Persona, Masking, and Ziggy Stardust: Why Jungian Archetypes Spoke to My Neurodivergent Soul
I’ve worn more masks than I’ve had hot dinners.
Some were sparkly. Some were stitched from awkward silences and overthinking. Most were invisible—but heavy, like an old coat soaked through with the rain of other people’s expectations.
I didn’t always know I was masking. I just knew I felt... wrong. Like everyone else had the script, and I’d been handed a blank page. So I watched, learned, copied. Smiled when I was supposed to. Talked like I thought they wanted me to. Laughed at the right places in conversations, even if I didn’t get the joke.
And I got good at it. So good, in fact, that I didn’t realise how much of myself I’d buried underneath.
Then came the diagnoses—autism and ADHD, both later in life. And honestly? It wasn’t a tragedy. It was a revelation. I finally had a name for the shapeshifting, the exhaustion, the sense of living just slightly out of sync.
But even with that clarity, I didn’t know who the hell I was without the mask. That’s when I met Jung.
The Persona: Masking with a Capital P
Jung had this concept he called the Persona. It’s basically the version of you that you show to the world—the social mask. The one designed to make other people comfortable.
Sound familiar?
For neurodivergent folks, the Persona isn’t just a handy tool—it can become a full-time job. We build it from trial and error, from mimicry, from subtle cues we pick up because we have to. It’s how we get through school, work, family dinners, bus stops, therapy sessions.
But it’s bloody exhausting.
And over time, it can get hard to tell if there's even a “real” self underneath it all—or if we’re just a patchwork of everyone else’s preferences.
Enter Ziggy Stardust and the Cast of Inner Weirdos
Here’s where it gets juicy.
What drew me to Jung wasn’t just the Persona stuff. It was the archetypes. The idea that inside all of us lives a whole ensemble cast of mythic energies and psychological patterns: the Rebel, the Caregiver, the Orphan, the Trickster, the Sage, the Artist, the Wild One.
It made sense of why I could feel like ten people in one body. Why I could be deeply nurturing one day, then want to burn it all down the next. Why I could feel ancient and wise and also completely lost—at the same time.
And suddenly, those shifts weren’t flaws. They were stories. Roles. Archetypal energies. Parts of being human.
That’s when I started thinking about Bowie—not as a rockstar, but as a living myth. Ziggy, Aladdin Sane, The Thin White Duke… he played with persona. Not to hide, but to express what couldn’t be said plainly. He turned the mask into art.
And that’s what Jung’s work offered me, too—not just language, but liberation.
Individuation (AKA, Getting to Know the Real Me, One Weird Archetype at a Time)
Jung called the journey of becoming your true self individuation. Not self-improvement. Not reinvention. Just—wholeness.
And for me, that’s been about gently peeling back the layers. Not ripping off the mask in one dramatic flourish, but slowly meeting the parts I’d hidden. The anxious one. The loud one. The awkward, goofy, wildly creative one.
It’s messy. It’s nonlinear. Some days I still catch myself slipping into old roles, especially when I’m tired or scared or around people who don’t feel safe. But now, I notice. And that’s where the magic lives.
So yeah—Jungian psychology isn’t just an intellectual interest for me. It’s a lifeline. A way of understanding myself that honours the depth, the contradiction, the archetypal chaos of a neurodivergent mind.
And sometimes, when I’m feeling lost, I put on Starman, light a candle, and remind myself:
the mask was never the problem.
It just wasn’t the whole story.
