Mine has become much more obvious with age. I did fine in school, but struggled with all the transitions one is supposed to make in life (so it probably became more obvious when I reached those “transition points”), plus long-term (as in, over a decade) depression, burnout, and isolation caused me to lose much of the skills and familiarity I had developed.
Regarding masking, it’s more of the other way around for me - my inability to mask made me retreat more and more into isolation, and stay there when there wasn’t much more isolated to (feasibly for me) get. And WP is still just about all the social interaction I get outside of immediate family.
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Yet in my new wildness and freedom I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage. For although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.
-H. P. Lovecraft, "The Outsider"