I just realized something I have been missing my entire adult life: I’m still the kid who holds it together all day and collapses the second he gets home.

I was listening to a podcast explaining why ADHD kids melt down after school—
not because they’re dramatic,
not because they’re disrespectful,
but because they spend the whole day suppressing who they are:
holding in their fidgets,
forcing attention,
trying not to be “too much,”
and white-knuckling their way through expectations that fry their nervous system.

And I thought:
That's still me.

A grown man.
A project manager.
A father of four.
Still burning through my mental bandwidth just trying not to overwhelm everyone around me.

Masking isn’t complicated.
It’s spending your entire day acting like you’re not neurodivergent.
It’s muting your intensity.
Lowering your volume.
Holding yourself still when every part of your body wants movement.
Monitoring every word so you don’t come off too blunt, too fast, too much.

You run two programs at once:
1. Do your job.
2. Don’t reveal how hard you’re working to do your job.

That second program drains you more than the first.

By 5 p.m., you’re out of fuel.
And that’s when the real job begins.

Here’s the part I never wanted to admit:
All day at work, I’m terrified someone is going to realize I’m faking my way through this.
My internal script is a loop:
“You’re not good at this. You’re getting away with it. Someone’s going to notice.”

So I mask harder.
Push quieter.
Try to look calm.

Then I walk through the door with nothing left—
and suddenly I’m facing another shame spiral:
I should be more patient. I should have more left for my family. Why can’t I get it together?

It’s a double hit:
You’re not “enough” at work,
and you’re not “calm enough” at home.

There’s only one time it feels easier:
when I’m doing something physical with my kids—basketball, wrestling, building something.
Because intensity becomes a way to connect, not something I have to cage.

It took me embarrassingly long to notice that I’ve been protecting myself without knowing it.

I’ve always lifted weights at lunch.
I told myself it was about staying in shape or reducing stress.
But what it actually is:
a controlled window where I don’t have to pretend.
I can be loud.
Aggressive.
Driven.
I can push weight, blast music, and let myself be the version of me I keep hidden for most of the day.

It’s dopamine.
It’s emotional pressure release.
And it’s why I don’t completely implode by evening.

I keep change in my pocket and roll it in my fingers.
I never questioned it.
Now I realize it’s self-regulation—a way to move in an environment that expects me to sit still.

I volunteer to go to jobsites instead of sitting in the open office where I feel trapped.
I walk across campus.
I check on a project.
Then I find a quiet place to work instead of returning to the chaos.
For years I thought I “just liked getting out.”
But what I was really doing was escaping environments where masking is required and slipping into ones where I can breathe.

These aren’t personality quirks.
They’re survival strategies.

Your brain can only white-knuckle it for so long before it crashes.
Breaking the mask—even briefly—keeps the system from frying.

You don’t have to be “your full self” everywhere.
You just can’t hide everywhere.

I’ve read plenty of advice about “re-entry buffers.”
Sit in your car.
Take ten minutes.
Breathe.
Decompress.

I’ve tried it.
Sometimes it helped.
Sometimes it made me feel like I didn’t want to see my family—which wasn’t true at all.

The problem was never my wife or kids.
The problem was that I pulled into the driveway already depleted, masking-hungover, and emotionally underfed.

Understanding masking changed the whole equation.

The solution isn’t building a wall between work and home.
It’s preventing the depletion before you walk through the door.

Find moments during the day where the mask can slip:
Walk between meetings.
Pace during a phone call.
Work behind a closed door instead of an open office.
Say the sentence most men are terrified to say:
“Give me five minutes to reset before we start.”

These aren’t luxuries.
They’re what keep you functional for the people who matter most.

If coming home feels harder than the workday, you're not failing.
You're masking.

The exhaustion is real.
The short fuse is real.
And that guilt you carry—
the feeling that you should be better—
that’s real too.

But you can’t change a pattern you won’t name.

Notice what you’re already doing to protect yourself.
Stop pretending you’re fine.
Stop treating depletion as a moral failure.

Your family doesn’t need a flawless father.
They need one who still has something left to give.

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