My friend was having a terrible week. Life had beaten her down in the way it does when everything compounds... relationship stress, money problems, an exhaustion that lives deep within bones. When the HR guy called about a job opportunity, she took a breath, painted on what she calls her "bubbly, happy" mask, and performed enthusiasm she didn't feel.
"I didn't want to scare him away," she told me later.
Scare him away. As if her humanity (her real, struggling, beautifully messy humanity) was a threat to her employability!
Yesterday, I called out sick from both my jobs. I've had a headache bordering on a migraine since Sunday. Three days of my brain feeling like it's wrapped in barbed wire. I couldn't drive. I couldn't remember basic words. Working was impossible. So I called out, and then I cried for thirty minutes straight.
Not because of the pain. I'm used to pain.
I cried because I know my bosses are disappointed in me. I can see it in their body language, hear it in their tone. I know the pattern: disabled employee does great work, but isn't available 24/7, so becomes a problem. I cried because I felt like I let everyone I care about down. I cried because I'm mad at myself for having a body that doesn't cooperate with capitalism's demands.
And here's the fucked-up part: both of these stories are about the same thing.
We've created a work culture where being human (having emotions, having limitations, having bodies that don't perform like machines) is treated as a professional liability. We've forgotten that work is supposed to support life, not replace it. We've built a system that demands we become someone else for 40+ hours a week just to afford rent and food.
And for those of us with disabilities? The mask isn't just uncomfortable. It's suffocating.
The First Mask: Emotional Labor
Let's start with my friend. What she was doing (performing bubbly for HR) has a name. It's called emotional labor.
The sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined the term back in 1983, defining it as emotion work that is performed in exchange for pay and as a condition of employment. This isn't just being nice. It's the commercialization of human feeling, when your employer has a degree of control over the emotional activities of its employees, demanding a smile and a "happy to help" attitude whether you feel it or not.
This is the baseline robot behavior we're all expected to perform. And the cost of this performance is staggering. This faking it creates cognitive dissonance and is a direct line to employee burnout, emotional exhaustion, and reduced mental health. This isn't just a me problem or a you problem. This is a global economy problem. The World Health Organization estimates that depression and anxiety from workplace burnout cost the global economy $1 trillion in lost productivity every single year. For a single company of 1,000 employees, the cost of burnout can exceed $5 million annually.
The Double Mask: Neurodivergent Camouflaging
But here's the point you really need to get: that's just the first mask.
For those of us with disabilities or neurodivergence, this is exponentially harder. We're expected to perform that same emotional labor on top of a second, deeper mask, just to get to the same starting line. This isn't just faking an emotion. This is faking your entire neuro-physical state.
This is what researchers call neurodivergent masking or camouflaging: a high-cost survival strategy where we actively force neurotypical traits to avoid being recognized as different. For me, an autistic person, this means forcing eye contact, which is a high-energy, deeply uncomfortable cognitive load. It's manually performing a specific tone of voice, practiced facial expressions, and neutral body language angles that are not my native operating system.
This is hiding symptom management... the conscious concealment of our reality. It's deliberately keeping it together at work, hiding the fact that you need to take medication, use an inhaler, or check your blood sugar because of the stigma and the fear that disclosing will undermine your professional role.
This is heartbreaking symptoms... finding a private space to deal with severe pain, or pretending your migraine is just a headache so you don't sound dramatic.
My friend had to put on one mask: the bubbly employee. I have to put on that same mask, but only after I've already put on the "I'm not in pain, my brain isn't full of barbed wire, and standing up doesn't make my heart spike" mask.
That is the Double Mask. And the cost of wearing it isn't just $1 trillion. It's our frickin' lives.
The Systemic Trap: The Disability Employment Gap and the SSDI Catch-22
Let's talk about what equal opportunity employment actually looks like in practice.
In 2024, only 22.7% of people with disabilities were employed, compared to 65.5% of people without disabilities. Read that again. Less than one in four of us can even get a job. And our unemployment rate? 7.5% (nearly double the 3.8% rate for people without disabilities). This chasm is known as the Disability Employment Gap (DEG), a key indicator of systemic inequality in the labor market. And when we do get jobs, we are twice as likely to be stuck in low-quality, precarious employment.
But wait, it gets better. (By better, I mean so much worse that I want to flip a table.)
Let's say you can't work. Your body simply won't let you anymore. You apply for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), which is supposed to be the safety net for exactly this situation. The average SSDI benefit for a disabled worker in 2025 is $1,580 per month.
