The Mask
When all you have known about yourself is crashed into by one word. Autistic. It isn’t as if the word has never been spoken around you, however it has never been spoken about you. You truly wonder why, considering you are in your 30’s and it hasn’t been spotted by the ones who are supposed to be closest to you. But I guess it does make sense after you find out what masking is all about. You aren’t legitimately wearing a mask as you think of this phenomenon. It’s almost one of those figures of speech that you just can’t grasp the way other people do. Then the realization happens and all thoughts of normal are expelled. Being different from everyone is your normal. You have always failed to meet the expectations of the people around you because after an entire day of just attempting to remain invisible, the facade falls and you are faced with the truth yet again as you try to sit in the darkness of your bedroom and drown out all the chaos you must live amongst. You want to find solace in a quiet that does not exist as you look into nothing, feel only the unmoving things around you and smell the familiar scent of your bedroom closet. Then, you hear your name being screamed up the stairs as if she has wrenched the foul name from her chest and thrown it at you. It explodes within your bubble, and you are forced back to the reality of being alive twenty years before the word was ever spoken about you.
The word autism and all that it spells out when you look up the signs as an adult female. The times in your life that you were grounded from books and not allowed into the calm escape your provided by your bedroom. It isn’t as if you were a terrible kid. You were difficult. You corrected grown-ups for grammar or literacy. You didn’t let something go when you knew it wasn’t correct. You never came home drunk or high like most of the others in your generation of teenagers did.
And now that I have a miniature of myself in a lot of ways, I know without a shadow of a doubt that I was a difficult child to raise. Yet, for the life of me, I also know that the form of “ABA therapy” that I endured, would be considered abuse in every form of the word. The torment I endured as a child is something I keep in mind every day when interacting with my daughter because I won’t have her growing up in a home she feels the need to escape from. Instead, I make sure she has the space to take that mask off and be herself without the need to hunker down in an eight-foot by six-foot room without anyone around who understands her needs.
It didn’t matter that there were no outlets for your TV or radio to be plugged into. It didn’t matter that the only electricity in your escape powered one naked lightbulb in your ceiling. The only items that truly mattered to you were all needed to create safety. The empty doorway covered by a sarong kept the heat in because the air conditioner made you shiver. The closet was comfortable and made you feel enclosed (it was the kitchen cabinets when you were younger). The CD player / Walkman that you got from a family friend played one song over and over on repeat to drown out the cacophony downstairs. The pencils to draw or a Robert Jordan book in your hands led you to another place and time where you weren’t thinking about the next time you would have to babysit or endure ten chaotic kids in the living room watching the godawful SpongeBob marathon on nickelodeon. It didn’t matter that the walls had no paint or wallpaper, nor did it matter that you had to go to work in two hours. That calm was what you needed before going back to the world that you lived in, yet didn’t feel as if you belonged.
I am sure many have similar stories. Especially when you have a similar lack of body language perception as I do. Most of my life I have had similar comfort needs. Right now, I am sitting in my bedroom typing and it’s only the sound of the keys typing these words that I can hear. As an adult I have the control I need to make sure that there is safety in my home where anyone can go to find calm. My calm has always been my room, and I have added my craft room to it when my bedroom isn’t giving off the “right vibes.”
There are so many things that are on that list that if anyone looked into and saw, they might have understood me better as a kid. Then again, in the early 90’s the diagnosis of Aspergers was not something with a good outlook. Hell, if a particular person had known that diagnosis, it would have been used as a way to ensure that her hooks stayed in me for good. For today though, I am just going to look back at a few of the misconceptions that were placed on me.
“You have a terrible case of selective hearing.” In reality I was hyper-focusing on something so hard that I truly didn’t hear the words that were spoken to me. To this day, my husband will ask me a question while I am in the middle of something I am doing and because he knows and accepts me, only smiles and shakes his head in wonder at my response to the question he had asked me five or ten minutes earlier. When he didn’t get an answer, he assumed that I was unresponsive or as he calls it, “in your head” and decided to ask the question again when I was in the “here and now.”
“You only start crying when you are lying.” The reality is my absolute aversion to confrontation to an extent that I have anxiety attacks. My ability to lie with any form of conviction is slim to none, which is something that still confounds me to this day. When my husband and I disagree, I leave him alone until we can discuss it because quite honestly, I become defensive and immediately want to make him feel at ease again. He accepts that I am flawed as I accept that he is. If someone comes up to me and begins yelling, or I become frustrated because I don’t have the quickness to explain myself as they do, I just start crying. It isn’t as if I can help it, so I do everything I can to avoid the situations at all costs.
“You rat yourself out every time.” What is slightly comical about this conundrum is that it is true yet isn’t at the same time. I have a tendency to overshare EVERYTHING. My closest friends can attest to this. My overshare is not an admittance of guilt though, as my husband explained normal people will think. My ability and compulsion to spill every detail down to the times and placement of my body in comparison to others around me is not a guilty conscious at work, nor is it my overcompensating for words I have left out. It is an absolute and unequivocal play by play of the events that have transpired since I last saw the person I am speaking to. It happens when I am in pretty much any social situation, especially with regard to people with whom I have a tendency to want to please. Thank goodness my husband explained this tidbit of information to me though, because I look back to all the times I spoke to certain people, and I bet some of them who claimed they knew me thought as he said. I don’t need the people who would think that of me in my life.
“You can’t clean.” This one is especially funny. It isn’t that I CAN’T clean or that I am horrible at it. The problem lies with my want to get “everything done” and then in the end having “done everything some.” There are times when I am on my game and everything looks amazing (when I start in one corner of the house and do a full sweep of EVERYTHING") and there are times when I have that intention, but something pulls me from the hyperfocus on cleaning and draws me into a hyperfocus on something else (like a shopping list or starting the laundry). I will get some of the major things done, but not all of what would denote the room as perfect. It is definitely something that I have been working on.
I feel that as a first post, I have kind of given a peek into my mind. My intention is to get at least one post published a week. I drive CDL without an absolute schedule, so if there are any times that you see I haven’t posted, feel free to check in with me. I am always up for a nudge to write. I work like so many others of us and create as a way to keep myself in check. I almost want to use this blog as a form of diary, yet I want to ensure that I keep everyone who reads it in mind as well.
That being said, if there are ever any triggers, I am hoping that I have enough sense to put a warning before the post. I do have some really messed up things in my past that I may touch on.
If for any reason I do trigger anyone without a warning, PLEASE let me know so that I can add the warning up top. My contact page does send me an email to notify me of any submissions, and I am the last person who would want anyone to spiral from what I have been through. It’s bad enough when I go down what I consider a rabbit hole, and I don’t want to bring anyone with me.
