Masking: Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t
I am glad to find authors here on Medium who as if take words out of my mouth. Makes my own thinking clearer. This entry will be my reflections upon reading posts such as this one.
Yes, difficulty in socializing rather follows from our different then expected presentation to others. Loss of meaningful connection usually follows, but not inevitably. It does depend on the other person’s ability to be flexible, to become genuinely interested in the person behind an awkward façade. It does depend on the allistic counterpart’s level of incisiveness. I find plenty of supportive evidence to that in my life.
Masking is grueling, yes, but does it at least help us in our socializing?
In my case, masking failed to be a breakthrough in my socializing. I came up with it as a young adult. Learned being pleasant, smiling on camera, things like that. It was quite an improvement from my school years.
Let me compare these 2 periods in my life, one without masking, one with masking.
So, at school I was bad at masking, and was that loner, standing apart from peers at school recesses. I must admit, I escaped the wrath of bullying. There was little picking on me.
There was some socializing with a few girls up to about grade 3. We were going to each other’s places, were into cartoon posters collecting. I remember first and last names for some of them. I was at my most natural behavior with them.
How did it end? Oh, I remember what happened. Those girls went to a different class… That’s when the loner years started. I felt the most miserable, when our class went to some outside activity, and we were supposed to go in pairs. I was always walking alone at the end of the cue. I tried to look nonchalant about it.
I must’ve looked weird, or at least gave off weird vibes, because I do remember shushed smirks, slant glances at me. No teacher ever thought to intervene. Why would they? No commotion requiring attention was happening. Talking of dealing with anxiety. I mastered the art of keeping still and not producing any outbursts of anxiety since early childhood! All this “keep calm” self help, all that therapy for dealing with stress — that was the last thing I needed. I mastered that art on my own. I only went into meltdown on a few rare occasions in whole life.
May be that first mastering of self control is a requisite for successful masking later?
What made me look weird must’ve been not looking in the eyes. That I did not do at all. How do I know? Because the difficulty of remembering faces ensued. Think of how people appear to someone who doesn’t do eye contact. No how! The faces are just not passing view screen. That’s may be the cause for that “partial” prosopagnosia, that is co-morbid to autism?
There was some attempt to push me into my peers’ society. I was elected to certain volunteer leadership positions. If it was an attempt by the teachers to “get me out of my shell” or something, it was futile. If a child has no idea they even need to look in the eyes of the peers, if the child vaguely remembers faces of their classmates, let alone socializes with them, then the child certainly has no idea how to lead. It’s not like I’ve been reading up on leadership for dummies, but I am sure the first step is to know your peers, to develop strong relationship with them. Right?
I think I was once elected to some school level position. And they tried to make me speak at some all-school gathering. I did it. Somehow. Employed my self developed coping with being overwhelmed technics. Which for me was: take out of your mind all external stimuli, think of people around you as static dots. Concentrate inward, make yourself speak. Eyes have no function as you do it, so park them somewhere in lower left corner. I nailed it! And was never elected anywhere again.
I don’t know if the teachers at my school even thought of me. At the time I was under impression nobody notice anything unusual about me. Nobody spoke directly to me, about me. I now wonder, may be there was some concealed attention? May be those teachers were noticing my struggles and tried to orchestrate something for me, unbeknownst to me? I will never know.
But I want to tell to anyone who fathoms an idea of surreptitious intervention. If your subject is a fully conscious, normal IQ human being, please, talk to them, explain to them what you think is wrong with them. Point out things they may be don’t realize yet. Ask them how they feel, give them a sense that someone cares. For me, that in itself would do wonders.
That was a review of how was it for me during no masking years at school. Then I managed to enter a university. That was in Russia, 1985. Soviet Union had free higher education for everyone. All you needed to do to enter is pass exams. So I did.
I have a few pictures saved from the period, and I now look at myself as if from fresh perspective. I definitely learned to smile on camera. And occasionally, I would mingle at some campus social life events. I pulled off looking “nice” whenever situation obliged.
What did I gain by newly acquired niceness? Not much. It allowed me to sail through life without adverse attention. Meaning, people were pleasant with me. The shunning away as from a weirdo was gone. But that was it.
I never managed to break through to the next energy level in socializing (electrons in atom analogy came to mind). That next level in relationships with people is when you get past the niceties and start developing mutual draw to each other. When you control and direct this process, it’s called “networking”, I guess.
My experience with the niceties from that time on was that it lead me nowhere. One minute I am mingling with someone, have my pictures taken by somebody, apparently. Next, I am alone, made no plans for upcoming holidays. Again, trying my best to be nonchalant about it.
Some circumstances were conducive to not making friends. Why necessarily the dorm rooms were occupied at 3 girls per room? Naturally it followed, that the two with who I roomed were best friends between each other. And yes, they were nice to me, but no friends of mine.
My university years were the origin story of that phenomenon, that was plaguing me ever since. The one I call “oil and water”. I first mentioned it in this post: Running to the Hills From a “Welcome” Sign. I will be expanding on this subject, which seems important to me, in future posts.
For now, I will conclude, that masking does not ensure meaningful socializing. It only makes you looking non-weird, at first glance, upon tremendous effort.
At all points in my life, masking or not, if someone would make an effort to get to know me, then I would make a good, loyal friend. It’s not like we, aspies, are unable to be good friends in general.
