John Walker: Do you use ‘deaf masking behaviours’? (with BSL video)

I remember years ago, I fooled them.

I sat in a group of people, all hearing, while they chatted away with their funny stories about how someone did something to someone and they got their comeuppance.

I got the gist of the story through the facial expressions but none of the details.

I would sit there watching their faces: when they laughed, I would laugh too – not exactly in the same way, just a little bit off.

When they laughed, I would giggle; when they giggled, I would smile. I had it to a fine art, because I appeared to be part of the group but not too much to draw attention to myself.

On occasions, someone would turn to me directly, “do you remember when ….” and I hadn’t a clue what event they were talking about. “Oh yeah. That was funny,” would be my reply, but they weren’t referring to a funny event at all, it was something serious as their faces started to drop.

In a slight panic, I would speak up and make some offbeat statement that would get me out of this sticky situation quickly and draw attention to something else.

Deep inside, I had feelings of nervousness and anxiety, which I tried my best to hide.

To all my non-deaf colleagues, friends and family, sorry… I fooled you. Many times. Well, at least more than once.

The worst part is that I was fooling myself. Badly.

Let me digress a moment.

Autism is widely known to affect boys more than girls but recent research has challenged this principle because boys are more likely to exhibit autistic traits, whereas girls are more likely to mask them due to their needs to socialise.

Not only would they mask, but they would hide their anxieties in order to appear sociable to their peers, as a form of social survival. That survival behaviour is called ‘masking’ (Baldwin and Costley, 2016).

This explanation made me think about whether we have ‘deaf masking behaviours.’

In a Facebook discussion, I asked my friends “what masking behaviours did you use?”

I’ll list them here but if you know some more, add them in the comments:

• Keep nodding to show I am listening.
• Making random sounds like ‘uh huh’ and ‘mmm’ to show collusion.
• Take control of the conversation.
• Talk continuously without making eye contact.
• Skip quickly through topics to make sure no unfamiliar topics are introduced.
• Crack a joke to mask my misunderstanding.
• Appear distracted to get out of conversations.
• Talk quickly to hide the fact that I don’t know what that word or name might be.
• Ask a completely random question or share a fact out of the blue, and act surprised.
• Say ‘what’ in a way that it seems the other person is talking rubbish.
• Just smile and hope for the best.
• Become child-like when caught out.

We all acknowledged that we’re experts at this to a point that it became so embedded in our persona and masking would occur automatically – even if we didn’t want to.

It is so entrenched that we fool ourselves to believe we were actually listening, even when we couldn’t. While we fooled you, we were actually fooling ourselves.

“Masking and social pressures of friendship can cause a great deal of exhaustion, anxiety and stress for adolescent girls which may be due to the internalisation of their autism traits.” (Corscadden and Casserly, 2021)

Both examples from autism and deaf groups described a meltdown, the point when we can no longer maintain that mask, when the mask becomes too difficult to bear.

It often coincides with specific moments in our lives when the pressure is on, such as exam periods, relationship problems, and challenges at work.

For me, I was 17 years old and found the new approach to A-level teaching (through discussion in small groups) and more complex late-adolescent relationships hard – I became reclusive, tired, in denial of my situation, and generally depressed.

I was masking in every class, to a point that I was lagging further behind with my studies. It was at that time I reached out to the Deaf community.

At the age of 40, I was comfortable with BSL, worked with interpreters regularly and felt at home within the Deaf community, I made a conscious decision.

I said to myself, “my contribution to the hearing world, 40 years of putting hearing people’s needs above my own, now comes to an end. So ‘hearing world’ – it is now your turn.”

I decided that hearing people should know exactly when I don’t understand something and it would be their responsibility (with my support) to do the right thing.

Hearing people should know what they need to know and their ongoing ignorance is no longer acceptable.

I now no longer mask (or try not to).

Earlier on, I said ‘sorry for fooling you’ but in reality, I was just letting you off scot-free. In fact, those subtle messages of ‘don’t be a burden,’ ‘you are nearly normal,’ and ‘you speak so well,’ just adds salt to the wound.

I am not here to be normalised by you, I am here to celebrate my differences, and just be accepted the way I am.

John Walker is a Lecturer at Sussex Centre for Language Studies at the University of Sussex and the university’s academic lead for disability as part of their ambition for an inclusive university. The centre provides a range of undergraduate and open course programmes, which is growing year on year, in BSL and Deaf culture in Brighton, Sussex. Past projects have included, Eurosigns, Eurosign Interpreter, Signall, Hidden Histories: Intercultural dialogue, and Mapping Deaf Brighton. Deputy Chair of Signature, national awarding body for sign language, applied sign language and communication strategies. The views expressed here are John’s views and his alone, and not those of the organisations he may represent.