It really is more than code-switching. It’s creating an entire artificial personality tailored to be non offensive and accepted to the social setting. There is nothing of me in that personality. I would sit off to the side in the director’s box, constantly watching for anything and everything that would give me information to feed to the actor that was actually running my body.
It’s functional, it can be so functional. But no one ever knew anything about the real me. That’s lonely, no matter how functional you are. It’s not that it’s too much work, it’s that it’s completely hollow and empty work.
Gosh, I’m really sorry that you went through that. I think a large part of what saved me from being desperately unhappy is that I went to a magnet school for my last two years of high school, where I hung out with a group of kids who were all very accepting of what, now I look back on it, was indeed a very neurodiverse and often neurodivergent group (though I think there were some kids who were probably neurotypical). So I was able to be “the real me” around them. I didn’t know how to mask at that point in my life anyway, so what you saw was pretty much what you got, and I got to experience that people would be my friends anyway.
Also – to @DemonTree 's point – I’m not pretending to be a different person – now that I am a middle-aged person, part of what’s going on is that I actually do find a large number of topics, especially people-based ones, much more interesting than I did when I was a teenager. I’m more interested in what people say about their kids and their parents and their families because now I have my own kids and my own aging parents. I’m more interested in people talking about buying a house and what their business is and their hobbies even when their hobbies or business are things I’m not interested in, because hey, maybe my kid will be interested, maybe I’ll be interested someday, or maybe it’s related to a subject that I am or should be interested in.
Now… that’s not everything, of course. A few years ago my kid was in a swank private school for a year or two where the mothers tended to talk about things like their exercise routine and beauty care, and okay, yeah, I’m just… never gonna be interested in that, sorry. I did not succeed socially in that environment at all.
Haha, yeah, that’s a flaw of mine. I’m always looking for excuses (it’s a tendency I constantly have to fight), so no surprise my brain latched onto this as well.
Yeah, what you are/were doing is qualitatively different from what I am doing (which is really more like code-switching than your experience, although the way I talk about it to my kid is more like “it’s fine to send whatever messages you want with subtextual and nonverbal communciation, but you should know what messages you’re sending and not unintentionally send messages you don’t want to send”). It sounds terrible and I’m sorry you had to learn how to do that.
And you are awesome for that, because what my parents would say is, “Why do you have to be so difficult?”
Even if you had no more awareness of the topic, just knowing that they aren’t doing it to try to be difficult puts you far ahead. Being met with understanding rather than judgement in at least one place in their life could make all the difference.
Again, same! It’s funny because my therapist wants me to write about stuff that’s actually happened to me. I wrote something for her yesterday that said, “The only way I know how to communicate what this felt like is through my fiction. I’m not writing about the exact same experience, but I’m writing about the same feeling.”
And I’m bored to tears trying to write about my own trauma. I’d rather express and process those experiences through fiction. Trauma is heavily thematic in my work but it’s not like I’ve ever been a secret revolutionary who killed her brother and fled the country. But when I look at that storyline I see where my personal experience influenced it.
Fiction is my special interest and I would be an absolute crazy person without it.
Nearly everything you say I feel like I could copy and paste it as my own story. Writing is actually my weakest skill. I was always graded high for the content but low on the grammar and punctuation. I enjoy writing because I don’t feel so rushed to express a thought. I don’t have to worry about boring someone.
We’ve gotten to where I can talk about and write about things directly, but for quite a while at the beginning, we actually did explore some things through my creative writing, as that’s where I had stored my emotions and personality.
Led to IFS therapy for a while, which actually really helped as I found my fictional characters to be stand ins for both my personality and my defensive mechanisms, and sorting through that mess made a huge difference.
Most of them I didn’t even realize at the time, but looking back, I see what they meant and symbolized, even if they don’t make a lot of sense to someone without context. For instance, a character’s first battle, where she killed for the first time, and how she felt after, represents something entirely different to me.
