When did I last drink water. When did I last eat. Christopher connected it to the base of Maslow’s hierarchy—the questions that feel too small to matter are usually the ones that got skipped.
Above that sits a body practice. Can I feel my feet. How many of my toes can I find. Ico traces a finger from the forehead down to the heart as a physical reminder of the direction of travel. And then the sensory inventory that adults often think they’re too old to ask for: tags cut out of shirts, socks folded a specific way. Ico’s framing is that saying what works out loud counts as advocacy, even when it makes no sense to anyone neurotypical.
What this means for parents
For a parent raising a neurodivergent child, Ico offered two things. Recognize the child as a sovereign individual—someone who will think, feel, and decide for themselves, with a real yes and a real no worth teaching them to find. And go one step further back and parent your own inner child, the one who didn’t get what they needed, without pretending it was fair.
Both cost energy. Ico’s case is that they’re among the few expenditures that pay the reserve back rather than draining it.
Ico is offering a free call at callwithico.com.
