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Since I got the autism diagnosis I've been trying to reflect on the things that I do to mask, or pass as neurotypical, so that I can make a more considered decision about whether I want to continue doing them and in what circumstances. But it's quite complicated, because I've been doing it for the better part of four decades, and it's now very difficult to pick apart "this is subconcious masking, but still comes with a cost", "this is actually my natural behaviour", and "this is just part of human social behaviour and is something that has a cost for neurotypicals as well, but we all do it to make interactions run more smoothly".
I'm going to talk a bit about where I've got to so far, but before I get to that, something that I would find useful is comments from other autistic people (or people who think they might be autistic but haven't pursued a formal diagnosis) about the things that you do to mask, or things that you have done in the past but don't do any more.
So, I'm going to start with the stuff that I don't do, (which is of course all the stuff that gives me imposter syndrome about my diagnosis, but I think I'm more likely to work through that by acknowledging it that ignoring it). I don't have much in the way of sensory issues to mitigate. I sometimes find that I'm more aware of and distracted by background noises than other people, but actually a lot of the time I tune them out quite effectively (I think this might be a benign interaction with the ADHD, where the hyperfocus from the one brainweird mitigates a symptom of the other.) I don't stim, or at least, I'm not consciously aware of a drive to do so, although I've seen other autistic people talking about starting to do so deliberately post-diagnosis and finding it soothing, so I may explore that when I'm feeling socially overloaded and see what happens. I don't find eye-contact painful or unpleasant, although I do find that when I'm talking to someone who isn't a close friend I can become hyper aware of it, which is a bit stressful.
I do, and this is something I only realised last night, flap. Or at least I do when I'm alone and suppress the urge when I'm not. I'm probably going to stop that suppression.
When I'm interacting with people I have a constant calculation going on in the back of my head about whether what I'm about to say is appropriate to the context that I'm in and the level of intimacy I have with the people I'm interacting with. This is pretty tiring, and the amount of work it takes correlates strongly with the number of people in the conversation and inversely with how close to them I am. I don't think I could choose to stop doing this even if I wanted to (and I probably don't want to) but I would like to continue to reduce the frequency with which I'm in situations where it's particularly hard work.
I find it difficult to pretend that my emotional response is other than what it is - things like appearing interested when I'm bored, hiding when I'm irritated, damping down excessive enthusiasm. I suspect this is something that everyone finds a bit challenging, and I don't actually know whether it's harder for me than for NTs, but I think it might be. I think this is probably something I still want to do sometimes, especially in professional contexts, but I might want to try to do it less in social contexts, particuarly with people I can trust to gently tell me if I'm becoming abrasive.
I find one particular kind of task-switching very difficult indeed. It was actually when I discovered that this was a common autistic trait that I first started to wonder if I was actually autistic rather than just socially incompetent. I'm fine with multi-tasking between lots of similar activities - so when I'm cooking, for example, I can manage several threads at once. What I find really painfully jarring is turning social mode on and off. This means that if I'm in the middle of something and someone interrupts me then it takes all the self-control I have not to snap at them to leave me alone. It also takes me quite a while to get back to whatever I was doing after an interruption, but because I can do that transition at my own pace it's not unpleasant, just time consuming. This is occasionally a difficulty at work, but actually in my current role I don't get interrupted very often and interactions with colleagues are generally instigated by me, so again, I can do the transition at my own pace. It's definitely something to be aware of for future roles though. Mostly when I'm in social situations it's not a problem because I have social mode permanently on, so the main place where it comes out is at home when I'm doing my own thing and Ramesh (or less frequently Robert) wants something. It used to be one of the biggest causes of conflict in the relationship with Ramesh, and although we've got a lot (really a lot) better at managing it now, I think there might be some small tweaks we can make that would improve things even further.
I'm really bad at remembering names and also somewhat faceblind. Generally I try to cover for this and find some way to be reminded of their names and who they are without letting on that I've forgotten. I think I might try being more willing to admit that I've forgotten, and perhaps say explicitly that it's an autism thing. I think I might also ask Mthr Alice if we can reinstate the board of photos of members of the congregation, but this time with name labels, because church is very definitely the environment where I most often catch myself thinking "I've known you for months, and you've told me at least three times, how can I have forgotten your name?"
