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 

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