Unmasking

Most masking does not look like a disguise. It can be as ordinary as agreeing to dinner with a friend when you can barely speak. At work, it may mean staying quiet after a cruel joke because the person who made it can damage your career.

The performance is often rewarded. That is what makes it hard to stop.

In Unmasking: What We Lose by Pretending—and How We Get It Back, Essy Knopf examines how people learn to hide their needs in exchange for approval. Boaz, an autistic bank teller, cannot bring himself to send an honest text to a friend. Elsewhere, Noura, a Muslim surgical resident, stops praying at work after a senior doctor mocks her. Neither thinks of this as self-erasure. They are trying to stay safe.

Knopf draws on psychology and sociology to show why these choices can become automatic. He also turns to the lives of Pauli Murray, Judith Heumann, Jazz Jennings, and Alice Wong, who paid a price for refusing the roles assigned to them. Throughout, he considers what constant self-monitoring does to the body and to our closest relationships.

But if disclosure can threaten a job or relationship, and visibility can attract punishment, is fearless self-exposure really the solution?

Unmasking is part psychology, part cultural critique, and part manifesto for wholeness. It asks readers to remember who they were before the world told them to hide—and to decide for themselves where it is safe to be known.