What Severance teaches us about masking at work
One thing I’ve learned in my years of coaching is just how powerful being seen is. So when I watched the show Severance I was stunned by just how much it made me feel validated.
So like a typical ADHDer I’m hyperfixating right now. I missed the boat on Severance on its season 1 release. I don’t think I even saw people talking about it at the time so it completely passed me by. Even season 2 release wasn’t on my radar. I remember people talking about it but people talk a lot about TV shows and it doesn’t mean they’re my cup of tea. I personally enjoy weird stuff. I just didn’t know that Severance was my kind of weird.
So when my partner suggested we sit down and give Severance a go I thought: why not? I liked Adam Scott in Parks and Recreation and we’d only got the Apple subscription for a month. It wasn’t until a few minutes into the first episode that I said: “Oh, it’s a sci fi.” I literally had no idea what I was getting myself into.
Fast forward two weeks (record time for me, I usually can’t sit still and watch a show very often) and we’ve seen the whole thing. I’m fully engrossed, watching interviews with the cast and crew, reading fanfic, trawling the Severance subreddits, and slowly making my way through the podcast because I don’t want it to end. It’s been a month now and I haven’t been able to watch another TV show since because I want to sit with the feeling of being totally in love with Severance a little longer.
Now of course, given my hyperfixation, I started posting about it online, starting with my personal social media and then mentioning it on my coaching page for the first time. I got so many enthusiastic responses and there was something else I noticed - all the people responding were neurodivergent (I do have some neurotypical friends!).
So I decided to mention it in one of my weekly emails, just talking about the joy of hyperfixating and encouraging anyone to reply if they wanted to feed my hyperfixation. And I was shocked at the responses I was getting. So many of my clients had seen and loved the show, and a good portion of us had been deeply affected by it as well.
Now I could go into what I love about the show because there is multiple essays worth of info dump available in my brain but I’m not sure that’s enjoyable to anyone but me, so instead I’m going to talk to you about one of the reasons I think this show resonates so much for those of us that are neurodivergent. So with that out of the way, let’s talk about how Severance works as an allegory to masking.
The rest of this blog post will be spoiler free.
The characters from Severance on the Severed Floor
What is Severance?
For those of you unfamiliar with Severance, the basic premise is that individuals who have undergone the severance procedure are basically two individuals sharing the same body, one of them using it during the working day, the other, who is the original, gets their body all the time they’re not at work. It’s a voluntary procedure, those who have elected to be severed do so willingly, and they are paid for their work like a normal employee.
They just don’t know anything about their work. They arrive in the morning, check in, deposit their personal items (no messages may be passed to their ‘innies’) and get into the elevator (lift, if you’re in the UK like me). As the elevator descends down to the Severed Floor, the implant in their brain is activated and the person that walks out is a different person. Same name (though they only get their first initial instead of their full surname), same body, different consciousness.
Much like the ‘outies’ who don’t know anything about who they are on the inside, the innies have no idea about who they are outside the walls of Lumon. They don’t know whether they have a family, what their hobbies are, whether that headache is something to be concerned about or just a hangover. All they know are the memories from their own existence, their time on the Severed floor.
Of course what makes speculative fiction so exciting is the questions it brings up about our current society and ways of living. Severance opens so many topics of conversation from identity, autonomy, consent, love, life under capitalism, the list goes on… But the one I want to talk about today is work-life balance.
The arguments for and against masking
We live in a society in which work is prioritised. We’re expected to be well-rested, to bring our best selves to our job. To commute to or arrange our lives around earning a living instead of earning a living in a way that fits around our lives, something that many neurodivergents struggle with. Now I’m not here to opine on whether that’s right or not, just observe how it affects us.
Because at the end of the day many of us are tired, depending on the work we do and how difficult the job is, but also depending on how much we have to mask.
