mask up

 

A key component to getting to adulthood as an undiagnosed autistic is masking. For the uninitiated this the process of hiding your autistic traits so that you can get by in a society built for neurotypical people.

This is usually done as an unconscious process in childhood and onwards. you display a behaviour and are told repeatedly that it is not appropriate or weird and you learn to bury that deep inside until most of your life is a sort of a performance.

Obviously this serves a purpose because autistic people would struggle to hold down jobs (this is already something a large proportion of the autistic population have difficulty with), maintain friendships and relationships if they were to go around with their fully unmasked selves on display for everyone to see. 

The downside to this of course is that this is completely exhausting. It is a facade you must maintain and the unspoken message is that the world is not really prepared for you to be your autistic self.

The other thing that is kind of funny about masking is that most of us (autistic folk) don't even realise we are doing it. It's like an internal switch that get flipped when we are out in public and all we really know is that navigating social situations feels really hard and we feel really exhausted all the time.

It's also something that is more common with autistic women and is a large part of the reason so many women go undiagnosed for so long. I genuinely had no idea I was autistic until very recently but I did know that everything was hard and I felt really tired and also like I was somehow adulting wrong.

I also found out through a reliable source that I have let my mask drop quite a bit around my family without knowing that I was presenting differently there than in other situations. So much so I was told by a family member that it was so obvious that I was autistic for at least the last decade they assumed I already knew and was working through it. They must have also believed I was being very stoic about the whole experience because believe me that bomb has just dropped for me and I am not being super quiet about the whole thing.

The trick now that I know Im autistic is working out when it is safe to unmask and also what exact traits I'm masking because as strange as it sounds I genuinely don't know.

as with all things on my autism journey I am exploring this with curiosity and the hopes as the days go by I will continue to learn new things about myself 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sometimes I open my mouth and my mother comes out ..

Image
I have been told on more than one occasion that I'm sarcastic. Often that I'm too sarcastic (as though there could be such a thing) and I have retort up my sleeve for such occasions which is if you think I'm sarcastic you should meet my mother. No, really you should because my sarcasm is but a pale imitation of hers. Every so often though I come out without something that makes my friends or other family members pause because sometimes when I open my mouth, my mother comes out.  It's funny how people always take the words you are turning into your mother as such an insult because the reality of the matter is it's a both a good and bad thing. Obviously there are certain qualities I am perfectly happy to emulate and others not so much and on the whole I am not entirely sure how much control I have over it. It's not quite a pick and mix counter here. I think there are some habits you are not even aware you have picked up until someone else kindly points it out....
Read more

How long does it take to learn to drive?

Image
I remember my nieces a year or so back asking me in an incredulous tone how long it takes to learn to drive because for as long as they could remember I had L plates on my car. The answer in my case is four years. Admittedly I probably could have gotten my full licence sooner if I hadn't been so hesitant to do my test in the three years that have passed since my last attempt. I get very anxious during tests or Interviews and so do not perform particularly well at either. I will put that in my list of things I need to work on in the new year. In time since I have learned to drive I feel I have accomplished a lot and yet I will go out of my way to avoid having to parallel park because I feel like its always going to be my Achilles heel. At least I have come a long way from the days when I used to feel anxious about getting into my car and was likely to bunny hop across roundabouts in third gear. The problem with learning to drive is that the older you do the harder it is and...
Read more

Burnout: the sequel

Image
  I am burnt out. Hardly the most shocking declaration given I have been saying it out loud for a while now but here we are. This isn't my first run in with burn out nor will it likely be my last. Not only am I working in a stressful job, a social care worker in residential care, which is no stranger to burn out but also I am autistic so its like I know a secret short cut to getting there. I think as bragging goes this is up there with declaring how many times I have managed to catch covid. Which is 4 at my current count and they say there are no benefits to working in Health care. If you are lucky enough to not have experienced burnout then I can tell you its not an experience I would recommend to a friend. If you have friends working in social care then you probably wont need to.  Some of the things I have been experiencing are random bouts of crying. Given high sensitivity is part of my autism profile, I am no stranger to crying and the first time I experienced burnout it t...
Read more