I’ve always made up a person to fit in. Masking has taken a toll and I hate the person I’ve pretended to be. That person is boring, polished, and an over achiever. Since.I was punished severely on a daily basis at 4 years old and afterwards, my true self never was known to me. Only my self who could survive.
Where do we find our unmasked real self after reaching “the big one” burnout? When your braim stops working, you’re no longer functional, and the person you made can no longer be sustained, what do you do?
I’m in my 40s and it’s rough.
There’s nothing under the mask. Your face is for communication with others
You have to take off the mask, reshape it to communicate what you want to show the world, and accept it as your real face
That’s just another mask.
Your real self is the you when you’re not trying to be something else. You have to feel safe and be calm and then that’s you. You could possibly alter it with effort, but not as easily as a mask.
That’s my point. A mask and a face are the same in nature. We all act differently around different people, everyone has different sides to themselves that are all real
Every mask and face you have is a part of you. It’s not fake, it’s a layer of communication. If you don’t feel comfortable in it, it feels like a mask. That’s entirely what makes it a mask
You have to examine it and figure out where it doesn’t fit right, and then wear it until the changes become ingrained behavior
The final step is to accept you’re not wearing a mask anymore
You’ve just internalized the problem and called it normal. You shouldn’t need to be different around different people. That’s exhausting and most people don’t do that. That’s the neurodivergent coping mechanism.
No, literally every human being does do this, whether they’re aware of it or not. We are very social species that is extremely sensitive to the group we’re in and the social context. From the most neurotypical normie to entirely nonverbal autistic people, we all have different sides
Do you think people are masking when you bring a dog or a baby into a room and they act differently? Is it masking to act professionally at work? Do you think you really act the same with your friends and grandparents?
You keep dancing around the core of this - the discomfort from modulating your behavior in ways you don’t want to is what masking is. That’s the part that’s exhausting
I haven’t internalized a defense mechanism, I got rid of the discomfort. I’ve decided I’m often comfortable with silence (even if others aren’t) and made peace with the fact people will misunderstand me often and stopped letting that drive my interactions
I also code switch hard and mirror people’s speech patterns… But that’s not a defense mechanism, that’s just how I prefer to interact with the world. I like that I can fit in pretty much anywhere I want to be, it’s easy and natural for me
That’s what it means to stop masking. You don’t change as a person, you learn to express yourself in a way that isn’t exhausting