Ep 16: AuDHD Experience - Masking, Burnout & Unmasking in ADHD, Autism & AuDHD

🎙️ Episode 16: AuDHD in the Real World - Masking, Burnout & Unmasking

Episode Summary

In this episode of the AuDHD Psych Podcast, Aaron Howearth unpacks masking and camouflaging as neurodivergent survival strategies. He explains how autistic and ADHD people learn conscious and unconscious ways of “passing” as typical, such as practised eye contact, softened honesty, and scripted conversations, often long before they have words for their neurodivergence. Aaron explores how this constant self‑monitoring and suppression of stims, emotions, and sensory needs drains cognitive and emotional energy, contributing to exhaustion, low social battery, and executive functioning crashes. He also touches on late diagnosis, identity confusion, and grief around not knowing “where the mask ends and I begin.” Throughout, he reframes “disorder” as a mismatch between neurodivergent needs and environmental demands, normalises collapse after masking‑heavy days, and invites listeners to compare one high‑cost masking context with one low‑mask or safe environment.

Key Themes & Takeaways

• What Masking Is – Compensatory behaviours neurodivergent people use to meet typical social, sensory, and behavioural expectations and to “pass” as non‑neurodivergent.
• Conscious vs Unconscious Masking – Habits like practised eye contact versus deliberate strategies such as softening blunt corrections or scripting conversations.
• Cognitive Load & Exhaustion – Self‑monitoring, impulse suppression, and managing tone, face, and stims consume working memory and lead to exhaustion and executive crashes.
• Sensory & Stim Suppression – Hiding stims and enduring uncomfortable environments increase stress and reduce emotional and cognitive capacity.
• Identity & Imposter Feelings – Long‑term masking can blur the line between self and performance, fuelling imposter syndrome and grief about “who I could have been.”
• Masking as Safety Behaviour – Framed as a survival strategy to avoid stigma and rejection, even while it can worsen mental health over time.
• Mismatch, Not Defectiveness – “Disorder” is located in the mismatch between neurodivergent traits and environmental expectations, not in personal failure.
• High‑ vs Low‑Cost Contexts – Listeners are invited to notice where masking is most draining versus where they can be more authentic and safe.
• Reframing Collapse – Post‑social collapse and burnout are described as the result of prolonged effort in non‑accommodating spaces, not weakness.
• Community & Normalisation – Competence collapse, grief, and confusion are positioned as common, shared neurodivergent experiences rather than individual defects.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Potty potty potty potty, potty, potty, potty, potty, potty, potty, potty, potty, pod podcast. Potty, potty, potty, potty, potty, potty, potty, potty, potty, potty, potty, potty pod podcast. We love an audio, Stim, and self-acceptance. It's the Audi HD Psych Podcast. What if the reason you're so exhausted is not that you're failing at life, but actually that you've been working three times as hard as the average person for years to feel safe. Hi friends, welcome back to the Audi HD Psych Podcast. I'm Aaron Howell, Clinical Psychologist, and we are different, not defective. This week we're going to talk about masking, camouflaging, burnout, and mental health. So before we crack on, I just need to let you guys know this is an educational podcast. It's not therapy and it's not personalized advice. If you do have difficulties, please seek out an affirming clinician in your area. And if you are an affirming clinician, please contact us with your details. We'd like to start up a list of affirming clinicians for people to be able to log into and find somebody who understands that we are different, not defective. So this week we're going to have a talk about, as discussed, burnout masking, burnout, mental health. We'll give a bit of a definition of masking. We will have a conversation around why people do it. Drawing from the current research, we'll touch on burnout and mental health, and then we'll finish up with a bit of a chat around how to think about unmasking safely. We don't want to perpetuate fantasies about unmasking being an easy thing. We don't want to perpetuate fantasies about it being appropriate in all contexts because it's just not. It serves a purpose for us. So, a definition of masking. Very broadly, masking is a series of behaviors and compensatory strategies that we apply as neurodivergent people in social settings, in our behavior, in our sensory adjustments, and managing our identity and just broadly fitting in. Masking itself is the behavior or the process that we go through to try and meet typical expectations, typical standards. Because often we've learned that our neurodivergent characteristics are not socially acceptable, so we learn to cover them up and try and pass as typical. What are some common misunderstandings about masking? Well, first of all, masking isn't necessarily a conscious thing. It can be conscious or unconscious. So for example, I when I reflected on my own experience, I realized that I have no issue making eye contact now. But if I'm thinking deeply, there's something so intimately vulnerable about that for me, I find it really difficult to look people in the eye. When I reflected on that, I remembered back to being a child and actually being told that if I didn't look people in the eye, I looked like a liar. Or when I didn't look people in the eye, they assumed