I imagine most people visiting this blog already have familiarity with masking but in case not, the short version is that masking is the act of suppressing your neurodivergent traits in order to appear more neurotypical. It’s hiding your true self to better fit into a neurotypical world, and many of us don’t even realise we’re doing it. We grew up learning what behaviours were considered “weird” and learnt to cover them up, behaving in a way that’s more palatable.
Now I’m not anti-masking, although I don’t blame anyone who is, especially if you’ve only recently discovered you’re doing it, but I believe that masking is a tool. We mask because it makes it easier for us to exist in situations where neurodivergence would not be immediately accepted. In these situations you can do one of two things:
Make the situation more neurodivergent friendly
Mask to appear neurotypical
Which of these two options you take depends on a number of things. How much control you have over the situation, how much you trust the people involved, your personal safety (it’s not always safe to unmask in certain situations), but also your own energy.
Because masking is a trade off. You might mask for an interaction that you want to get through quickly, for example collecting information from someone, especially if it’s someone you are unlikely to need to interact with very often in the future. In this case, the amount of energy you would need to invest to make the interaction more neurodivergent friendly (changing the location, explaining to the other person, bringing a fidget with you) might be higher than the energy cost of just masking for a few minutes to get through the interaction, get what you need and get on with your day.
We regularly make these optimisation decisions in our lives, code switching according to the circumstances we find ourselves in. But masking is a special kind of code switching because it suppresses so much of our natural tendencies and replaces them with something we’ll never be: neurotypical. And the energy needed to be someone you’re not is not free. For some people the cost can be incredibly high.
I guess this image is meant to make a point that some people can be so masked they’re like a completely different person? I don’t know, just trying to break up the text.
How Severance works as an allegory for masking
So when I link this back to Severance, I can see how the Severance procedure is like the concept of masking, but taking it to the extreme.
You go into work and you behave as though you’re a different (neurotypical) person. You do what you need to get the job done without really feeling connected to the true self you are outside of work. At the end of the day you leave the office exhausted, your mind and body running on full power all day but you weren’t yourself there.
Of course it’s not quite the same as masking. It’s not like you forget about your neurodivergent self when you’re masking and vice versa, but that feeling of living a double life at home versus work is something that many neurodivergents relate too.
Before my own discovery and later diagnosis, I used to joke that there were two sides to me: The one who played classical piano, led projects and cycled to work, and the one that played punk guitar and did prowrestling on the weekends for fun. That’s not to say that classical piano and cycling to work were masking, just that those were seen as more corporate-safe hobbies, so those were the ones I spoke most about at work.
But masking isn’t just about omitting some of your hobbies when talking about the weekend. It’s also thing like pretending the fluorescent lights don’t bother you, or that it’s not like nails on a chalkboard every time the person at the end of the row sniffs. It’s about forcing yourself to attend the sales call then having a panic attack in the bathroom afterwards. Depending on the severity of your symptoms and the environment you find yourself in, being neurodivergent at work can be incredibly difficult.
Do you ever think of yourself having a little worker in your brain? You are now!
Would you undergo Severance?
In episode one of Severance it’s established that Adam Scott’s character Mark undergoes the severance procedure due to struggling to cope with grief. His decision means that for eight hours a day at work he doesn’t have to be consumed by it anymore. And I’m sure many of us that have been through grief can completely empathise with how he came to that decision.
But for someone struggling with work due to their neurodivergence, severance could also be a valid option. If your mental health is damaged by the work environment, why not just opt out of it? Collect the money but send someone else in instead.
Of course there are a tun of ethical questions to consider here and empathy for the ‘innie’ is one of the themes of the show. But let’s say that wasn’t an issue here, you could just go into work and then the next thing you know it’s eight hours later and you’re going home with the knowledge your bank account just got richer. Would you do it? Why or why not?
If this resonates with you and feel you would be interested in talking to an adhd and neurodivergent-friendly leadership coach, feel free to get in touch. If you’re looking for more blog posts, you can find them here.
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