zaxxon

pathfinder , 1 day ago to actuallyautistic

@actuallyautistic

Many things to do with being #neurodivergent and autistic are far more nuanced and individual than are sometimes given credit. Masking seems to me to be one of those.

Most of us learnt to mask at a very early age and not just for laughs and giggles. It was to protect ourselves from simply being different in a world that barely tolerated it. And let's face facts, children, bless their little cotton socks, are all too often the absolute worst at this. It was also a way of being seen and acknowledged, when just being ourselves never seemed to work. A way of learning how to communicate with those around us, in ways that they expected and could understand.

In fact, in many ways there has always been a deeply practical and functional element to masking. Like foreigners learning the language and customs of their new home, it allowed us to exist and in many ways flourish in this strange land we found ourselves in. For many of us, and perhaps especially those of us who are late diagnosed, the degree to which we could make the mask work for us, was often the key to how we managed to shape our lives and also perhaps how we could stay below the radar for so long.

It's why sometimes we resist when we hear the calls to unmask and how important it is to do this. The endless YouTube programmes and books dedicated to this. Because, for us, our mask was a functional necessity and perhaps still is. And for some us, perhaps because we've been doing it for so long and found a way of doing it that isn't that difficult, it's hard to see why masking is so wrong, or how we can really live without it.

But that is because it sometimes takes a while to see the damage it does. To our mental and physical health, through the stress and anxiety and sheer amount of energy it requires. But also to our sense of self. We are always behind the mirror we are showing the world. Never seen, never interacted with. It is not us who receives the praise, or respect, or even the love. Our confidence never grows, our worth is never nurtured and neither is our self-esteem.

This is the balance of masking. The good it can do, for some of us at least, against the harm it does. The practical over the necessary for growing and truly nurturing ourselves. And the answer to mask, or not mask, is rarely binary. It's often about finding the balance between the two in terms of our needs and duties, safety and comfort. And always it's a choice we have to make. A balance that can only work for us.

#Autism
#ActuallyAutistic

zaxxon , 4 hours ago

@Susan60 @Jobob @pathfinder @actuallyautistic 🫂

Well-intentioned but ill-informed advice can still be abuse.

zaxxon , 3 hours ago

@pathfinder @actuallyautistic I’m struggling this year due to the added masking/deception due to PDA (Pathological Demand Avoidance).

It’s made me a lying, deceitful person all my life, which is hard to reconcile with my strong sense of justice and integrity.

I have hidden from the full impact of this for 45+ years.

It is my greatest struggle with my spectrum profile, and the thing that makes me despair.

pathfinder , 14 hours ago to actuallyautistic

@actuallyautistic

Today was the first Saturday I've had off since the lockdowns (discounting my nieces wedding) and what have I done? Spent the night on here, with you nerds and beautiful people, sat alone in my flat and having a few beers. And I've loved it, without any of the guilt or regret I would have once felt. This is because I've finally started to come to terms with something that has been weighing on my mind for a while now.

The last five years or so has been one of massive change and as an autistic change isn't easy for me. For so long my life revolved around my work and family and the small local pub whose community allowed me to be as much myself, as I could be anywhere. Which to be fair wasn't much. But that community dispersed and changed, as these things tend to do and pub's in this country aren't what they used to be. For perfectly good reasons I changed my job to something that didn't carry as much weight for me and, the price of getting older, my immediate family died.

But, I also, during this time, realised my why. The reason why I'd always been so different and yet could never really explain, or come to terms, with how. That I was autistic and, of late, probably audhd. But with that realisation and all the other changes that, no matter how horrible in so many ways they were, left me free of obligation, of a sense of having to be in certain ways, of having to do what I felt was required, I was left with a near overwhelming sense that I had to do something. That I had to somehow justify this new me. A new and horrible obligation, all of its own. A weight that was bearing me down.

It, until well really today, never occurred to me that I could just be myself. I've never had that option or privilege before. Or, to be more accurate, I never realised I had that option. To just be myself, to not have to justify, or prove myself. That it was never about how others saw me, or how much I could feel worthy. That was a benchmark I was never going to meet, no matter how much I tried. Because it was never about how much I could do, but how much I could be. And just being myself, is a whole different ballpark.

#Autism
#ActuallyAutistic
#AuDHD

zaxxon , 4 hours ago

@pathfinder @actuallyautistic I also replied from my main, but just wanted to add that when we find our authentic self, buried under all the shame, guilt, expectation, or whatever else was dumped on us without our consent, it can be such a freeing, and also potentially scary, time of revelation.

Trust yourself. Deep down, you know what you need and I will always support you in supporting yourself.

Thank you for your support, and know that I admire your journey, your courage, and your honesty. 🫂

pathfinder , 2 months ago to actuallyautistic

@actuallyautistic

Autistic brains be stupid. Well, obviously not stupid, they just seem to work, or not work, in mysterious ways.

The main one that has always got me, about mine, is that I have no memory for sound, absolutely none. I can't remember a song, or a sound. I can't remember what my parents sounded like and none of my memories carry, for want of a better word, a soundtrack. I can remember what I was thinking and what others were saying, but not hearing them say it, nor any other sound. I also don't dream in sound, at least as far as I know. All my dreams are silent.

