Life in Paper Mache
The creative non-fiction essay below is based on my experience of masking as an autistic girl / woman. It was longlisted in the 2026 Creative Future Writers' Award. Huge congratulations to all of the winners and shortlistees!
Life in Paper Mache
My true self lives in a huge library.
There are shelves of books from all over the world – and beyond. It is musty. Dark. Quiet.
No other humans are there. Just me. Ink is blotted on my fingertips, and I’m wrapped in the scent of old paper as I move through faraway fantasy worlds, vicariously living hundreds of different lives from the comfort of my squashy reading chair.
I’ve had other obsessions: animals; outer space; natural disasters; to name a few. Literature was the obsession that never deserted me: no matter how much I neglected it.
When I was small, my true self moved through the real world: even when the real world made it clear she was unwelcome. No one wanted to hear about the hunting habits of cheetahs. No one thought it was a good use of time to pace around a room for hours. No one found it cute when little girls spoke their unfiltered thoughts.
I stumbled through a confusing and incomprehensible world. Everything was loud: even the smells.
I understood nature, science, and the written word. My intelligent and hungry mind consumed their laws and patterns.
Humans
were different. I didn’t know why they stared into my eyeballs as they spoke. I didn’t know people could say one thing and mean something else. I didn’t know others exaggerated, or kept secrets, or had ulterior motives. I was always open with my own emotions and communication, because it didn’t occur to me that I shouldn’t be.
I was speaking a different language to everyone around me. I could hold a basic conversation. But nuance, and hidden meanings, and facial expressions were lost in translation.
Of course, I couldn’t describe it this way at the time. But my lungs constrict and try to crawl out of my body each time I think back to my early years: the times I misunderstood instructions and was punished; the bullying from all directions because I was ‘weird’; the times when I was rude to others, when that was far from my intention.
I had no true friends in primary school. A few pretended to be my friend when they wanted something from me, but I didn’t understand the difference back then.
None of the teachers noticed. I was smart, and good at my schoolwork, and I wasn’t disruptive. Or male. So, what did it matter if I was isolated and miserable?
My parents noticed, but they didn’t know the word ‘autism’ then.
Books and stories were my refuge.
When I was ten years old, my father died of stomach cancer.
My own personal natural disaster crashed through my library, hurling books from the shelves, fracturing the parquet floor into tectonic plates, and smashing all the reading lights to stardust.
I was curled in the darkness under a collapsed bookcase, staring – numb – at the fallen rolling ladder, and the torn pages settling around me like snow. Dust coated my mouth and nose. A book on planets was splayed open at my feet, as though mortally wounded. The page showed Jupiter’s violent red and orange stripes.
No friends. No library. No Daddy.
If I could study distant spheres of rock and gas, then surely I could study the people around me?
I remember the exact moment this realisation hit me. Though I did not ‘see’ it at the time, that was when the first strip of paper mache drifted through the gaping hole in my library’s ceiling and floated down to the floor by my feet.
I emerged – blinking and coughing – from the shell of my sanctuary, with that strip of paper mache cradled in my fingers.
I watched the people around me like an owl. I correlated emotions and facial expressions. I searched for the hidden meanings. I looked for disapproving comments and gestures, which told me when my behaviour or speech were unacceptable. I recall the exact moment I realised – so powerful that I slumped onto the grass in the school playground – that girls were supposed to be polite and helpful.
As I made each small epiphany, another piece of paper mache appeared in my hand.
In the evenings, I glued the strips of fibre and added them to my face. I inspected my growing mask in the mirror: moving my eyes and muscles in the expected ways; rehearsing conversations; and drawing facial features on the freshly dried material.
Then I would pace for hours, deepening the worn track in the threadbare carpet.
It was a slow process.
Gradually, I made my first couple of friends. The mask-building sped up, as my new friends were quick to let me know what I should like, what I shouldn’t like, and how I should dress. No more talk of the oceans or stars. Talk about boys, instead.
I gained more friends. I could navigate different social situations. I piled on the politeness and helpfulness and perfectionism. I smiled through the pain of sensory stimuli that raked across my brain: holding it in until I could make it home and pace my familiar circle of carpet.
Occasionally, I peeled off the mask and wandered into my frozen, disused library. I sat among the rubble from time to time and picked up a book, or perched at the rotten writing desk to compose part of a story that I would never finish. I lifted some of the toppled bookshelves back into place.
But the biting cold reached through the cracks in the outer walls, stealing the warmth and joy. I would remember that I wasn’t supposed to like stories. I would become dismayed, creep back out of the room, and re-apply my mask.
By my late teens, the mask covered every part of my face. It was beautifully shaped and painted, like a volto mask from a masquerade ball. It had a built-in voice modulator with rehearsed scripts for hundreds of different social scenarios. It said and did the correct things, and moved in the correct ways.