that I was lying or being dishonest. And I I actively and effortfully made the point of making eye contact. I've done that for so long at 51 years old that now it's simply an unconscious thing that I do. I actively make eye contact. At some point I've learnt what an appropriate length of time is before glancing away and then glancing back. But that is an unconscious form of masking that I do. It's not my natural. I don't really feel the need to look you in the eye unless I need some bit of information back from looking at you. So conscious masking, on the other hand, is uh, and I guess this is a really simple example for me. I had a complaint made against me while I was in the Navy. Somebody was presenting some training to trainers, and some of the information that they gave was just flat incorrect. So I raised that, and the person argued their point, and based in my experience, I argued against what they were saying. Now it didn't come across well. I basically argued with that person and I embarrassed them in front of their peers. I had a complaint made. I went to a trusted friend and asked them about their perspective on the situation, and my friend said, yeah, I was really abrupt and rude. That wasn't my intention. My intention actually was to correct an incorrect fact, but the person defended their fact, so I defended my position and it came across really poorly. What I learned from that was I can't be the purest form of myself without social and professional repercussions. I later had somebody say to me after I'd apologized to that person, Oh, I'm really happy that you did that. And my response was I didn't do it to please people, I did it because I understood that I'd caused harm to somebody, that that person had been offended. But that's always in the back of my mind now. When I find myself being frustrated by incorrect facts, I now really have to moderate and mediate my response to that and not just go, you're wrong, but actually go. I don't think that's correct. And that's an effortful affectation. I'm deliberately pacing the way I respond to that, even though my go-to is to quickly highlight it, identify the incorrectness, and then move on. So that's a form of conscious masking, and that's a really, it's not a high stakes form. However, for many, many, many neurodivergent people, we experience social exclusion because we're impulsive as Audi HD is, we've got those ADHD impulsivity characteristics, we can be emotionally impulsive, and we learn to mask that, to hold those impulses in, to shut those emotions down. And so we walk around kind of not being a true version of ourselves. Pardon me. That takes energy, that takes cognitive load, and we know that neurodevelopmental differences like autism, ADHD, learning differences come with differences in the way our brains function. So differences in our application of our cognitive skills. If I'm tying up my working memory and the amount of information that I can process with not reacting emotionally, or not having resting bitch face, or I've said it before, mine is more resting vapid face because there's nothing going on on my face when I'm thinking deeply. I'm monitoring that on my tone. That's taking up my ability to fill my working memory with new learning in a learning environment, with completing the task at hand in a professional environment. It has significant impacts on us. But when we mask, we're never just masking in one domain. We'll be masking at work or at study. If we're trying to apply atypical cognitive resources in a typical setting, when we're in social settings, we're maybe trying to manage our workload plus also interacting in the appropriate social way. It's unsurprising that by the time I get home in the evening, I'm just exhausted from those social interactions. When we talk about having a low social battery or low spoons, it's effectively what we're talking about. Our capacity to fake passing as typical when that's not actually who we are and it costs us energy. I ran out of spoons or my social battery runs low, and I get home and my executive functioning, the language that we commonly use, my executive functioning is disf uh is dysfunctioning or is poor. And I struggle to decide on something for dinner because I've put so much cognitive energy into masking all day long. So, what can masking look like? It can look like mimicry. I can copy what other people do, I can do things in the same way as other people to ensure that I fit in and don't get excluded from the group. It's scripting, you know, I've shared in the past. I have the same skeleton of a conversation when I meet new people in social events. And it always starts with asking the person what they do for a living. If I have some interest or connection to that, I share that, and then I ask them perhaps what they like about that role. And it puts the conversational onus back on them, and then I don't have to carry the burden of that conversation. And then hopefully I actually have a bit of a connection with them, and then it's much easier. But I don't know how to start a conversation without that script. Scripting is a really common masking tool that we use. Making eye contact, as I mentioned before, many of us it's not natural for us to make eye contact, it's not a go-to for us. So doing it is effortful and it feels vulnerable for a lot of people on all occasions. Where for me it's mainly when I'm thinking deeply. Some of you may have noticed that I stim with my eyebrows. We often suppress our natural stims. Whether they are stims in the autistic sense of those repetitive behaviors, or whether it's