Absolutely, I really only ever experienced emotions through fiction. Either reading it or writing it. Never quite knew what to do with them in real life, though.
Yikes, that was ‘therapy’?! It sounds awful, I’m sorry that happened to you.
I suppose a message board selects for people who are good at and enjoy writing. One of the reasons I started posting was to improve my writing skills; when I started I couldn’t even read my own posts back after clicking ‘reply’ because I was too embarrassed, but now sometimes I even feel like I’ve done a good job - so it did work.
Very true. I think I’ve been guilty of this as well. But it’s extremely unhelpful; mutual understanding can be difficult enough without purposely reading uncharitably.
This was the really useful part of my kid getting diagnosed, because even though she’s very much like me, she’s a bit further out on the spectrum, and especially when she was younger (and of course my memories of being very young are much more vague) it was really good to have the knowledge that she wasn’t melting down to try to be difficult.
My parents were a lot more like yours. I guess even though I wasn’t much good at masking with my peers as a kid, I got pretty good at hiding myself from my parents. But I never wanted that for my kids.
I don’t think I’m so disconnected from sharing my personality with people close to me, but I’ve definitely gotten surprise at how dark and visceral and violent my work is. It’s hopeful, too, because it’s ultimately about love and healing, but my writing is too much for some people. And you would never guess it from knowing me.
You know I’ve struggled for a long time with people not connecting to my female protagonist. It occurred to me recently that she’s too much like me, lol. All of my characters are extremely candid but it reads better from a man - they love my male protagonist despite his massive character flaws. Some people really don’t know how to handle a woman who is that direct.
I scored kinda high on the CAT-Q which surprised me. It’s supposed to measure masking. I’ve never felt good at that. Maybe I got points for trying.
Late 80’s early 90’s, not a licensed therapist, just the vice principal and teachers who had taken some sort of seminar or something. Had me do things like write apologies to my bullies and have me read them in front of the class, then not react with anger when they rejected my apology and piled on with the insults. I learned how to not look angry, anyway.
I actually still have the notes from those sessions. My therapist calls them barbarians. They may have even meant well, but they had no idea what they were doing.
It’s the only place where I can complete a thought. I may not be able to make you read the whole thing, but at least you can’t interrupt me mid sentence. I have been far more real here than I ever was in real life. I’ve talked about things here that I didn’t even broach with most people, it was actually a fairly useful outlet.
Yeah, and it’s one of the reasons why I stopped. I’d always wonder what part of my post someone would find a way to take exception to… but it usually ended up being something I didn’t even think of.
And it goes far beyond here or even social media in general. The world is simply a more hostile place when misunderstanding is something to be exploited rather than resolved.
I stopped sharing most of my writing a long time ago when people would say, “Ummm, what’s wrong with you?” My themes tend to be uplifting, but my villains are extremely evil, and quite creative. Evil being defined as deriving pleasure from the suffering of others.
Saw was gory, but it wasn’t very creative at all…
Most of my protagonists tend to be women, and what little feedback I’ve gotten seems to be that they are reasonably well written. But 80% of what I read is written by women with a female protagonist, so I’m biased that way.
Of course, what I write are almost always fantasy settings, (and sometimes the woman is actually a goddess) so expectations may not be quite the same.
Masking is also from yourself. I assumed I was on the autistic spectrum long ago, but I thought at the time, as has been kinda implied in this thread, isn’t everyone?
It wasn’t until someone who knew that they were doing started poking around up there that I realized just how much I had buried and erased myself.
Turns out, at the center, there’s a drunk racoon that just wants to dance, who would have thought?
I really did not wish to annoy you - or anyone (at least in this thread! ;)) And “not wrong about everything” is just about the nicest thing that has been said about me lately!
Now I don’t. But I was not clear before I posted initially.
I’m not suggesting that ANYONE in this thread is overstating their condition, pursuing any secondary gain, or is doing anything other than their best. My personal opinion - which may be mistaken, tho I think it has SOME merit - is that the same could not be said about EVERY SINGLE PERSON who describes themself as neurodivergent or experiencing some other emotional condition.
