A #thread about #autism and #masking, #camouflaging, #compensation.
I don’t like any of these terms. Masking implies deliberate, deceitful disguise. Camouflaging conjures up images of greasy face paint. Compensation reinforces the idea of deficits, of us lacking something.
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It’s important to think about who came up with masking theory. Not autistic people ourselves. It’s a way in which neurotypical people describe how hard we can be to read. How our true feelings may be hidden. How we may go unnoticed and undiagnosed for decades.
#AllAutistics
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I can only speak from personal experience. As a very young child I felt free and unselfconscious. I don’t remember putting on anything apart from party frocks and fancy dress. But I felt uncomfortable posing for photographs, holding a smile, unsure how to make my face look.
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As I got older life became more complicated. I was supposed to know what other people thought. Sometimes they didn’t read my good intentions. Misunderstandings might easily arise. If they did I couldn’t explain what had happened, but I felt mortified. That wasn’t what I meant.
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To minimise the distress of myself and others I became adept at trying to predict what would happen in groups. I said relatively little but smiled a lot. I would only contribute to discussions if I was sure about what I wanted to say. I preferred talking about factual things.
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I wasn’t consciously masking, camouflaging or compensating, but I didn’t feel free to be open, natural and unguarded. If I was people sometimes reacted strangely. It seemed perfectly normal to me to talk about things that broke unwritten social rules. So I tended to hold back.
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I wasn’t told directly what I’d done wrong. That would have been far, far better. Instead it was a look, a sideways glance at someone or a sigh. Negative judgements were being made about me. I was just a soul whose intentions were good, and who didn’t want to be misunderstood.
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As a teenager I consciously decided not to follow the crowd. I couldn’t identify with trends I was supposed to be following. I would probably have been more at home in the sixties than the seventies. I did my own thing, mostly on my own, so I was easy bait for bullies.
#autism
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Keeping myself to myself and smiling to show I meant no-one any harm wasn’t enough to save me from bullies. Instead it identified me as a target. They knew which buttons to press to get a reaction. To stop it I had to be impassive and learn to hide the hurt.
#autism
#autistic
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I’d walked confidently onto a large stage aged three. A magician gave me a balloon and as I walked back down the whole audience started laughing. My attention was on my beautiful balloon. I didn’t notice him tie on a long string of balloons that I was pulling along behind me.
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By the time I was a teenager I was acutely self conscious. I had intensely focused interests and I missed social messages. Shyness enveloped me like the huge cloak I wore. Dressing eccentrically made me much more comfortable. Maybe this was why people looked at me strangely.
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At University I found a few people who were a bit like me. That’s the advantage of having a much bigger pool to fish in. I feel so sorry for autistic students who have started university penned into shared accommodation because of Covid. I searched far and wide for friends.
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Although I was agonisingly shy and painfully homesick some of the time there was a certain freedom in being a student. Friendships were quite fluid and undemanding. There were different clusters of people to spend time with and plenty of solitude, once I had a room of my own.
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I never identified with the phrase “problems making eye contact” but in seminars in small rooms with several other people something used to happen that I thought of as “my eyes going funny”. It only occurred to me after my autism diagnosis that this was what it was.
#autistic
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I felt unbearably exposed and scrutinised with other people looking at me. The same thing would happen at events which were small enough for me to be noticed by the people around me. I’d get the urge to escape from the room just to relieve the pressure. I wanted to be hidden.
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