an ADHD energy-based, you know, fidgeting, bouncing my legs, suppressing those costs us attention and concentration, and mental energy broadly, which reduces our emotional and cognitive resources. We can also be holding in our responses to sensory sensitivities. If I don't handle bright light well and I have to go and work in a bright office or a bright classroom, just being there can be a form of masking. I'm applying and expending energy to fit into a typical world that's not my natural or my go-to. And that constant self-monitoring. You know, I mentioned I responded to incorrect facts in a quite a blunt and somewhat abrasive way, I understand. And so now I monitor my responses. There's always a part of my brain tied up with how's my posture right now? What's my face doing? Did that response come across the way I intended it? And so many of us, certainly in my clinical practice and my personal world, we do a lot of that second guessing. Some of us it becomes almost that unconscious work that we don't realize is actually tying up our cognitive resources, but it still does. And that causes us stress. And that's less resources that we have to apply to difficulties in our life day to day. So back to why do we do it? It's strongly tied to stigma around neurodivergent characteristics. I would argue misunderstandings that lead to stigma, the misunderstanding that our characteristics are disordered, rather than disorder being born in the mismatch between my characteristic and the environmental demands or expectations. But when I'm told I'm disordered, I want to fit in. We are mammals, we've survived as a species by fitting in with the group. So we cover up those things that are deemed unseemly or unsociable or antisocial that costs us energy, but it makes us feel safe right now. Unfortunately, long term, it contributes to increased stress, anxiety, depression, and in certain contexts, safety-related concerns like suicidality and self-harm. So, a quick check-in. Masking is not the opposite of neurodivergence. It's not the absence of neurodivergence. It's actually often what it looks like for neurodivergent people to exist. One of the quotes that I took from a research article from a participant who'd given their lived experience was masking is life. For that person, every element of their experience involved masking. And that can only take up an absurd amount of energy that we're not putting into our own well-being and health. So I guess what's the next thing I want to talk about? I'm so glad you asked. Um, again, lived experience, and now just touching on late diagnosis and the identity concerns that can come up out of that. You know, I've seen people make comments on our social media, and I've seen it in my personal world and in some articles that I've read as well, where, and if I summarize all of those into one kind of idea, it's sorry, that sound is a beautiful dog beside me, yeah, scratching. There's your girl. So if I could distill all of those comments into a single idea, it's where does the mask end and I begin? A lot of people have spent so long masking who they truly are to fit into a typical world, there becomes a confusion between who I actually am, the core characteristics of me, and the affected mask that I put on to feel safe in social settings around other humans in a typical environment and world. Pardon me, it's a high cost, it's a high emotional cost. So many of us have we feel like big faky fakers. We have that kind of imposter syndrome, is the language that I've often used myself and that I've heard a lot. We spend so long being a version of ourselves to try and feel safe and fit in with the typical community that we start to think of ourselves as impostors. We start to feel like impostors. And if that's the case, and I've never had a chance to really express myself, perhaps since I was very young, it's understandable that people who are late diagnosed then come across the idea of masking, would go, well, which parts are actually me and which parts are not? Which parts of this mask, this safety behavior? Oh, I beg your pardon. So some really key things to consider in the lived experience of masking for many, many neurodivergent people is just that exhaustion that I started uh the discussion with. It costs us energy, cognitive energy, emotional energy, physical energy in a in a very real sense to constantly try to be a version of ourselves that keeps us feeling safe. We can become hyper-vigilant to any chance of us being clocked as neurodivergent, for us being to us being rejected, to us doing the wrong thing in air quotes. And that can lead to a real disconnection from who I am, what are my core values, who am I at the core of me. And when I have a late life diagnosis, some people experience a very real grief about the loss of who they could have been, about the loss of who they could have been, not only if they'd never had to mask, but also if they'd known about their neurodivergence earlier. Late diagnosis can give people a real opportunity to reinterpret their life through that lens of performance and masking to try and protect ourselves. And that's what masking is, when it's boiled right down to it. Masking is my attempts to feel safe and be accepted by the group around me because the typical community is the powerful group. They're the, and I quote, normal group. And those who are in the majority generally have the power in societies. There's also an idea of a double bind, and that's that, you know, I referred to masking as safety behavior before. And that's the idea that it keeps me safe right now, but long term