masking

2022 10 26

content warnings

masking, autistic abuse, social isolation.

blog

we read this webpage.

It is about how autistic people can struggle identifying feelings, because we don't have words for the feelings we're having. It talks about how the author felt more able to identify their feelings after talking to other autistic people in an inclusive community, and how their feelings were isolated before.

autistic people often find it hard to identify and describe our emotions partly because we have not been exposed to the right language to learn how to do it.

this is a quote from the webpage that made our brain excited! we think "partly" is important; we may talk about why later.

we read a french book a while ago that talked about how allistic people get free admission to understanding feelings. their brain learns how to easily condense feelings into language, and, neurotypical culture supports that. NT culture gives them new words to describe their feelings, and helps ease them in.

the french book suggests that auties don't get free admission. it suggests that auties have to manually learn what feelings are, process them, and communicate them. that autistic people need to manually learn words, and that doing this is extremely strenuous on our brains, and the authors also think this might be where stimming comes from: they think it's a tool auties use to help them process information physically, to help their brain out. we like this! we think that stimming theory sounds at least partially true. the book itself transorms quite quickly after the introductory chapters into autism being a negative condition, and it's why we aren't sharing what it's called; we don't like most of the book.

we think of this like mental shortcuts. allistic people get to have mental shortcuts to describe their feelings and emotions early on, whereas elysia has had to do this for basically everything, completely on our own, and it required a ton of self reflection. it takes a lot of work, and it's easy to forget to be mindful. having mental shortcuts are important, since they helps us not get overwhelmed, and to take care of ourselves and the people around us. (we think allistics should have to do it too)

it being really really difficult, and it also being distinctly autistic, makes masking really easy.

during an appointment today (that we completely forgot about), the person kept asking us what we were feeling, or we would try to ask them a question. we think what they wanted was for us to describe things in a way that made sense to them. our focus on on our soft friends and the details of our skin wasn't valuable to them, and they seemed uncomfortable with how we would say "we don't know" to, what to them seemed like "self explanatory" questions, like where we live. to us, they were asking us to describe the location we lived in in detail, and our experiences, and also about auto centric design making travel difficult. we didn't know how to answer what they were asking; it was overwhelming and we needed lots of space and time to think about what we wanted to say. masking in this position would be telling them an answer that fits their needs.

if we had told them our address, or the municipality that we lived in, we'd be masking, so that they could get what they wanted. saying those wouldn't satisfy us, and aren't nearly what we want. this can be extended to other feelings really well.

in therapy, we are very physically still, stoic, and we describe our feelings in ways that we think therapist will understand. we've realised last session that this was masking. if we tell our therapist that we're sad, what we're doing is artifically and retroactively trying to shape our feelings to the person we're talking to. we are using "we're sad" in a neurotypical way, so that it's comfortable and easy for our therapist to understand. we aren't sharing what we're actually feeling for the sake of others, and this causes us a great deal of confusion and distress. we think this is also why we're completely still; people aren't "supposed to" move around in therapy room, or, if they do, it is exceptional. our stimming and our focus is treated as exceptional, and it feels like us being autistic is being targeted and novel, when to us it's something we just need to do.

the webpage we read helps us describe this happily. it talks about how allistic people will encourage masking by mis-idenitifying our feelings, and they'll focus on them in an obssessive, unhealthy way. it's confusing and distressing having our feelings mis-identified as others, and we assume that the other person is right, or feel like we're being invaded. it enforces that the "right" thing to do is to act in ways "appropriate for others".

when we say our feelings are inherently valuable and important, a part of that is affirming that what words and ideas mean to us is inherently most important, because that's how they feel to us. internalising that is hard, and important. we don't need others to understand our words, even if they should or have to. what matters most is that we have words to describe ourselves in the first place, and that they're special for us, even if they aren't what we want. we're doing our best to take care of our brain, and that's important. doing this requires so much mindfulness. we wish we had community like the webpage author, we think it would help us be safe so much, and we think we remember part of the reason why so much more concretely now.

it's so hard to remember everything about autistic abuse on our own, and how to pick up when it's happening, and to remind ourselves to stay away from it. it's really important, and community we think used to help us with that a lot. it used to be a lot easier to identify where autistic abuse was, and to tell ourselves to avoid it.

masking is being hurt and punished for expressing our feelings, and it's about being encouraged to act for the sake of others.

the words and ideas allistics have to describe their feelings is very different from what auties have.

auties can't use allistic shortcuts, because auties aren't a part of neurotypical culture.

figuring out our own feelings all on our own is really overwhelming and confusing, and it's so easy to forget the brain shortcuts we already have, since their is a constant pressure to just mask and use allistic words. we need to spend a lot of time thinking about and talking about our feelings for them to eventually become accessible and safe,

if an allistic person asks us how we feel, it's easier to use words that they like and understand intuitively. eventually, we've noticed this stops being a conscious thought, and becomes subconscious. the allistic person has systemically enforced masking to us, and prioritised their dominant culture over marginalised peoples.

we think that, masking makes it really hard to find words accurate to ourselves, and part of why it feels so scary to get caught by. masking is subconcsious, and being mindful takes so much active brain energy that it's discouraging and inaccessible. it's hard to recognise when we are masking, because, we've already long stopped identifying our feelings, to the point where it doesn't feel like we even are having them any more. complete physical stillness, stoic expression, using clean words for allistics.

we think, having our own words is special and important. it helps us. the webpage is really important to us and helps us use words to describe complex thoughts concretely and in a way we understand and like, and it reminded us of something really magical we learned and forgot a long time ago: that have had to learn our feelings all on our own, because we masked when we were younger.

it took us about a year of mostly solitary time, with our only activity being entirely social, with people we liked. this helped us find people who shared important and healthy words, and it also gave us the ability and freedom to explore ourselves truly, and without the pressure to mask, since we were only talking to people we actually liked. we'd prioritise our own feelings over fitting our feelings into something neat and accessible for someone else, and this changed when we forgot to focus on our feelings first, and we relapsed.

we remember the french book teaching us why this was important, at least, why it was so important to find words for our own feelings ( because they're important to us!) (we already knew why masking sucked).

thinking about the causes or motivation behind problems in more depth, rather than stopping at the supposed 'problem'

"I think" is a really powerful phrase for us. it enables us to share things we don't fully understand, and still validates them and makes them valuable. we don't need to know our feelings imediately, all at once. our thoughts are fluid, and so are our experiences, and our lives are iterative. our feelings need to develop over time, and form. it's okay for us to only understand some things or only be able to remember and/or articulate certain things, because we're exploring and learning. we don't need to force ourselves to form a complete and accurate idea all at once.

we forget how we wanted too write this blog post, and no longer feel comfortable with our words, and we think it is healthy to stop writing now.

we're really struggling sharing our feelings.