As I’ve expressed before, I find it challenging to figure out how to assess such presentations. I have to do it as part of my job, and I perceive the desire to do so in my personal life. Anyone can certainly present themselves however they wish, but I do not believe complete reliance solely on an individual’s subjective statements is always desirable.
I do not wish to impugn ALL mental health care providers. But I often see records where counselors seem willing to provide years of “empathetic listening” for as long as an individual’s insurance/copays last. Yes, I think there is value in discussing one’s mental health, emotions, reactions, etc. I periodically think that one reason some folk seek out counselors is because they lack intelligent, reasonable, well-meaning folk elsewhere in their lives - friends and family.
At times I wonder how well an individual might be able to function is SOMEONE did not contribute to an environment that allowed them to present in the manner that they do. No, it is not enough to simply say, “Get off the couch and get a job!” But that can be one element.
As I’ve said before (and some of you may have noticed), at times I often do not understand how other people think and act. Believe me, I have wondered if that suggests some pathology. At one time I asked a counselor I was seeing whether I had a personality disorder, or was depressed or on the spectrum. He said no, but I did have things to work through. I continue to do so. I guess I COULD have just kept trying different counselors until I found one who was willing to assign me a pathology…
PLEASE note the generous use of qualifiers - some, etc. I am not intending to speak ill of anyone in this thread. Or to deny that mental illness can be very impactful. I find this discussion very useful. I apologize if I hijacked the thread. If folk would prefer, I’m happy to withdraw.
I’ve mentioned this before, but a short snippet of conversation several years back blew my goddamn mind. I was chatting with a friend at my favorite annual event (about 50 of us rent a state park’s summer-camp facility for a long weekend, and spend the weekend playing games and hanging out by the campfire and cooking for each other and it’s glorious). We were talking about the quirky personalities there, and he chuckled, looked me in the eye, and said, “I don’t think there’s a single neurotypical person here.”
That’s the first time I ever thought that I might not be neurotypical: I’d tended to think that “neurodivergent” meant someone who was unable to participate in basic social activities or self-care. If you could get married and hold down a job and engage in small-talk, you weren’t neurodivergent.
Since then, though, I’ve had a much more expansive view of it. Coupled with the idea that neurodivergence isn’t necessarily a disability, I wonder whether the question isn’t so much “am I neurodivergent?” but “In what ways do I diverge from the neurotypical?”
Asking that question about someone else, not in a way to judge or diagnose, but in an attempt to understand better where they’re coming from, gives me a lot more patience with the folks around me; and asking the question about myself helps me not be ashamed of some of my weirdness.
At the same time, I worry that this approach might minimize or marginalize folks for whom their divergences cause more serious difficulties in life than my divergences do. I don’t have a clear answer.
Asked seriously - if 50 out of 50 folk are neurodivergent, what does that say about the term? Is neurotypical just some Platonic ideal that no one attains, but we all compare our individual divergence to? Or did you 50 divergents somehow self select?
To me, there is a meaningful difference between having a “quirky personality” and being neurodivergent. But I may be misunderstanding the term.
I will say this. My niece is agoraphobic, she’s afraid to leave the house. I understand that… OTOH, so am I, but I also got kicked out of my house at 18, so I kinda had no choice. She is still living with my sister at 24 and babysitting for neighbors. I owned my own house by then.
There is a middle ground to be had between coddling and ignoring, though. I get that since you live in a binary world of choosing whether or not someone deserves govt benefits, you don’t have the choice of seeing that nuance, but that’s really what almost all of us want.
The nature of how our benefits system works is pretty arbitrary, and I think that your attitude is more a reflection of that system than about the challenges that are actually facing the people you have to make decisions as to their ability to continue to live.
People are going to game the system, that’s the nature of systems. There is benefit in ensuring that the system is not cheated, but not at the cost of the people who genuinely need it, nor at the cost of others that are at its periphery.
