My graduate collection, Unravelling the Mask, is about my mental health, being diagnosed with ADHD and highly recommended to go for an ASD diagnosis. Growing up as a carer for my AuDHD brother, I had to repress my own issues to protect him. Until my adult life, where I began to struggle and received my diagnoses, I never understood why I felt so tense and uncertain all the time, and had many moments of identity crises where I found it impossible to work out what I liked or who I was, and how much of my behaviour was me hiding myself to protect myself and other people. This is a common experience for neurodivergent people, especially in women who are only diagnosed in adulthood, and this is the specific focus my collection explores. Masking is the term for the neurodivergent survival mechanism where, consciously or subconsciously, you mimic other people’s gestures, behaviours, expressions, and suppress behaviours that are societally considered “weird”. For example, repressing stimming behaviours, which are actions such as clicking, fidgeting, making noises in order to self soothe. Through my own experience, and my secondary research into the vast topic of neurodivergence, Unravelling the Mask interrogates the cognitive dissonance of masking that I’ve had to learn to recognise within myself. While it is born out of protective instinct, masking can be quite harmful. The internalised pressure to mask and exist only through a lens of perfectionism can only be coped with for so long, and it (along with many contributing factors) has been building up for so long that it recently led to me having the worst mental breakdown of my life. My journey of acceptance and unlearning these unhealthy coping mechanisms of completely altering myself to avoid any sort of vulnerability is just at its earliest beginning, and this collection has unknowingly been my way of proving to myself I can ask for help, and I don’t have to be alone in this all-consuming struggle anymore. I am so grateful to myself, for never giving up and channelling it into this collection which contains my heart and soul, and to all of the wonderful people around me who have shown me I am allowed to break, and I am allowed to heal. There are many details put into this collection through the visual communication, which parallel the storytelling through the physical construction of the garments.