thebookishautisticblog

[thebookishautisticblog]

An analogy for being a high masking autistic person in a world of mostly neurotypicals

Imagine you’ve woken up in a foreign country with no idea how you got here. In this country a different language is spoken than yours and very few people know your native language. 

Over time, you start to pick up words and phrases that people use and you begin to understand some of what people are saying when they talk to you. You start speaking to some people and, even though you mess up sometimes and say the wrong thing, you are gradually getting more and more fluent. Because of cultural differences between here and where you were raised, most people are still probably aware that there’s something a bit different about you. However, they generally decide to overlook these differences, although some people may dislike you for them. 

By this time, you have made a life for yourself in this country. You have found friends and colleagues, maybe even a partner, here who care about you and accept you for who you are. The only problem is that you are exhausted all the time. You can speak their language fluently but it has never gotten to the point where you now think in that language. Every word that you speak has to be consciously translated from your native language to theirs which takes quite some effort. 

Then one day you find a group of people that also moved here from your home country and who speak your native language. Communicating with them feels so effortless because you can say everything that comes into your head directly without having to translate. It may feel a little strange at first because you haven’t spoken your native language out loud for so long but gradually you become more and more comfortable around them. This doesn’t mean that you love the people you met who are from here any less. It just means communicating with them can sometimes be difficult and it’s nice to also have people in your life with whom you can communicate more easily. 

Please note that this is not based on any experience I have of moving abroad. I’ve learned foreign languages and tried speaking them whilst on holiday but that is very much not the same thing. This is just an analogy that I came up with to try and explain what communicating with neurotypicals feels like to me, as it can sometimes feel like I’m having to speak in a foreign language.

[thebookishautisticblog]

Loss of identity after discovering you're autistic as an adult - a personal essay

Growing up, I felt like I had two very distinct and separate personalities. There was the person I was at home - talkative, passionate, funny - and the person I was elsewhere - reserved, quiet, uninteresting. This was due to the fact that I felt safe at home; I knew I wouldn’t be judged and I knew there was very little I could do that would lead my parents to not like me anymore. Meanwhile, at school, I cycled through friends very quickly because after a certain point people seemed to stop liking me. I never knew why but friends generally started to be mean to me or they would get bored and go and join another friend group. This led me to start masking heavily, not that I was aware that that’s what I was doing. I tried to hide every part of myself that I thought people didn’t like and I tried so hard to be known as nice because that seemed to protect me from being judged. I became a textbook people pleaser. Whilst the real me is still more visible at home, I think my personality has dulled down over the years as the pressures to fit in have taken a toll on my sense of self and my mental health. I feel like the mask has gone from being something I slipped on when I left the house but that I could easily take off when I came home, to something that just stays on most of the time.

I think this partly came about, kind of ironically, when I made my first real friend. All my previous “friends” had either just straight up not liked me or had never really made the effort to truly get to know me, so I was never that close with anyone. That was up until I met this girl I’ll call Susan. It took a long time for me and Susan to grow close but eventually we did and she actually seemed to get to know me and still like me. Except, she hadn’t actually gotten to know me, she’d gotten to know the mask that was hiding the parts of me that some people find off putting. I also got the impression that that might be the only version of me that she actually liked because when the mask would slip and I would ramble or I would bring up some niche interest that I had at the time, she would look bored and not really engage with me, just moving the conversation straight onto another topic when I was finished. This was my first real feedback that the mask was doing its job; that it’s not that people don’t like me, they just don’t like certain parts of me. This made me think that maybe if I just worked hard at keeping those bits hidden, then it was possible that everyone would like me. It also kind of dashed my hope that maybe someday people would come along who liked all parts of me because even my closest friend didn’t. Therefore, it just felt easier to keep the mask on all the time instead of risking the bits of me that I wanted hidden peeping out. 

This brings me to my recent autism diagnosis. It turns out that pretty much all the traits people seem to not like about me are autistic traits. These include: giving too much or too little eye contact, having little facial expressions or body language, finding it difficult to start conversations, wanting to infodump about my interests, and a hatred of small talk among other things. After my diagnosis, I also got a name for what the mask was and I realised that I’d gotten so used to pretending that I’d  pretty much stopped thinking of it as pretending anymore. As a result, I was left feeling like my sense of self had been wiped away. Now that I wanted to take the mask off because I could see how much it was harming me, I realised that the person underneath had all but disappeared years ago. Even now, a few months down the line, I still don’t feel connected to who I am and I don’t know what to do about it. It probably hasn’t helped that I’ve been very socially isolated this year due to taking time out from education. It’s hard to figure out who you are in a vacuum. 

I hope to one day figure out who I am again and thankfully there is no time limit by which I have to do that. If anybody out there has any advice on how to do this, I would greatly appreciate them letting me know.