it actually has negative impacts on my health and well-being. So I might cover up my eyebrow stim. And right now, it means that I don't worry about you seeing it and thinking I'm some kind of weirdo, I think that's a good word, but nonetheless, some kind of weirdo as an insult and drawing away from me. But it's effortful for me not to do that. And then if I'm suppressing that stim, but also suppressing the effort to respond directly and honestly, uh, it increases my stress levels. It can increase my anxiety about being, and I quote, caught out, being clocked as a neurodivergent person with these what an average person might think are unsavory characteristics or awkward or odd characteristics. And that actually causes me harm in the long term. You know, we know that the stress hormones have significant impacts on our body, and long term, the experience of anxiety can lead to irrital bowel type characteristics. My constant heightened heart rate probably can contribute to heart conditions, so on and so forth, physical stress. So that double bind is I am being kind of harmed and stressed by not being noticed, but then I'm also fearing the harm of being noticed. My masking protects me in the right now, but it also harms me in the long term. So sometimes the confusion when we do start to understand ourselves through the lens of neurodiversion and masking is not so much who am I really? Because we are ourselves. Even that masked version of us is an expression of our shield to keep us safe. Perhaps a better question is how much energy have I expressed to try and keep myself safe? How much have the environmental expectations of typicality cost me in trying to meet those expectations? So not so much who am I really, but how much of me had to become a mask for me to be able to survive and feel safe in the world? Touching on burnout, depression, and suicidality, I guess, actually, just before I do that, I guess I'll touch back into late-life diagnosis. You know, I do argue or try to speak from a really balanced perspective, and masking can be really harmful. And uh long term we do see that it is linked to some uh well-being difficulties. But it can also be helpful. It does actually keep us fitting in the workplace, it keeps us earning the monies when we're not uh constantly being performance appraised for behaviors that other people assume have an intent that is not necessarily our intent. It keeps us feeling safe in just not being clocked as other and then that fear of rejection coming up. But also sometimes we can actually apply it in really deliberate ways that serve us. I think when I consider masking and whether it's helpful or harmful, it really is how much energy am I putting into the mask and what are the benefits I'm getting back for it? You know, I'm quite happy to mask some of my more blunt responses in the workplace because it means that I get to have my practice and my business and I get to enjoy working with the really lovely, amazing humans that I get to work with. It's a great privilege there. So there is a cost-benefit analysis in everything in life, but the problem with masking in a neurodivergent sense is it's rarely ever just these things that I choose to engage in that serve me more than they cost me. Usually we're masking across all domains of life and across all areas of our experience, our behavior, the way we think, our thinking style, our social interactions, and often there the costs far outweigh the benefits. So now moving on to burnout and those health, well-being, and safety considerations. Now I don't want to imply in any way that masking equals suicidality or self-harm, but it is a very real risk. There's some good research out there that shows that our experience of burnout from various things, including masking, actually mediates the risk of mental health and suicidality risks. Masking has been shown to be associated with anxiety, depression, a lower sense of self, self-esteem, and self-concept, and a lower sense of me being an authentic person, being a big faky faker. But also associated masking has been associated with trauma-related variables. And we can probably all see how if I have a complex trauma history of exclusion and feeling unsafe because I'm socially rejected or bullied because I'm different, that's going to lead me to want to protect myself and mask all of those characteristics that I've been bullied for or that I've experienced negative feedback for. And so that trauma and stressor history probably leads directly to masking, which maintains my anxiety about being clocked as neurodivergent or for my characteristics and continues to increase my stress long term. So social camouflaging, masking, and burnout are positively associated, they're correlated, with depression and with burnout exhaustion. And that burnout exhaustion may mediate the link between camouflaging and depression. So I mask, I do all of the cognitive energy and emotional energy and put that into masking. That leads me to burnout and exhaustion. And that burnout and exhaustion contributes to depression. Some lived experience, qualitative work, links masking to suicidal ideation. Serious difficulty, though it's not a causal attribution that masking leads to suicidal ideation. It's just there is a correlation there in some of the qualitative research where people share the lived experience. So the cost of masking, the cost of fitting in, can show up later as exhaustion, burnout, neurodivergent burnout, and then all of the flow on mental health difficulties. When I hit burnout, I struggle to manage my emotions even more. In an Audi