I find turn-taking in conversations with more than one other person a mystery. Especially because as far as I can tell, the norms about when it's okay to interrupt and when it's okay to ignore someone interrupting you and just keep on talking vary massively from group to group and from context to context. I read recently on twitter that neurotypicals do quite a lot of the communication about whose turn it is to speak using eye-contact, which is clearly just cheating. How much I mask this already depends on how comfortable I feel in a group, so I think with my close friends I don't worry too much about the rules, and probably sometimes come across as quite interrupty, but I think also we have a fairly interrupt-friendly norm, so its not too abrasive. (I would be interested in other people's perceptions of me in this regard.) With less familiar social situations I mostly mask by just not saying anything. Which is effective, but also makes socialising in groups even less appealing, because I can't really participate. In work and similar contexts I mostly stay quiet, and hope that that buys me enough social capital than it doesn't matter too much if I speak out of turn when I've got something important that I need to say. I don't think I particularly want to change strategies here, except again by minimising the frequency with which I'm in the situations where it matters.
There are a couple of circumstances that sometimes make me unreasonably anxious - unfamiliar social situations where I think there might be rules that I haven't understood, and being asked to make a decision (generally a fairly inconsequential one) where on some level I suspect that there's a right and a wrong answer and I will be judged if I make the wrong one. Sometimes I mask these by plowing on through the anxiety which is invariably deeply unpleasant, but I've often found that if I say "No, I don't want to do that", then a few moments after I've given myself permission not to, I become able to do it without feeling anxious about it. Brains are weird, but I think I'm going to try and take that particular flavour of anxiety as a sign that I don't have to do a thing (unless it's a thing I really do have to do, but it mostly isn't.)
Gosh - that got quite long. Possibly that's just because I'm over-explainy and went into excessive detail about actually small things, but probably my imposter syndrome should take note... I've got some more stuff to think about that's more to do with choosing to avoid difficult social situations, and why I'm finding it quite challenging even though I'm confident that it's the right choice, but that can wait for another post.
I'm going to talk a bit about where I've got to so far, but before I get to that, something that I would find useful is comments from other autistic people (or people who think they might be autistic but haven't pursued a formal diagnosis) about the things that you do to mask, or things that you have done in the past but don't do any more.
So, I'm going to start with the stuff that I don't do, (which is of course all the stuff that gives me imposter syndrome about my diagnosis, but I think I'm more likely to work through that by acknowledging it that ignoring it). I don't have much in the way of sensory issues to mitigate. I sometimes find that I'm more aware of and distracted by background noises than other people, but actually a lot of the time I tune them out quite effectively (I think this might be a benign interaction with the ADHD, where the hyperfocus from the one brainweird mitigates a symptom of the other.) I don't stim, or at least, I'm not consciously aware of a drive to do so, although I've seen other autistic people talking about starting to do so deliberately post-diagnosis and finding it soothing, so I may explore that when I'm feeling socially overloaded and see what happens. I don't find eye-contact painful or unpleasant, although I do find that when I'm talking to someone who isn't a close friend I can become hyper aware of it, which is a bit stressful.
I do, and this is something I only realised last night, flap. Or at least I do when I'm alone and suppress the urge when I'm not. I'm probably going to stop that suppression.
When I'm interacting with people I have a constant calculation going on in the back of my head about whether what I'm about to say is appropriate to the context that I'm in and the level of intimacy I have with the people I'm interacting with. This is pretty tiring, and the amount of work it takes correlates strongly with the number of people in the conversation and inversely with how close to them I am. I don't think I could choose to stop doing this even if I wanted to (and I probably don't want to) but I would like to continue to reduce the frequency with which I'm in situations where it's particularly hard work.
I find it difficult to pretend that my emotional response is other than what it is - things like appearing interested when I'm bored, hiding when I'm irritated, damping down excessive enthusiasm. I suspect this is something that everyone finds a bit challenging, and I don't actually know whether it's harder for me than for NTs, but I think it might be. I think this is probably something I still want to do sometimes, especially in professional contexts, but I might want to try to do it less in social contexts, particuarly with people I can trust to gently tell me if I'm becoming abrasive.
