After a lifetime of masking, how do I unmask?

The way I'm approaching it is to be more ruthless in prioritising my own needs, and actually realising that what I consider ruthless is what most people consider compliant. It takes a lot of soul searching, to work out if you're motivated to do something because you genuinely want to or because you feel obligated for some reason(s), and this is made even more difficult by alexithymia making it hard to understand how we feel about things.

What I know at the moment for instance is that I'm quite happy being at home with my wife and dogs, or out running with our running friends, but apart from that I've honestly no desire to travel anywhere or see other people, family etc. The fact that I'm not motivated to travel e.g. to see my parents or daughters might seem "selfish" or "wrong" if compared to societal norms; but I now know that conforming to what's expected leads to potentially fatal poor mental health and I'm no longer going to risk that. 

So I count some of that as bravery / courage. Like my username says, I'm not sending Christmas cards any more, because it used to wind me up to a high level of anxiety feeling forced into the shops to do something that I considered a pointless and environmentally unfriendly hangover from days before the internet and telephones.

In other ways, my mask didn't survive my burnout - which explains why I awoke from that three month long coma (figuratively speaking) as a different person to the one I seemed to be before, & I now realise that I'm now more authentically me.

The way I'm approaching it is to be more ruthless in prioritising my own needs, and actually realising that what I consider ruthless is what most people consider compliant. It takes a lot of soul searching, to work out if you're motivated to do something because you genuinely want to or because you feel obligated for some reason(s), and this is made even more difficult by alexithymia making it hard to understand how we feel about things.

What I know at the moment for instance is that I'm quite happy being at home with my wife and dogs, or out running with our running friends, but apart from that I've honestly no desire to travel anywhere or see other people, family etc. The fact that I'm not motivated to travel e.g. to see my parents or daughters might seem "selfish" or "wrong" if compared to societal norms; but I now know that conforming to what's expected leads to potentially fatal poor mental health and I'm no longer going to risk that. 

So I count some of that as bravery / courage. Like my username says, I'm not sending Christmas cards any more, because it used to wind me up to a high level of anxiety feeling forced into the shops to do something that I considered a pointless and environmentally unfriendly hangover from days before the internet and telephones.

In other ways, my mask didn't survive my burnout - which explains why I awoke from that three month long coma (figuratively speaking) as a different person to the one I seemed to be before, & I now realise that I'm now more authentically me.