HD context, I might have ADHDs emotional impulsivity. It's harder for me to manage that than it is normally because I'm burnt out and I don't have the energy to give anymore. I've probably been giving a lot in masking at work, in my relationships, social and intimate, managing my home. And then when I burn out, I have those real well-being and safety-related concerns through mood, my understanding of myself, my self-concept, and through my broader well-being. So I guess we're getting to the point where I'll talk about unmasking and doing it safely and not recklessly. There's, you know, we we have these very Hollywood ideas of fairy tales and things done perfectly and smoothly. It's like the queer coming out fallacies. And unmasking is very much akin to the coming out slash inviting in process in the queer community, in that it's a process of us starting to accept and understand ourselves and take away, peel away those layers of extra work that we're putting into fitting into the typical society because I start to recognize that I am different, not defective, and therefore I can stim with my eyebrows and let that be when I'm talking to people. And feel safe doing that. That's the biggest important caveat there. We unmask where it feels safe because. Because masking is a safety behavior. It's something that we do to fit in and avoid exclusion and rejection and to meet typical expectations in the environment. So the process of unmasking has to be done in places where we can feel safe. If I'm around my bullies, that's not the best place for me to unmask because it's going to lead to really significant difficulties for me. However, if I'm in a workplace that maybe I have the same communication style as the people around me, so they're maybe neurodivergent too, that might be a safe place for me to allow myself to stim a little bit more, to play with my squeezy cat toy, to tap my feet, to bounce my eyebrows. That may be a safe place to start unmasking. And when I'm around my close friends and my family and partner, maybe that's a time to have a consent conversation with them and say, I'm just gonna actually start not self-sacrificing, not masking my natural responses because it costs me a lot of energy and I'd like home to be a restorative place for me. But please know that if I just give you a quick abrupt response, it's about me and my energy levels right now and where I am at, and just that I don't think I need to smile to still love you and give you a response. So it's not about you, it's just about my natural response. Having a conversation where we invite consent and are then able to let go of some of those energy-draining masking behaviors can actually be really constructive for us. We can maintain our sense of safety, but also reduce our risk of exhaustion and burnout, and then anxiety, depression, increased self-concept difficulties, and potentially safety-related issues. So, context matters. Um, you know, most people tend to unmask more at home because it's usually my safer space. Um, for some people, it's in their bedroom, even in the home. Some people can unmask a little bit more at work. If you are somebody who runs or owns a workplace, try to be more affirming. We can actually say to people, use your stim toys at meetings, get up and walk around if you need to to help your attention stay on task. Don't feel the need to be sugarcoating everything. If you're blunt and direct, let us know that. Explain that to us, and then we won't expect you to meet the typical social expectations, provided you're not being rude and harmful. You know, we can have accommodations like that. We can accommodate sensory differences, light and sound. In healthcare settings, please, clinicians, be aware of how much masking costs people. Sometimes we'll have neurodivergent people who come in who will mask things like, my ADHD didn't let me get the homework done, so I'll tell you that I got it done. And then I spend the next 15 minutes pretending I know what you're talking about when you're talking about the homework task that you gave me that I ADHD'd all over and didn't get done. In healthcare, being affirming. CBT can be difficult for some neurodivergent people, so we adapt it to that person and their capacities like we do in therapy to every individual. Family often we can unmask a little bit more about family, but we often mask up in public spaces where we don't know and trust the people and we don't feel safe there. Pacing my unmasking matters. To just suddenly try to drop all of my masks is going to have very sudden impacts on the people around me and myself. It's probably going to be overwhelming for me. And if I'm having social pushback from people at work, at school, in social settings, and in public, that's going to become really overwhelming for me and reinforce those safety fears that have triggered my masking. Boundaries matter. Unmasking is not about full self-exposure to everybody, it's about sharing those parts of my neurodivergent characteristics that I feel safe sharing in specific contexts where I choose to. The unmasking process is a choice and it needs to be agentic. If we feel pushed into it, it's likely to be really stressful for us. And regulation matters. Try reducing one layer of performance where a support exists. So where my manager says to me, okay, you can just be direct and what we call abrupt, I don't care because I understand that you're not being rude, just do it one at a time. Build up our confidence with that and don't do it in the hardest environment first. You know, if you have to give a lot of presentations or