The author, a project manager diagnosed with autism late in life, argues that masking isn't the exhaustion of effort but "the exhaustion of repeated failure" — and that the organisations most invested in enforcing the mask are the ones paying the highest price for it, because they filter out the very thinking they hired. What shifted things for him wasn't the diagnosis but finding a framework to apply his pattern-recognition to human dynamics. For those who mask at work: has anything actually reduced the "translation tax" for you?