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Unmasking experience

Max

Has anyone else on the spectrum spent most of their time on earth presenting as neurotypical? I spent many of my formative years, including all of my adolescence and now adulthood, trying to appear as ordinary as possible. I don't know if I'm 'high-functioning' or simply a good mimic.

This has included:

- keeping my niche interests and tastes to myself unless I know for certain that others will find them agreeable

- keeping physical tics to a bare minimum

- hiding my true feelings/opinions (this could be related to C-PTSD)

- mirroring the personalities or quirks of other people

I'm a deeply unhappy person with no real sense of self, no real friends and nowhere that I belong. That's what you get for trying to please everyone else!

If anyone has had a similar experience, feel free to share them here.

Thanks.

Parents

  • dunno, i guess i do, but doesnt everyone present a different face to everyone they dont know? nd a different face to the world anyway. different layers of faces and masks for different relations. and yet not even the deepest relation will truly get the full you and you will still hide stuff from them and want to appear in control to some degree and not want to harm your image.

    id say my public face is so detached from who i am that i wont even show my love for cute cats! lol because that is not a very cool look on a guy and can make you look soft.

    ofcourse things like making involuntary weird noises often break through the cracks of any mask as they are rather involuntary, but sometimes can be curved or covered up into something else that totally seemed voluntary and in control. 

  • in reply to Caelus
    Caelus said:
    show my love for cute cats! lol because that is not a very cool look on a guy

    Disagree

Reply Children
  • in reply to Deleted User
    Unknown said:
    Caelus said:
    show my love for cute cats! lol because that is not a very cool look on a guy

    Caelus, I'd have to say, that whilst for SOME people it may not be a "cool" look, for others it shows that you do have the ability to build some sort of constructive relationship and provide care for another being. And that IS a very attractive trait.

    In fact when I was internet dating and scratching around for something to say to the four women who were prepared to swap a few emails with me, it was me recounting the story of the previous evening's ride home where I found myself confronted with a polystyrene cup with legs walking across the road in front of me, and my subsequent freeing up of the hedgehog who's spines made it impossible for him to remove the cup himself that got me the actual face to face date that lead to the relationship I've been in for the last 19 or so years.

    And of course for many people who live outside of our mainstream media's influence the epitome of "cool" is the rather tough minded Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is reputedly keeps a cat himself as well as his dog. (and he's possibly one of us..)