Published on 12, July, 2020
The older I get the more I notice a difference between me and my peers regarding my social skills, and the more they notice a difference in me too.
I feel like as everyone is getting older and maturing i'm just frozen in time. Forever trapped as a younger person stuck in the body of an adult, no matter what I do. `No matter how hard I mask.
I felt the first big jump when I was transitioning into my teenage years. I just wanted to mess about, play classical playground games, do what we used to do. But girls my age just wanted to sit around talking about boys. Everything was changing and it was nerve wracking.
I'm now turning 23 and I'm noticing the big jump again, except this time it's worse, harder. I don't know what to do to emulate my peers at all. They can just tell that I'm different.
I don't want to get pushed out, I want friends. A romantic relationship. I've been craving more structure relationship wise because of this, a relationship with rules. I've returned to religion, not because I'm necessarily a believer but because religious people tend to have well defined social rules that I can learn, follow, and as long as I stick to those rules I'm less likely to be socially ostracised.
I'm in a lot of distress. I don't know what to do. Everything is changing so fast, faster than I can keep up with.
Masking is not good for you. If you keep doing it you will burnout eventually. If there is one piece of advice I could give my younger self it would be stop trying to mask.
The more you try to emulate your peers the more likely you are to have feelings of inadequacy, which can result in a negative spiral into anxiety and depression.
Autistic people find it very difficult to cope with change. As you have found it can be nerve wracking and even terrifying at times. I still find that, even though I'm much older. We need much longer than non autistics to process change and adapt to it.
Please stop trying to keep up, as it is causing you a lot of distress. Try and allow yourself the time and space you need to adapt, discover who you are and what you want to achieve in life. However long it takes.
Are there opportunities in your area to meet up with other autistic people around your age? You may find they are on a similar journey, trying to adapt to being an adult and finding it very difficult.
Sounds like good advice in general, though from what I understand there's an irreducible minimum to masking - as there is a core component that is an involuntary, unconsious, and reflexive learned trauma response that's been there from childhood onwards. But the more conscious and performative aspects of 'fitting in' are something we can all be more viligant for.
Yes that is true. Most of us will have started masking at an early age and it just becomes an involuntary response, without always consciously being aware of it.
I wonder if there has been any research on whether autistic people who have been diagnosed very early tend to mask less.