I’ve just realized something about myself. And the wild thing is that it’s nothing I wasn’t aware of, but it’s not something I ever thought about…it just seemed normal. And that’s why I’m turning this very personal Facebook post into a blog post about autistic masking vs. narcissistic masking.
I am 100% hiding how I feel about things most of the time.
What is coming out is correct, but it does not reflect on how strongly I feel about whatever the thing is. In fact, I even hide it from myself. I am VERY bad about suppressing my own feelings in order to seem more reasonable to everyone.
The upshot is that turns into me basically being able to function in society when I have to.
The downside is that it’s exhausting, and I really, really don’t like how it feels. Sometimes it’s bad enough that it causes physical discomfort, minor headaches…which I don’t get as often as I used to, but I’ve also learned over time that I can even push down how I feel about pushing things down.
And I’m really, really freaking good at it.
I’ve even fooled myself. And now I’m looking at all of it from a more…forgiving (?) perspective (not sure if that’s the word I’m looking for, but it sounds kind of close).
So, for a second, imagine this: you’re in a situation where you cannot show your feelings or you will die. Like that one Monty Python scene. You know the one. I know you know the one I’m talking about. 
You encounter a feeling that sucks. You know that if you show that it sucks, it’s going to upset people, so you just have to suppress the external showing of it. So you downplay it massively. And you still have that feeling inside “oh man, they’re going to know, and YOU KNOW that they will know because you can’t hide that you don’t believe the words coming out, and you know you don’t want to lie about it, so you’d better get used to the idea of being uncomfortable…“
And so you get used to being uncomfortable. And you do this over and over, and suppress the internal warnings over and over until you can’t even recognize that you’re not acting how you were before.
And the worst part is, it’s painfully obvious to people who care about you. So they try to tell you that it’s okay to let out your feelings.
Morgan Freeman Voice: “It was definitely NOT okay.”
So you cover the entire thing in a thick layer of humor. You become the person who will literally joke about anything. Even if it’s not something to joke about. Eventually, you convince yourself that you’re fine because it seems to work. At least it does most of the time. But what do you do when you can’t fool yourself? What do you do when you can’t pretend that you feel some kind of way about something? And what do you do when you know that sharing that, even if asked, will make it worse?
That’s easy. You keep suppressing it until you don’t even recognize that you’re doing it.
It’s just normal for you.
Because that’s how you protect yourself and the people you care about. eventually, you can’t keep it up. It WILL fall apart.
Now multiply this problem by two if you have a relationship.
I would be lying if I said that this can be okay. I don’t know that it can be. Eventually, people end up exhausted because they can’t get through to you because your defenses are so…actually VERY EFFECTIVE…and you can’t really take any of it back. You can’t just stop masking it. That would make everyone believe you’re having some kind of crisis.
Truth is that most every time you encounter something that makes you feel anything at all, it’s a crisis.
But people don’t act that way. So you keep on suppressing. And if any slips out, don’t worry. Someone else will find a way to remind you why you need to suppress how you feel. It’s kind of messed up. And yes, that’s understating.
I think I’ve argued with almost everyone that I’ve ever cared about because I don’t speak your language. The words are similar. The meanings – to me – actually have a very specific meaning, and I have to articulate things accurately to feel that I’m correctly relaying the concept. That exhausts people because they shouldn’t have to sit there and figure it out.
People sometimes want “yes” or “no”, and as we all know sometimes it’s not that simple.
Most of the time it isn’t. And trying to force someone to fit something into a yes/no dichotomy is just building your own narrative. Much like attorneys in court do.
I don’t want to hide how I’m feeling about things anymore, but I don’t have the option to let it all out though.
Ever wonder how messed up the world is when you can be punished for expressing how you feel about things that people do or say to you?
I don’t wonder. It’s not worth a damn.
But that’s how it is. And sometimes we want to function in it, but it isn’t made for people like us.
Ostracism is still a thing.
For me, I’ll just beat them to the punch. But it’s not because I’m selfish…it’s not because I don’t want to hurt (remember, I can even suppress my feelings internally and make myself forget about them…which is NOT good, I know lol)…it’s because I don’t want to make other people uncomfortable about me. And that’s because when people are uncomfortable, they put distance between the thing they’re not comfortable with and themselves. This is just normal behavior. This is nature doing what it does.
Think of it like protective equipment. Like armor, or a firefighter suit. Except you can’t see it, and you cannot take it off because it’s melted to you from the fire outside. It still works, but not optimally anymore, and you need to get out of it because the more it melts, the more it suffocates you. I’m sure you see where this is going.
That’s what I feel. That’s what I do. And I know I am not going to be able to turn it off.