Now let me tell you what it actually costs to survive in America. According to the MIT Living Wage Calculator, a single adult with no children in Mississippi (which has one of the lowest costs of living in the nation) needs to earn $43,159 per year before taxes to cover basic needs. That is $3,596 per month.
The system that is designed to be our safety net pays us $1,580 a month. The bare minimum cost of living in the cheapest state is $3,596 a month. That is a $2,016 gap. Every. Single. Month.
he living wage for a single adult in Mississippi is $3,596 per month, according to the MIT Living Wage Calculator. Based on the average SSDI benefit for a disabled worker in 2025, that means the monthly survival gap is negative $2,016.
You literally cannot afford to be disabled in America.
I've applied for SSDI twice. I've been denied twice. The process has taken years. And you want to know the really fun part? The legal jargon they use to deny is so dense, so deliberately opaque, that I can't even fully understand why I've been denied.
Meanwhile, I have to keep working. With the migraines. With the POTS. With the days when my body decides it's done cooperating. Because $1,580 a month (even if I could get approved) wouldn't even cover rent, let alone food, medication, utilities, or the accessibility tax of just existing in a body that needs extra support.
So I work. I do great work, actually. And then my body reminds me it's the ultimate boss, and I have to call out, and I disappoint my employers, and the cycle continues. This isn't a personal failing. This is a system designed to break us.
The Burnout Loop: Ableist Microaggressions and Enforced Masking
This brings me back to crying for 30 minutes.
The reason I cried wasn't just disappointment in myself. It was the terror of their disappointment. It was knowing that my great work is always, always conditional. The minute my body (my Ultimate Boss) overrules my employer's deadline, I stop being a great employee and become a disappointment.
My lived experience (doing great work but being unavailable equals disappointing) has a name. It's called subtle discrimination, and it's delivered through ableist microaggressions. A microaggression is one of those small but hurtful actions from coworkers or supervisors that maintain unfair treatment, even if they are not intended to be harmful. That disappointed body language I see? That shift in tone? That's the microaggression. Researchers categorize these as microinvalidations (actions that negate or undermine our reality) and microinsults (subtle communications of bias). It's the subtle, unintentional bias of a manager who fundamentally, subconsciously, believes my invisible disability isn't as real as their deadline.
This creates a destructive feedback loop that disabled and chronically ill people know in their bones. My invisible disability (POTS, migraine, fibromyalgia) is not outwardly visible. I have to call out. This is a symptom of my disability, not a choice. My manager's unintentional bias leads them to interpret this symptom as a character flaw: You're not reliable. They communicate this judgment through microaggressions... the disappointed tone, the sigh, the "we need to talk about your patterns" texts. My nervous system, already hypervigilant from trauma and chronic illness, correctly identifies this as a real social threat. This triggers the shame and fear (the extended crying session) and forces me to mask even harder next time, which leads directly to Disability Burnout: a specific, crushing exhaustion from navigating a world not designed for me. This burnout makes me sicker, which starts the whole goddamn cycle over again.
The gaslighting isn't just in my head. It's in their body language. They're telling me, "You're not reliable," when the truth is I'm literally surviving.
And if the subtle discrimination at work is designed to break your spirit, the SSDI process is designed to break your will to live. My personal story of two denials and years of waiting isn't a fluke. It is the statistical norm. When you first apply for SSDI, your claim is denied about 62 to 67% of the time. If you appeal (which is called reconsideration), your claim is denied 84% of the time. My years of waiting isn't an exaggeration... it's the data. The average wait for an initial decision is 7.5 months. The average wait for a reconsideration decision is another 6 months. And the average wait to finally get a hearing in front of a judge is another 12.2 months. Add it all up. The average applicant waits 2.1 years just to get a hearing.
And remember my deliberately opaque legal jargon? That's not an accident. It is a weapon of attrition. Denial letters are infamously vaguely worded, confusing, and not helpful. The legal jargon is so challenging to comprehend that 90% of claimants who win at the hearing level have to have a lawyer. The system is designed to be so complex that you'll just abandon your claim or miss the appeal deadline. Your confusion is the intended outcome.
This creates the ultimate Catch-22: Too sick to work, not "sick enough" for benefits. This isn't just a feeling; it's a series of documented logical traps. The Still Working Trap: You have to keep working to survive the 2.1-year wait, but the SSA then uses Catch-22 logic to deny you, arguing that if you're still working, you can't possibly be disabled. The Unemployment Trap: You can't get unemployment benefits while you appeal, because unemployment requires you to be "ready and willing to work" (which directly contradicts your disability claim). The Benefits Cliff Trap: Even if you do get approved, you risk falling off the "Benefits Cliff." If you try to work part-time and earn even slightly above a certain income threshold, you can lose the essential Medicaid or SSI benefits you need to survive.
