Published on 12, July, 2020
My question is, having Recently researched Autism I had a lightbulb moment, is it possible I lost some of my mask during my mental break or healing process? I know I still mask sometimes and to some extent but I was wondering if anyone else has experienced this or thinks this is likely?Background for those interestedA few years back I had a mental breakdown after years of struggling with depression and anxiety, at the time I had no idea what was going on and why I didn't seem to fit anywhere and was just broken but having finally started to get answers (ADHD and likely Autism), its raised a few questions about the way I act now vs before. Before the breakdown, most people would have thought I was mostly normal, with the possible exception of being a bit obsessive on some topics and missing the odd social cue and being quite introverted. This came with a massive toll on me and I would have to spend a lot of time recharging between social events and came with a lot of anxiety which I now know is likely because I was masking. Immediately after the breakdown people expected me to be odd, and I was, but I started to heal and thanks to a supportive family, I found work I enjoy and a way to exist that is reasonably low stress and although I have a lot of anxiety and social issues still I'm happier now than I have been for most of my adult life. The problem is my family and friends all seem to think I'm still broken and have approached me saying I don't look right, stare off into space, don't emote correctly, among other comments, and they do things like tell me to cheer up when I'm perfectly happy and the like.
Before I was diagnosed I had a lot of anxiety and depressive episodes. Then I had an awful situation at work and lost my job. I didn't have a breakdown as such but it put me in a dark place. After that I lost the ability to "perform" and eventually had to change career altogether.
Now I'm diagnosed I think what I lost was my ability to mask, because it always felt like I was acting a role. At the time I thought everyone operated like this. Now, I'm learning to mask all over again, but just when I want or need to.
Yeah I think that's where I'm at too, I didn't lose the mask entirely I still performed in front of the doctors and therapist I saw looking back at it, probably the last people I should have been masking in front of but I didn't know I was doing it, I just thought I was putting my "outdoor" face on.
The regular whipping and other forms of violence in combination with the extended childhood terror, kinda makes it difficult for me to work out what is "mask" ( a concept that I first heard this week!) and what is me...
I believed I had manufactured elements of my own personality in an effort to make up for perceived deficiencies. They were obviously very vital deficiencies (my thjnking went) otherwise why do they keep hitting me and expressing hatred in my direction?
The double standards that seemed often to be in force (usually to my personal detriment), were incomprehensible to me, until very recently.
I was literally* saved in my youth by a very good book indeed called "Games People Play" by Eric Berne, that helped me understand Normie World enough to function in it. Later in life I read "people of the lie" by M.Scott Peck, which I found very useful indeed for understanding some of the more inexplicable things and people.issues.
Unfortunately I didn't stop whilst I was winning, I went on to read "Eichmann in Jerusalem", often called "the banailty of evil" by Hannah Arendt, I've always been fascinated by the "Jewish problem", (for what should, I think by now, be obvious reasons!) and came to understand how unbelievably easy it is for (groups particularly) human being to slip from "victim of circumstance" to "oppressors de jour"..
You can see that process in action right now, on the TV news, of course!
Yup, humans as a whole tend to be way to quick to blame a popular victim for all of their ills. Although definitely not as extreme as you seem to have had it, I was certainly punished a lot for what I'm realizing was just being me as a child. My grandparents were very well off, business people, pillar of the community sorts, and I was seen as an embarrassment in many ways, I was their only (outwardly) male grandchild and therefore I was seen as the successor and was occasionally trawled around to see business friends and such and it wasn't unusual to take a lot of verbal and some physical abuse after these encounters. I won't go into any real detail but I do think that is at least part of where my strongest masking came from, I was always expected to keep up appearances.Im very much in a period of deconstruction now, I'm finding myself breaking down decades of behaviour and running it through my new model and I'm grateful for the work I did in the past with mindfulness. It was highlighted in therapy a few years back that unless I was at an extreme I didn't really recognize my emotion and therefore learned techniques to recognize emotion from my own behavior and that's really serving me well on figuring out what is mask and what isn't, however so far I'm still on a surface level so we'll see where that can get me.