If I had had more accommodations would I have been as “successful” in material sense? Maybe not. But, I may not have lived in misery that everyone saw as success either. Where’s the balance on that?
Given the length of waiting lists to see a therapist (and I’m not talking about Better “Help” here), they don’t need your payments, there’s someone else ready to take that spot.
Unless you actually know what’s being discussed in those sessions, you really have no call to be judging what they are about. Maybe that’s what the patient needs is empathetic listening. God knows this world is short of that.
Sometimes there is that. And it’s also that the “intelligent, reasonable, well-meaning folk elsewhere in their lives” have useless platitudes and generic advice, but are completely unable to help, and their attempts at doing so make things so much worse.
And if they are lacking those people in their lives, who else would they reach out to? Social media?
This - the whole thread, diagnosis, etc - has been a lot for me to process, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense.
Just moving through my day at work today, I could see more clearly than ever where the mismatch was, where I fit, where I didn’t, and how I was compensating.
Also my executive function is falling apart. It was learning about “autistic burnout” that made me seek evaluation in the first place. It’s characterized by sudden loss of ability to function, markedly decreased executive function and increased sensory sensitivities. It describes the last eight months, it describes that time I missed work last month, and it describes this week. I’m struggling so much this week I feel absolutely useless. And I just got assigned a lot more work. I want to crawl into a dark hole and never come out. These past two months are the first time I’ve been genuinely scared of not being able to hold down this job.
It’s a very scary feeling because it feels like my brain and body are shutting down. When I first experienced it, I thought I needed to go to a psych hospital or something. Then I heard someone describe it as a hard reboot, and I felt better. “Have you tried turning it off and then on again?”
Probably not a bad idea. It actually sounds like the last few months before my incident. I was struggling quite a bit to keep everything running, as well as not letting anyone see that I was struggling. It didn’t matter how hard it was to get out of bed, I can’t miss work, or at least that’s what I thought.
My social life had also become more complicated, not in a bad way, but at the time, it also increased my tension.
Then I had a hard reboot in the Meijer parking lot. I’m just glad they were able to turn it back on again.
I wouldn’t consider the term “neurodivergent” to be a clinical term unless it is being used to describe a disorder. In common parlance, it pretty much means “quirky personality”. In a clinical setting, about 1/5 of all individuals would qualify as having neurodivergent disorders.
Perhaps that’s where the confusion comes from? It’s kind of like the term narcissist. I hear that term thrown out all over the place when a very tiny part of society actually has a narcissistic disorder. It is quite possible that a term like “neurodivergent” is thrown around in a similar fashion.
The term “Neurodivergent” came from the popular book Neurotribes which was largely about self-advocacy that recognized ADHD and autism as natural human differences in pushback against the medical model.
There are people who believe that the only thing that makes ADHD and autism a disorder is the lack of accomodations for their differences.
“Neurodivergent” hit TikTok like a mack truck and suddenly everyone and their mother was using to describe not just ADHD and autism but psychiatric illness, too.
It’s important to note that this paradigm is in opposition to the DSM medical model. And in some cases denies that autism is a disability at all. Most of the people making this argument are Level 1s.
Interestingly, a lot of therapists have picked up on this self-advocacy language and will make the diagnosis but frame everything in a positive way. Even my husband lectured me yesterday about using ASD as opposed to “autistic.”
I personally think both are true. It can be a cool difference and it can be a disability. The medical model can be valid and also we need to be more accommodating. Etc.
It’s also important to note that labels and diagnosis are almost never actually talked about in session. It has it uses for paperwork, but a label does nothing for the actual individual.
People in the industry don’t entirely agree on terminology already, so when it comes into popular culture, it’s all over the place.
And I have to say that the South Park episode “Assburgers” did a huge amount of damage. Those who legitimately identified with it suddenly felt ashamed, and everyone that wanted to use it as an excuse had material.
