Published on 12, July, 2020
I'm in the process of discovering if I have asd. I feel I show alot of the signs apart from sarcasm. I use it all the time but the more I think about it the more I dont know if I'm using it and understanding it or I've just been going through the motions all my life. How can you tell if your socialising in a way out of habit or genuine understanding I'm overloaded with information and dont know.
i really don't know the answer. i'm left handed and at home we would use the knife on the right hand and the fork on the left hand. i've always struggled with that. When i found out i may be on the AS, i started to use the knife on my left hand, which felt very good. But, i couldn't get used with the fork on my right hand... THe same with masking, i believe. After 47 years masking how can i leave my mask now? i wouldn't cope. Perhaps all we can do is talk about autism, telling NT to help autistic children not to ware any kind of masks... so that they don't have to mask as we had to.
I really would like to know myself without masking, perhaps i would be free (or dead).
Letting the mask down a bit certainly isn't without it's problems. I've had comments from a few people that since my diagnosis I have become "worse" in some way or other - i.e. they expected that my diagnosis would mean getting "fixed" so that my autistic traits would go away, when what I really need is greater acceptance of them so that masking doesn't have the awful repercussions for my mental health that it always has previously. There is also a sense from some that I am simply using my diagnosis as an excuse for behaviours which previously I have always suppressed; that I have "given up trying", because they haven't the slightest sense of what the "trying" entails. After all, there's not a lot of point in masking if one gives away the fact that one is doing it, so the costs have always been completely concealed from other people, and the mental health problems always attributed to other causes.
However, at the very least, I have experienced huge relief from not masking when I'm alone - I have lost the guilt and anger that I felt towards myself for "acting insane" even when there was no-one else there to see it. And unmasking oneself doesn't have to be all or nothing, nor done at all times, nor done in every kind of situation or in every kind of company. Around people who have accepted my diagnosis wholeheartedly, I allow myself to stim, providing it's not disruptive in a practical sense; but I still would try not to do it when, say, travelling on a bus - the benefits of the stimming are lost anyway because of the self-consciousness that it makes me feel. But I will have a damned good stim when I get home after the journey, which I would previously have denied myself.
If "unmasking" seems like it's taking a lot of conscious effort and stress, then there's little point in it anyway - you'd just be trading one kind of pressure upon yourself for another. As I said previously, the right balance is something better "disovered" rather than "hunted for", IMHO.