We are trapped. And this systemic gaslighting (You're not really sick) is a perfect mirror of the medical gaslighting so many of us have faced. It's the same invalidation. It's the doctor dismissing your pain as just anxiety or some psychiatric issue or a weight problem. It's the ER visit where they treat you like a drug seeker. It's the SSDI letter that discounts, doubts, and questions your suffering. Both are forms of dismissive medicine designed to protect the system, not the patient.
Radical Resilience: Exposing the Loop
This is where my philosophy of Radical Resilience comes in. It's not about meditating on a mountaintop. It's about seeing the battlefield clearly.
My wound is my superpower? Okay. My superpower is seeing this for what it is: an unsustainable burnout loop. The system demands robot behavior (masking) to get a job. This emotional labor and camouflaging is work. This work leads directly to emotional exhaustion. For someone with a chronic illness, that burnout directly exacerbates our physical symptoms. This leads to more absences, which leads to more subtle discrimination, which forces us to mask even harder to prove we're reliable.
This isn't resilience. This is survival mode. And survival mode is, by definition, unsustainable. It's a slow death by a thousand paper cuts.
Radical Resilience isn't about enduring this loop. It's about exposing it. It's about calling it what it is so we can build something new. This is the heart of Radical Unmasking: reclaiming ourselves by refusing to participate in the performance. And that means this isn't a problem we can positive-vibe our way out of. We need systemic, radical change.
A Way Forward: Ditching the Professionalism Theater
So let's start with coworkers. This is where it begins. Your help is not helpful if it's full of judgment. Stop the ableist microaggressions. Stop analyzing your coworker's patterns. Recognize that non-visible disabilities are real. When your disabled colleague calls out, they aren't "unreliable" or "faking it." They are sick. Believe them. Your simple, unconditional belief is a revolutionary act.
Now, let's talk to the bosses. And to be fair, let's look at it from your guys' side. I know why you demand the mask. You have a business to run! You've been taught that professionalism (the bubbly mask) is the foundation of a well-functioning environment that builds trust with colleagues. You believe this emotional labor is good for business because it increases customer satisfaction and loyalty. And you're worried about the law. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requires you to hold employees to essential job functions and performance standards. You know that a "reasonable accommodation" does not mean you have to excuse poor performance or lower a production standard.
So when I call out, you're legally trained to see a performance issue, not a medical disability. This is the source of the gaslighting. You think you're just "managing performance." We experience it as a total invalidation of our reality.
But here's the truth you're missing: Your entire business case for the mask is a bad, short-sighted, unprofitable strategy. You're right... forcing the mask does increase customer satisfaction in the short term. BUT that same mask leads directly to burnout and emotional exhaustion. AND that burnout is what costs your company $5.04 million and the global economy $1 trillion. Your robot mask isn't talent retention. It's the direct cause of talent loss.
You want a smarter business plan? Here it is. It's the Radical Resilience model. Ditch the professionalism theater and build a psychologically safe and inclusive culture. Offer real flexibility and remote work, which aren't perks but essential accommodations. This reduces burnout, which actually increases productivity and retention. This isn't charity. It's just a better P&L decision.
It's Time to Remember
And for everyone (all of us, regardless of disability status) we need to remember something fundamental: Life matters. Work is what we do to live, not the other way around. We've forgotten this. We've let capitalism convince us that our worth is measured by our productivity, our availability, our willingness to perform the mask without complaint. But you know what? Life freakin' matters! The relationships that sustain us matter. The health that allows us to experience joy matters. The rest that lets us be present for the people we love matters. All of it matters more than any deadline, any performance review, any quarterly goal.
We work to live. We do not live to work.
This should not be a radical statement. But in 2025, it feels revolutionary to say: your humanity is not a liability. Your limitations are not weaknesses. Your body's needs are not negotiable.
The workplace masking that my friend does (performing bubbly for HR while drowning inside) is the same mask I wear when I force myself to work through a migraine, terrified of disappointing yet another employer who will see my chronic illness as a pattern rather than a disability. And pretending is SO exhausting.
The mask is suffocating us. All of us. Whether you're disabled or not, whether you're neurodivergent or neurotypical, whether you're chronically ill or temporarily healthy... this system is breaking you too.
The only way out is to take the mask off. To refuse to pretend. To build workplaces, policies, and cultures that honor the messy, complicated, beautiful reality of being human.
Because at the end of the day, that's all any of us are: human beings trying to survive in a system that forgot we were human at all.
It's time to remember.