I find one particular kind of task-switching very difficult indeed. It was actually when I discovered that this was a common autistic trait that I first started to wonder if I was actually autistic rather than just socially incompetent. I'm fine with multi-tasking between lots of similar activities - so when I'm cooking, for example, I can manage several threads at once. What I find really painfully jarring is turning social mode on and off. This means that if I'm in the middle of something and someone interrupts me then it takes all the self-control I have not to snap at them to leave me alone. It also takes me quite a while to get back to whatever I was doing after an interruption, but because I can do that transition at my own pace it's not unpleasant, just time consuming. This is occasionally a difficulty at work, but actually in my current role I don't get interrupted very often and interactions with colleagues are generally instigated by me, so again, I can do the transition at my own pace. It's definitely something to be aware of for future roles though. Mostly when I'm in social situations it's not a problem because I have social mode permanently on, so the main place where it comes out is at home when I'm doing my own thing and Ramesh (or less frequently Robert) wants something. It used to be one of the biggest causes of conflict in the relationship with Ramesh, and although we've got a lot (really a lot) better at managing it now, I think there might be some small tweaks we can make that would improve things even further.
I'm really bad at remembering names and also somewhat faceblind. Generally I try to cover for this and find some way to be reminded of their names and who they are without letting on that I've forgotten. I think I might try being more willing to admit that I've forgotten, and perhaps say explicitly that it's an autism thing. I think I might also ask Mthr Alice if we can reinstate the board of photos of members of the congregation, but this time with name labels, because church is very definitely the environment where I most often catch myself thinking "I've known you for months, and you've told me at least three times, how can I have forgotten your name?"
I find turn-taking in conversations with more than one other person a mystery. Especially because as far as I can tell, the norms about when it's okay to interrupt and when it's okay to ignore someone interrupting you and just keep on talking vary massively from group to group and from context to context. I read recently on twitter that neurotypicals do quite a lot of the communication about whose turn it is to speak using eye-contact, which is clearly just cheating. How much I mask this already depends on how comfortable I feel in a group, so I think with my close friends I don't worry too much about the rules, and probably sometimes come across as quite interrupty, but I think also we have a fairly interrupt-friendly norm, so its not too abrasive. (I would be interested in other people's perceptions of me in this regard.) With less familiar social situations I mostly mask by just not saying anything. Which is effective, but also makes socialising in groups even less appealing, because I can't really participate. In work and similar contexts I mostly stay quiet, and hope that that buys me enough social capital than it doesn't matter too much if I speak out of turn when I've got something important that I need to say. I don't think I particularly want to change strategies here, except again by minimising the frequency with which I'm in the situations where it matters.
There are a couple of circumstances that sometimes make me unreasonably anxious - unfamiliar social situations where I think there might be rules that I haven't understood, and being asked to make a decision (generally a fairly inconsequential one) where on some level I suspect that there's a right and a wrong answer and I will be judged if I make the wrong one. Sometimes I mask these by plowing on through the anxiety which is invariably deeply unpleasant, but I've often found that if I say "No, I don't want to do that", then a few moments after I've given myself permission not to, I become able to do it without feeling anxious about it. Brains are weird, but I think I'm going to try and take that particular flavour of anxiety as a sign that I don't have to do a thing (unless it's a thing I really do have to do, but it mostly isn't.)
Gosh - that got quite long. Possibly that's just because I'm over-explainy and went into excessive detail about actually small things, but probably my imposter syndrome should take note... I've got some more stuff to think about that's more to do with choosing to avoid difficult social situations, and why I'm finding it quite challenging even though I'm confident that it's the right choice, but that can wait for another post.
no subject
Date: 2019-11-24 12:57 pm (UTC)From:When I write work emails, I check them over again before sending to add in something at the start like "hope you're well/had a good Christmas/whatever" because it just doesn't occur to me otherwise.
I found baby and toddler group casual chit chat really hard so I observed for a while and now consciously work through a list of things to say- e.g. I try to find something nice to say about their child (ig their is awful, maybe their clothing instead)
I think of this stuff as normal but I am not sure it is
no subject
Date: 2019-11-24 01:04 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2019-11-25 02:05 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2019-11-25 02:00 pm (UTC)From:I observed to Mark the other day that it's probably not exactly coincidence that one of my favourite ways of socialising involves having an actual literal script in front of me telling me what to say :)