And I know that people, whether they understand or not, will be pushed away by it. (It = the weakened efficacy of the defensive suit allowing feels to leak out, not the suppression).
I had to build my own personality from fragments that I’ve seen over time that I thought were good qualities. I’m not honestly sure how I feel about anything anymore. Well, unless the feeling is strong enough to break through the suppression attempts. Then I’m sure what I feel, but I still cannot convey it to anyone else in any effective way.
That is insanely isolating. Even when you’re with friends.
I don’t hang out with people anymore. I want to. I know I need people around me that are close to my age, share some beliefs or hobbies, etc. But I don’t ask. I feel it’s rude to do so.
If something made me angry, I’d play it down because I didn’t want to show anger because people feel that’s a negative (it isn’t, but I also don’t express anger the way many people do because many people are bad at it). I don’t want to show hurt because people perceive that as being weak.
This has nothing to with how I was raised, for those who may be thinking “oh, this is just old school toxic blah blah blah” because it isn’t. Those people are doing what I mentioned above: trying to establish a binary narrative where they are always correct while ignoring every other bit of nuance, logic, or reason. That’s abhorrent behavior. That’s not even okay.
Why does society think that’s ok?
Because they don’t care about making things better. They care about getting what they want. They want their needs met. And they have no idea what their needs actually are.
Most of the time, what they need isn’t even close to what they say their needs are. That’s because they are actually just choosing not to behave like adults, and they need to justify it to themselves. To do that, they just attack anything that challenges what they WANT to believe, even hard evidence. It’s effective because we avoid things that are uncomfortable (naturally), and they use this defense offensively.
But people won’t call it out. And this brings us full circle, doesn’t it?
We suppress how we feel so we don’t hurt people. Then, evil people take advantage of our perceived weakness (it isn’t weak at all, it’s just that all of the strength goes to holding ourselves back…narcs should take note of that), and they create situations that sound reasonable to people who don’t think like this…and if they did they’d be able to say “that’s bs”.
The problem with people taking advantage of our perceived weakness is that it creates a sort of feedback loop. It can do this with regular people, but it really does it with disordered people. They have to destroy you because you will at some point drop the suppression and lay all of the fallout at their feet if they don’t.
At least that’s what they feel about it.
And they’re really good at convincing you that you’re safe talking to them.
You aren’t.
How can this be fixed?
Everyone needs to stop simplifying their conversations. Talk about nuance of politics and religion. Get used to having to work out complex and uncomfortable problems. NO IT’S NOT COMFORTABLE. GROW THE HELL UP.
Right now I imagine someone I’ve described saying “How dare you tell me to grow up?? *angry greta noises* That’s insulting!”
No. It’s objective.
Here’s an example of insulting: “You’re wrong. You just like supporting [bad people doing bad things].” That’s totally invalidating everything they say! And this makes people inclined to narcissism feel better about themselves.
It’s masking.
Just like with autism, except it’s malicious and it’s external. You’re trying to hide that you are so full of self hate and so convinced – not that you are right, but that you are ENTITLED TO BEING RIGHT – so you must attack anything that challenges it.
And that’s the difference between a personality disorder and something like autism, which is more of a problem interfacing with everything. Or ADHD, which is a neurological flaw that affects certain areas of the brain, like the prefrontal cortex, that causes it to basically misfire.
The stupidly watered down version of this is what you might get from a narcissist: “Everyone is valid, so you shouldn’t criticize anyone ever, because you don’t know what they’re going through.”
The non-manipulative version: “People have problems. You should be considerate. If they open up, listen. Be kind. You don’t have to agree. You don’t have to condone. But you can disagree and disapprove without being cruel to someone.”
Another take from the narc perspective:
“If everyone is super, no one will be.” – Syndrome,
The IncrediblesWe currently live in a society that somehow ended up with a mutually assured destruction element built in, but not for real threats to safety or security…but for pushing away anything that makes us feel uncomfortable at all…even if it’s internal. ESPECIALLY if it’s internal.
That’s not sustainable.
This will NEVER work.
It will ALWAYS break.
Deep down…every one of you knows this.
Humans didn’t change. Attitudes did.
Fix the attitudes.
Now, back on topic.
Autistic Masking.
Thing is, I’m not ever going to be normal. I am going to try to suppress less. I know this is going to upset people. I would say I don’t care. I think some of you know me well enough to know that there’s a couple layers to me saying “I don’t care.”
- It could mean I don’t care.
- It could mean I don’t accept what you’re saying.
- It could mean I don’t have a strong preference.
- It could mean I would rather defer to what someone else wants because I care about them and want them to have what they want and I’m not concerned with how that works out for me. This is the one I operate on most often.
Anyway. I’ll post more later. I used to L O V E writing things.
I began to hate it when it became something other people hated me doing.