Published on 12, July, 2020
I hear a lot about masking, but I'm not aware of myself consciously and deliberately doing that. I wonder however. Can masking be a subconscious/reflex thing rather than something that you purposely do?
Yes I would say so. When you don't know about ASD, you don't know that the "learning" you're absorbing from watching social interaction & researching it is building a set of intellectual skills to deploy in lieu of instinctive responses. So that makes it unknowing, if not subconscious.
When I had my burnout 2 years ago, it was like the areas of my brain that had been running those conscious / intellectual scripts blew all of their respective fuses, leaving the "raw aspie" exposed.