And yet, and it's a big yet. I have an excellent memory for voices and sounds. Like many autistics I have near perfect pitch, at least when I'm hearing others sing, or music playing. Just don't ask me to reproduce it, because I can't. If I meet someone I haven't met for a while, then I will almost certainly not recognise their face, or remember their name, but there is a very good chance that I will recognise them from their voice. I am also very good at detecting accents. Even the slightest hint of one in, say, an actor pretending to be an american, will get me searching Wikipedian to see if I am right about their actual nationality.

So, if I can tell the sound of a Honda CBR engine two blocks away, or a voice, or an accent buried deep, I must have the memories to compare against. And yet... nope.

So, as I said, autistic brains be stupid.

#Autism
#ActuallyAutistic

zaxxon , 2 months ago

@pathfinder @actuallyautistic welcome to the spectrum of spectra to which we belong.

pathfinder , 3 months ago to actuallyautistic

@actuallyautistic

I have often said, and largely it's true, that I'm fairly open about being autistic. There are a number of reasons for this, but mostly it's because I feel that it's important to be as open as I can be. That by doing so I am hopefully opening people's eyes to the fact that autistic's can be anyone, the bloke they stand next to in the pub, the one they work with, the person they've known for so many years. That we can be any age and anyone.

But, to put this in some context. I live in a smallish town and have done so all my life. For various reasons I am quite well known. I am also male, and single and old enough and secure enough in my life not to give a damn any more. So the risks for me being this open aren't the same as they would be for others. A fact and privilege I am very aware of. I have also masked in a way that, I think, is possibly different from others. I found a way to be essentially myself. To highlight the aspects of myself that were acceptable and submerge the elements that weren't. In other words, I didn't really try and hide the weird, only the true depth of it. So the leap from "it's Kevin" to "it's Kevin and he's autistic" doesn't appear to have been that great for a lot of people.

Having said this, though, it is still not easy. Dropping the mask is hard when you're not sure what is actually mask and what isn't. The internal masking, the ways I learnt to hide so much from myself, is perhaps the easiest, if not the most painless. But the external mask still has so many elements and not all of them are easy to forgo, or even possibly be part of a forged mask any more anyway. Maintain a way of being and doing something for over 5 decades and really where's the difference between you and it?

Much has been said though, about the effort of maintaining a mask over a long period of time. The effects it can have on us. The way the drain of it is more and more likely to lead to burnout. The way that restricting our natural movements and behaviour is harmful, especially in the long run and to our mental health. And I certainly don't argue with any of this. I can feel that strain, the cost of it for me. I also can't help thinking about how much of my aches and pains, the injuries I carry, the growing infirmities, aren't just age related, but caused by how much I've stifled and restrained my body from moving naturally over the decades and the cost of that.

But, as much as this is motivating and helping me to learn to unmask, there is, of course, the other side of the coin. I didn't learn to mask on a whim, it wasn't for laughs and giggles. I was the outlier, the strange, voiceless kid, who came within a hair's breadth of being institutionalised. I was the one who had to learn how to fit in and above all be safe. For that is what masking allowed me to do, at least as much as it could. And this, for those of us who are older, is perhaps one of the major problems with trying to unmask. It's very possible that one of the very reasons that allowed us to live so long without realising we were autistic, was that our masks worked too well. Not just in hiding us, but in allowing us to fit in, in so many ways, if not obviously in all.

And certainly for me there is a deep functionality in the way that I mask. It allows me to behave and to communicate with others in ways that they are comfortable with and understand. Not so much with set scripts, but more a menu of available options, of both body language and speech, that have proved to be viable and effective. It has allowed me to exist in their world and even though I'm essentially a foreigner to it, in ways that don't make that so obvious. But start dropping the mask and that illusion is quickly shattered and then it becomes a lottery how people react. Confusion, rejection, aggression, hate and dismissal. All of these I have experienced and even trying to explain that I am autistic, rarely makes matters better. In fact, it's more likely to make them double down on the necessity for me to do it their way.

For that is what mostly happens. Try not to speak and they insist that I do so. Be too weird in my movements and the most random of strangers will suddenly be up in my face over it. Try to be myself and have to watch the reactions and atmosphere change. Because the simple fact is that most people don't like having to do any of the work or put in any of the effort required to bridge divides, especially if they know, or suspect, that you are more than able to make it so that they don't have to. It will always be up to us, for so many of them. I'm not saying that this makes them bad people, although some of them are, just human and with perhaps too much on their plates already. Extra effort is sometimes hard to justify or find for a lot of people

But all of this simply makes unmasking even more difficult for me. It's hard and not always practical to forgo the functionality of it. And also the safety of it, the reasons why I began to do it so long ago. That difference is still so often a target for so many people, not something to be understood, but attacked and taken advantage off and age doesn't make any difference to that. Even as an older white male, I have to take that into account. The fact that unmasking simply isn't always safe, in so many places and ways.

So will I ever manage it? Will I ever reach the point of being truly open and maskless? The way I want to be. Given my age and how much of it is ingrained and, by now, a part of me. How much safer and easier it can simply make my life, I have to admit that I'm not sure. Let's just say that it's still a work in progress and a hope as much as a dream.

#Autism
#ActuallyAutistic

zaxxon , 3 months ago

@pathfinder @actuallyautistic I’m being pretty open about being on the spectrum, and, to family & close friends, about my PDA.

Being an effective masker is a two edge sword, as I’ve found to my detriment.

The expectation that I always “be like that”, esp. since learning I’m on the spectrum and masking and what an energy drain it is, seems, frankly, overbearing.

Being a phenomenally talented masker has meant my dysfunction has been hidden for 50+ years.

I’m just so tired of it.