Masking Between Existence and Understanding - Pre-Ontological Liminality and Ontological Field-Fabrication in the Tension Between Neurodivergent and Neurotypical World Architectures

This paper develops an ontological theory of masking that understands masking neither as an individual adaptation strategy nor as a primarily psychological or communicative phenomenon, but as a structural effect of ontological asymmetry between neurodivergent and neurotypical existence. The point of departure is the thesis that neurodivergent existence often operates in a pre-ontological, liminal mode oriented toward openness, embodiment, and relational field complexity, whereas neurotypical world architectures are stabilized through ontological fabrication, representation, and simplification. Masking emerges where a more complex, non-closed, open field of existencee is compelled to socially land within a simplified, objectified reality.The paper shows that the so-called “non-understanding” between neurotypical and neurodivergent subjects is not symmetrical, but results from a structural gradient of complexity: a simplified field cannot apprehend a more complex one without distorting it. Against this background, masking is determined as an ambivalent process—at once a creative act of world-making that enables social legibility, and an ontological form of forced labor when such legibility becomes a permanent condition of existence. The well-documented physical and psychological consequences of masking thus appear not as individual pathologies, but as indicators of structural overload that arises when pre-ontological liminality is compelled to operate durably within ontologically consolidated orders.The paper radicalizes existing approaches such as the Double Empathy Problem by showing that the issue is not primarily one of translation deficits or perspectival differences, but of the impossibility of simultaneously realizing existence and understanding. In this sense, masking marks a boundary zone in which it becomes visible that dominant world orders are not neutral, but are constructed too simply to sustain complex forms of existence. The aim of the paper is to position masking as a key phenomenon of a plural ontology and to expose the structural conditions under which neurodivergent existence can either become creatively effective or be ontologically exhausted. Interface Text This paper functions as an interface text within a larger operator-based research corpus. Core concepts are applied here, not re-derived. The underlying research operates in a non-linear, rhythmically recursive epistemic mode grounded in an autistic form of structural perception; the present text provides an interface translation for academic contexts.