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"Putting on my best normal" - how to shed the mask and do it anyway...

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https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5509825/

Masks / Camouflage / Performance art etc,  call it what you will but after many years of "fitting in" - as a partner, mother, employee, daughter, sister, sibling, citizen it is possible to successfully drop the mask completely and does everyone mask to a certain extent. But, what happens when it becomes detrimental and shift has got to happen in order to save yourself?

"..... two key motivations for camouflaging; assimilation and connection. This suggests that camouflaging behaviours come from multiple sources. They may be internally driven by the individual to accomplish specific goals such as friendships, but they may also be produced as a response to external demands placed on how a person should behave in society. The differential influence of each of these motivations varies between individuals, but our findings suggest that people are strongly motivated by wanting to avoid discrimination and negative responses from others."

Do you even remember or know who your true self is or has ever been?

But think of the risks? Feeling more exposed, vulnerable, being feeling duped - "so you just "played a role" all of these years. What if they don't like the true you? The saying goes "you can bend a twig but not a branch...after so many years is it feasible to re-set self and start again?

And there, lies the rub, did you mask due to self preservation or just due to a fear of rejection and being outcast from society?

So question: Is it possible to drop the mask? Is that too extreme, or is it just better to find small pockets in life to "be" (you know, when everyone has gone to bed and no one is watching)? Why did we learn to mask in the first place?

Parents

  • I find another paper referenced in that one particularly telling: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep40700.pdf

    Basically what it says is that, from the very first moment they lay eyes on us, we are destined not to be liked as much by neurotypicals as are other neurotypicals. Who cares how good we are at masking if the other person has already negatively judged us? Also, it means that even if neurotypicals also feel the need to camouflage themselves, we have to work much harder at it in order to achieve the same result, before our innate social difficulties are even taken into consideration.

  • in reply to DragonCat16

    I can identify with that... over compensating all the way!! But we mask with what result in mind? To blend, to shape shift ourselves into being accepted? And by whose rules? 

    Thank you DragonCat..

    DragonCat16 said:
    Also, it means that even if neurotypicals also feel the need to camouflage themselves, we have to work much harder at it in order to achieve the same result, before our innate social difficulties are even taken into consideration.
Reply
  • in reply to DragonCat16

    I can identify with that... over compensating all the way!! But we mask with what result in mind? To blend, to shape shift ourselves into being accepted? And by whose rules? 

    Thank you DragonCat..

    DragonCat16 said:
    Also, it means that even if neurotypicals also feel the need to camouflage themselves, we have to work much harder at it in order to achieve the same result, before our innate social difficulties are even taken into consideration.
Children
  • in reply to DragonCat16

    I find that I’m constantly flitting between a fight or flight response.... yes, likeyou, even in a ND environment 

  • in reply to .

    If I had a choice, I would have associated with ND people for my whole life, but that's not the way things have gone. At school, at work, in other situations, it's a NT world. As I look back, people that have been my friends, or even nice to me, have had autistic traits, and some of them I would bet quite a lot that they are on the spectrum. Otherwise, all I have to look back on were, to put it bluntly, total jerks, who never looked far enough past the ND surface (whether it had a mask on it or not) to see what was inside. Their loss, but my loss too.

    I wonder if I'm now too damaged to be part of a tribe, ND or not. The first minute I sense any hint of unpleasantness in a social situation, even among a group of people on the spectrum, the shield immediately goes back up and I don't want to be there anymore. I bet I'm not the only one who reacts that way. It's a hard-learned response.

  • in reply to .

    Humans are very tribal... are we trying to fit into the NT tribe? What’s wrong with the ND tribe? Or is it just that we are so scarce or hide ourselves that a tribe cannot be easily formed?