On Manly Masking

As a whole lot of middle class ladies who’ve had to struggle for decades finally get clarity about how easy it all looked for everyone other than them (spoiler: neuronormies have extra social bones that punish them when they step out of line), and also as women not of the white middle class variety get as gatekept and gaslit as ever, I would like us to turn our gaze upon a certain variety of early middle agéd manboys.

(And breathe. That started off funny and turned into an asthma trigger. ‘pologies)

We’ve all seen them. Some of them actually work up the neurodiversity end of health care and they are very very often human facing, as if they bet themselves at uni that no one could tell them they’d be happier in an archive or a lab for the rest of their lives.

You know those kids. They follow all the rules, throwing their hand up if the teacher allows an obscure one to slide, or forgets to set homework, or collect homework in, or that even though it’s furnace-likely hot, the head teacher said we had to keep our blazers on.

You know who you are. And yes I still resent you and yes if scraping into middle management and staying there for decades is your thing or ‘quiet desperation’ makes you feel noble, then that’s fine. Who am I to judge? Just don’t make it anyone else’s problem.

So there were the kids we now know were climbing up lampposts for a reason who have either lived a life of busking outside Tesco or founded business empires or anything in between, whilst still being nice to…