I have been affected enough by the #takethemaskoff campaign that I decided to actually do something about writing. It has been spearheaded by some remarkable autistic people I wasn’t aware of until a couple of weeks ago, among them Agony Autie, Neurodivergent Rebel, The Autistic Advocate, and Autistic Not Weird. I’ve mixed up the names of their pages with their actual names but you are more likely to pick up their public facing portals on Facebook…
In the interest of getting something written the following might seem a bit fragmented or like a draft…
I have never had a consistent mask or characters that I use to make people like me or be more accepted. My tendency has been to be dragged into being social by some specific people who have taken a liking to me. I have learned the hard way that this isn’t always a good thing. In some cases you might make a genuine friend, but often it’s a case of being targeted for someone else’s purposes.
The masking I end up doing is then an effort to mimic the other person for the sake of company. Attention from someone is enjoyed when you are largely lonely, but it can be a slippery slope into being far too dependent on the one person who happened to want to make an effort with you.
Masking for me is reflecting or summoning another person’s behaviour, maybe just a part of it. Something from my father, or mother. Some posture comes out from someone I observed.
This sort of effect was really made clear to me from the writings of Donna Williams, who explained characters in Nobody Nowhere. It was further expanded upon in Like Colour to the Blind, where she explains how she made an effort to shed all the accumulated mimicry from her life with her then-partner who was also autistic.
I read that book years ago and it’s taken me years to properly identify what to do about achieving the same thing. Why? The pressures of still having to keep a job and look after two children.
The habits of masking just operate when under stress. Only a great presence of mind can allow you to perceive what’s going on.
At the moment I am very anti-social because I have so little enthusiasm to use masking anymore. I don’t even want to start off a conversation with “how are you” with people I don’t know very well as it will start off the masking system.
Masking isn’t just about navigating small talk either, it is also suppressing emotional distress, resisting the intense desire to just get away from situations I’m forced to tolerate, the constant onslaught of noise and visual clutter and people moving about.
That tendency points to a core conclusion. The “compromise” with the world is all in one direction. I have to choose isolation because few people give me a way in. It feels like the way it is requires me to engage dishonestly or be ignored.
It emphasises the difference between me and the rest of the world. The actual me would like to share intense focus on something or talk in detail about psychology. I don’t know how people can be satisfied just talking about the mundane. Constant validation of sameness.
But you see the masking that’s either consciously developed or just forced upon me by trying to survive the world drains the mind so much that the intense interests that sustain me keep atrophying.
Masking is self-destruction. A negative death spiral.