Cloak of Competency
Part 1 of 2: Cloak of Competency, Before I Had a Name for It
For most of my life, I didn’t know what was happening to me. After big events like conferences, presentations, and days of intense social engagement, I would crash. Not “tired” crash. Not “I need a nap” crash. Days of being physically wiped out. Unable to think clearly. Body rebelling. Needing to shut down completely. And the hard part was that I didn”t understand why.
From the outside, I had done something reasonable. A few talks. Some conversations. A panel or two. Nothing that should have put me in bed for the next several days. But that’s the thing about living with FASD: before I understood what was actually going on, I kept measuring myself against a standard that was never built for how my brain and body work. And every time I couldn’t meet it, I’d carry the confusion and the shame right along with the exhaustion.
For years, I thought something was wrong with me specifically. A personal weakness. A failure of will. What I didn’t yet understand is that I wasn’t just showing up at those events. I was performing at them.
The Cloak I Didn’t Know I Was Wearing
I had heard the term “Cloak of Competency” before April 2026. But it wasn’t until I was sitting inside that FASD conference that I felt it, clearly, undeniably, in myself. The “Cloak of Competency” is the way many of us with FASD learn to present as more capable than we actually feel, to navigate expectations, systems, and everyday life.
And once I connected the term to what I was actually doing, I couldn’t stop seeing it everywhere. Not just in others, but now how I saw it in myself, and how many I was wearing:
The researcher and expert
The policy and advocacy voice
The parent of someone with FASD
The friendly, approachable guy you run into at the store
And then... there’s the “me” version only a few people ever really see
From the outside, these look like strengths. And in many ways, they are. They’ve opened doors, built relationships, and allowed me to contribute in ways that matter deeply to me. But the part I didn’t understand for a long time is that each cloak has a cost. And that cost is not just in the moment; it accumulates.
The Difference Between Imposter Syndrome and the Cloak of Competency
Before I go further, I want to address something clearly because these two things are often confused, and the confusion matters.
Imposter syndrome is something most people experience at some point. It’s the feeling that you don’t truly belong in the room, that your achievements aren’t real, and that one day someone will “find you out.” It’s rooted in self-doubt and a gap between how others see your capability and how you see yourself.
With imposter syndrome, the key is that the capability is usually real. The doubt is the distortion. The Cloak of Competency is something different.
It’s not a distortion of your capability. It’s an adaptive behavior, a survival strategy, if you will, where someone with FASD learns to present as more functional than they actually are in that moment, in that context, under those demands. It’s not about feeling like a fraud. It’s about working constantly, neurologically and physiologically, to meet a standard that was never designed for your brain.
Imposter syndrome says, “I don’t deserve to be here.” The Cloak of Competency says, “I will do whatever it takes to function here, and I will pay for it later.”
One is a feeling. The other is a tax. And for those of us with FASD, especially when layered with other health conditions, that tax has real, long-term consequences that I will explore in part two.
Written by Carl Young
Note: We at Embracing Neurodiversity cover four overlapping neurodiverse symptoms related to autism (ASD), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD), and trauma.
