The Mask Drawer
(listen to the poem, read by the author)
When masking, I carry a suitcase of fractured glass,
every glance reflected, adjusted, trimmed at the edges,
gestures rehearsed with lines I never agreed to give.
It is a second skin stitched from borrowed fabric:
smiles measured to millimeters, restrained,
a costume that groans when silence clamps down.
The weight settles in layers of sediment,
week after week in seminar rooms where I
nodded, spoke in careful tones, calibrated
my voice to sound competent & unthreatening.
Even my bones held the endless rehearsal,
a face insisting itself through the decorum—
slow, subterranean, uninvited. The mask hardens
slowly into armor, polished for practicum, gleaming
for professors, impenetrable, deliberate, yet heavy
enough to slow the breath in subway corridors.
Some days it clinks like porcelain stacked too high,
fragile but unyielding, cold against tender skin.
Other days, it fogs like winter glass at Robarts,
translucent, revealing only blurred outlines:
a gesture unfinished, a laugh abruptly tethered.
To unfasten it feels akin to standing in rough weather,
wind against raw skin, a breath still undecided.
Inside the drawer, the masks lie in quiet formation—
one for field placement, two for group projects,
another for presentations, their strings frayed from use.
Opening it disturbs the relics of long survival:
rows of borrowed faces lined in silence, waiting,
as I sit quietly, dreaming of the day at last—
when pretending will no longer be required.
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On Arrival
(listen to the poem, read by the author)
This was before I knew that masking could drain me dry,
before the lecture halls with their noise & blinding bulbs,
& chatter pressed against me like a sensory vice. I walked
campus with survival woven to my chest, pages of Greene
folded in my pocket to keep from unraveling. At night,
I scrawled field notes on body language, gestures, intonations
memorized as scripts for daily life, replicant among peers,
mimicking until my CPU overheated. Yet even then—
philosophy slipped its hand into mine, offering wisdom I
could hold, steadying the whirling chaos within. I read the Tao
by the water, sunlight breaking across pages, its paradoxes
undoing the knots of clenched intentions, infusing a strange sense
of calm that whispered in a nurturing tongue. I stayed up with Plato,
with Kierkegaard, with Tolstoy’s diaries, my walls plastered
in quotations, until my mind burned through theory & language
turned clear. Poetry returned too, quiet & demanding, asking
for honesty when classrooms requested performance, pulling me
back to my own thought, unmasked & unashamed. Even now—
years beyond those early seasons of bewilderment, I carry
notebooks filled with fragments of both anguish & awe,
all of them proof that education was never just coursework,
but a way of living, of surviving, of learning to be.
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About the Author
Jan A. Wozniak, MA, APPA (he/him) is an autistic artist, therapist, and clinical researcher, currently completing his MSW at the University of Toronto. His work explores neurodiversity, disability, ecology, and healing through arts-based practices that center advocacy and representation. His writing has appeared in Aletheia, Autism, Autism in Adulthood, Intersect, JIRIRI, Ought, Spectrum, and The Rush, among other publications.