When "Good Girl" is The Mask

I grew up knowing how to be good.

Good daughter. Good student. Good friend. Good girl. The kind of good that blends in. That keeps the peace. That doesn’t take up too much space, but quietly excels. That reads the air and rearranges itself — even when no one asked. Especially when no one asked.

It took me years to understand that this kind of “good” wasn’t just about culture. It was also about being Autistic. I took a rule and ran with it like my life depended on it. That was actually the first thing my Dad said to me when I told him I found out I was Autistic. "But you're so good! You never gave us any trouble" Those two things — Asian-ness and autism — can tangle together in ways that make you invisible. Even to yourself.

Being good was my earliest special interest.

There’s a very particular kind of pressure in many Asian families and communities — spoken or not — to uphold the collective. To succeed. To sacrifice. To be useful. To make your people proud.

"Wah, you got 97 on your Maths test. Where's the 3% ah?" When you’re Autistic, that pressure can slip inside and become a blueprint. A script you study obsessively. A map you follow to the letter. "Don't cause any trouble ah girl"

We become so good at guessing what people want from us — and giving it — that our actual needs blur out of focus. We speak however the community needs us to. (Queen's English? No problem. Singlish? Oso no prorrem) We smile while we’re burning out. We learn to read cues without understanding the game.

No one sees the effort it takes. And often, we don’t either. Because when your culture already teaches you to self-efface and endure… Autistic masking doesn’t feel like masking. It just feels like being good, and it gets praised.

The cost of good

I was late-diagnosed. Like so many of us. I didn’t look autistic — not to teachers, or doctors, or even myself. I had empathy. I made eye contact. I was gifted. I made myself useful to others. But I also sat on my hands rather than stimmed, cried in bathrooms, preferred to stay at home and read rather than socialise and spent days recovering from "normal" social life. My friends were going out 3 times a week and I just couldn't keep up.

I thought that was normal. That the exhaustion, the shutdowns, the meltdowns behind closed doors — were just the price of being human. Or more precisely, of being a good human. I had no idea how everyone else was doing it without being totally, completely and utterly exhausted.

What I was really doing was contorting myself into acceptability. I was translating constantly. Filtering constantly, and calibrating who I needed to be.

You’re not broken. You were Autistic all along.

There’s grief in realising your strengths made your struggles invisible. There's relief in realising you were actually struggling. That you followed the rules and still ended up misread, and it wasn't just a you problem, but an Autistic vs neurotypicals communication difference.

That you spent years perfecting a version of yourself that other people could feel comfortable around, not realising what your own needs were.

There's a freedom in naming it. In realising that what looked like “too sensitive” or “too much” was actually just enough in the right environment. In unlearning the shame that told you regulation was rude, rest was selfish, or joy had to be earned.

And in finding other Asian neurodivergent folks who get it — who carry the same double-coded scripts so you know it's not just culture, who are also peeling off the layers of good, and learning what’s true.

If this is you…

If you’ve been called shy, quiet, intense, high-functioning, too polite, too dreamy, too rigid, too much or too little in any direction…

If you’ve bent yourself into “good” for so long you don’t know where the mask ends and you begin…

You’re not alone. And you’re not failing.

You could be Autistic. And Asian. And astonishingly resilient.

Here's to the start of being real and knowing ourselves as good too. About the Author Sandhya Menon is an Autistic/ADHDer Psychologist who grew up in Singapore and moved to Australia for university, where she now lives with her husband and children. She was identified in 2021, with ADHD being her first diagnosis. She is possibly gifted, but thanks no thanks to ADHD having failed a lot of secondary school subjects, she's still working through believing this. She can be found at: Instagram: www.instagram.com/onwardsandupwardspsych Facebook: www.facebook.com/onanduppsych LinkedIn: Sandhya Menon | LinkedIn