meet a lot of people in perhaps a hospitality career, maybe unmasking something that has kept you feeling safe for many, many years. Dropping that mask, dropping that covering of my directness if I'm in a sales job or a hospitality job, that's probably not the right place to start for us. It may result in a lot of pushback from the people around us. We may even lose our job or something like that. We may not if it's a great workplace, but it is really appropriate to do it where I can manage my emotional response and my sense of safety. So, what are some things we can say to ourselves when it comes to masking, unmasking, and making decisions around that? I guess my I always talk about cost-benefit analysis. Analysis, analysis, cost-benefit analysis. Where is masking costing me the most? And then in addition to that, for the least benefit, if I've got five places where it's costing me eight out of ten um energy points in masking, but in one of them I'm getting 10 out of 10 points back, arguably that extra two is worth the effort for me. But if it's costing me eight and I'm only getting two back, they're probably good places to consider how and when can I unmask, or at least in some ways, and recoup that energy that's currently going into this uh this masking? Where am I safe enough to start unmasking, to stop these performative things, these behaviors of fitting into typicality? And what support do I need if I do become more visible as a neurodivergent person? Do I need um a manager to rein in that group of people that may be a little bit catty? And do I need perhaps approval at work to have dim lighting in my workspace? To wear earphones at work? So there are probably some good questions. Where does it cost me? Where am I safe enough to unmask? And what supports do I need to help me unmask in ways that serve me? So just to wind up now, we want to really consider cost versus safety trade-offs. What does it cost me to mask? What does it cost me to unmask? What do I gain by masking? What do I gain by unmasking? And really being able to answer those questions to myself can help give me an understanding of where, when, and why I should unmask. And in some situations we might decide, actually, that mask doesn't really cost me that much. I'm gonna keep it on. You know, masquerade. But in a lot of situations, we might actually find that it's costing us a lot of energy and it's not bringing in the well-being benefits that we'd like for it. The question is not whether you should mask or unmask as a moral rule. It's about where can I be authentic and safe? Because masking keeps me feeling safe. And how can I reduce the cost of that survival behavior in places where I can reduce the cost of it? So masking isn't proof that the real you is too much. It's not evidence of you being a bad person, a fake person. It's actually evidence of the work you have put in to try and feel safe in a world that expects you to be something that you aren't. I hasten to point out that is not a deliberate thing. Nobody is out there thinking I'm gonna make neurodivergent people feel like rubbish. It's just a product of being a minority in a majority world. Those of us who are aware and affirming can try and manage that on behalf of others, and we can try and advocate for ourselves to manage some of that as well. Basking is often evidence that the environment has asked too much of us. Because disorder when we diagnose is not inherent to your characteristics or mine. When we make a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, we're actually diagnosing the difficulties that arise between the environment and the environmental expectations and demands and the characteristics that I bring into that environment. Change the environment, like at home, where I don't need to mask as much, and I change the stress and I reduce the level of difficulty that I experience. So as a closer, I'll invite you guys and girls and they thems, beautiful gentlemen, I'll invite you to identify one high mask cost. One context where it costs you a lot of energy to fit into typical expectations, and then one low-cost masking environment. One context where either masking doesn't cost you that much or you don't need to mask as much. And compare the difference in how you feel in and after being in those environments. What's the impact that it has on your mood and your sense of self afterwards? So finally, if you collapse after a social or professional functioning, that's not about you being weak. That's about you having had to be strong for so long. It's not about you being broken. It's about you committing so much of your energy to an environment that doesn't innately cater to you and the style of brain that you have. And that's okay. When we recognize that, we can recognize that we're still good people, we're still valid and worthwhile. We're not inherently disordered or broken or defective or wrong. Now, finally, many neurodivergent people experience a mix of competence, collapse, grief, and confusion. And this pattern is really visible not only within community, but also in the published literature. So it's it's really quite common. So if that's you, don't feel alone. Feel as a member of our community, it's quite normal for neurodivergents, but we can manage it. Well, I'll leave that there for today. Thank you so much for joining me again. It's been an absolute pleasure to monologue at you. Unfortunately, neither Dan nor Uma could help me out this week. But I appreciate you all listening in. And remember, we are different, not defective, and I look forward to chatting to you again next week.