I had friends. I had glowing school work. My mask helped me navigate higher level exams and university. All the while, it grew more sophisticated. The details and patterns were more intricate. More social protocols were saved in its memory bank. I worked out that I could pick my skin instead of pacing to release tension; it took less time, and was easier to hide.
I left a high-ranking university with a first-class honours degree, a ‘good’ graduate job, and a suitcase of anxiety and depression.
My abandoned library fell further into squalor.
My mask was immaculate – or so I thought. It was seamlessly contoured to my face, and I congratulated myself on its design and its effectiveness at hiding my true self. I kept it beside my phone, and glued it to my skin the moment I woke up.
However, the cracks and imperfections – which had always been there – were lurking within the layers of hardened fibres. The mask was inflexible, heavy and suffocating. It was a poor imitation which subconsciously signalled its presence to others, while hiding the struggles of the flesh-and-blood person underneath.
I spent decades building my mask, and yet its surface disintegrates as easily as book pages in a rainstorm: the many times I have said or done the wrong thing; the way the voice modulator fails when faced with the stressful or unexpected; the delayed auditory processing, which my mask has never been able to hide.
Part of donning my mask involves following the social conventions which imprison adult women. I reflexively bow to the expectations of my gender before I’m aware that I’m stepping out of the way, or making myself small and agreeable, or apologising for every perceived misstep.
Society expected me to find a partner and get married. Society expected me to bear children. My masked self desperately wanted to be a mother.
How much of my adult life has been guided by the mask, rather than by me?
It wasn’t until I had my two beautiful boys that I began to suspect the truth.
My children’s innocent newborn eyes immediately found my mask, and they dug their little fingernails under the edges and tried to prise it from my face to better see their mummy.
Every screech. Every leaking nappy. Every day spent with them following me and climbing all over me and yelling in my ears. They destroyed the rigid routines that were essential to my staying grounded. The exhaustion of wearing and maintaining my mask was multiplied by sleepless nights and endless days of always having to be present for others.
My skin looked like the cratered surface of Mercury. I had daily meltdowns. I stopped reading and writing.
My mask is both helpful and harmful.
My mask is the reason I have a loving family and a stable home. I’m also lucky that I had the option to build a mask in the first place. There are many autistic people for whom that is not a possibility, and it nearly wasn’t for me. It haunts me that I may never have had the realisation about studying other people if it hadn’t been for my father’s death. And yet, if I had to choose between the mask or my dad, I know which one I would pick.
My mask hid my struggles so effectively that no one knew I was autistic – myself included. Without my mask, maybe someone would have eventually noticed. Maybe I would have understood how and why I was different, instead of spending decades telling myself it was my fault and that I was defective.
I’m not sure I even know how to unmask anymore. I no longer know who my true self is. My mask is so firmly wedged onto my face that I don’t know where the boundary between paper and flesh lies. The strands of masticated fibres will always stick to my skin.
However, I know my true self is in there. She hides in her world of books and darkened furniture, surrounded by nature encyclopaedias and studies of Pompeii. I think she is honest, empathetic, peaceful, moral, studious, and a little rebellious. But the truth is that I no longer know for sure.
I cannot fully unmask yet – if ever. But I’m chipping away at its glossy paint. Occasionally, I peel away a corner to see what it’s like to feel the breeze on my cheek. To see how people react to the glimpse of bare skin.
My older self has returned to the library. She is reading voraciously again. She is writing again: as she was always meant to. She is repairing the broken shelves, and taping the books back together, and sweeping up the dust and rubble. She has replaced the windows, and made cosy nooks on the windowledges with oversized sage-green cushions.
She is kinder to herself. She is learning about the facets of her autism, and embracing them. She no longer apologises for her rigid routines, careful planning, and hatred of parties. She permits herself to withdraw from society when she needs to: to remove the mask, and breathe freely. She explains to her sons why their mum sometimes needs space, and why she sometimes has meltdowns, and why they can’t monologue about Minecraft for too long before her brain fizzes out.
And one day, maybe my true self will feel brave and strong enough to creep back into the library’s central atrium. Maybe the little girl will spy her older self at her writing desk, furiously typing her next novel, with a coffee on her left side, and her sweets – arranged in colour-coded piles – on her right.
Maybe the older woman will hear the shuffle of shy feet behind her. She will look around, and spot the little girl with wild brown hair – she doesn’t like it brushed – and a pile of books under her arm. She will reach out to the girl, lift her onto her lap, and wrap her in a hug.
Written by Claire Bentley (April 2026)
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Disclaimer: generative AI
I do not use generative AI to produce or inform my blog, my images, or my fiction. All of my content is generated by the chaotic firing of my own (human) brain! (I have access to some stock images through my Wix subscription). I do not consent to the use of my content, images, or fiction to train generative AI models. Please contact me to discuss permission and compensation if you wish to use my content in this way.
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