#AutisticMasking or #SelfControl?

Yes, those hashtags annoy me too, but let’s ignore them for now and concentrate on the question.

What’s the difference between masking and self-control? Where does one stop and the other one begin? How much do they overlap, if at all?

Me right before I start explaining what’s wrong with what you just said. Original photo: Egor Kamelev (edited)

I’ve been wondering about this during the last several months, while observing my own interactions online (because offline I only interact with hubby for most of the time; store clerks for 0.1% of the time) and the way I tend to try to dissolve conflicts.

It doesn’t help that most people, for some reason unknown to me, hate the idea of being politically correct (they call it all these names, it blows my mind how wrong they get it), but it is part of my core, as an autistic human.

First and foremost, my intentions are to do no harm. Well, ideologically, because if I were to act upon that, I’d probably die, which is not a long-term solution (it is a long-term solution, but not really in a positive way for my own self).

I’ve probably inflicted a lot of harm, unwillingly, but also potentially willingly, as a kid who didn’t know much about the impact of my own actions.

It also doesn’t help that I’m a super empath or whatever you want to call it — I feel my own and other people’s feelings at a super high intensity, which many times leads to meltdowns, expressed through high intensity bouts of crying, as I can’t hit things or people because it goes against my non-violence principle (the physical manifestation of “do no harm”).

Which means that I’m anti-conflict as much as I can, especially since I know that a lot of verbal conflicts can escalate into physical conflicts. And while I know that verbal abuse is enough to leave emotional scars on people (ask me how I know), just witnessing physical violence, not even being its subject, makes me literally sick.

So over my 30 years of living as an autistic person in a world made for neurotypicals (or whatever you want to call people who are not neurodivergent), I’ve developed a set of skills that allows me to either diffuse a tense situation (humor and distraction work wonders offline), or run away from it (running away from a dangerous situation is not “cowardly”, no matter what others might say to you — it’s self-preservation).

I’ve also developed a thick skin, the ability to not take things personally and the ability to look through the things people say and find the messages hidden behind the hurt or hurtful words.

I’ve learned to unpack or dissect a phrase full of hidden personal attacks (which I know never to take personally) and poke at the person from behind these attacks.

Now most people have no idea that I do this and they either pretend to not understand what I ask them when I do this, or genuinely have no idea why I ask them these things because they themselves haven’t done the work required to understand why they are spewing hurtful words. Because of this, most of the time I can safely end the conversation there and move on.

This I believe is an example of self-control. You say something, I react in a controlled manner and I don’t respond from a hurt ego, you ignore my answer, I let you know that the conversation is over or I just move on.

This works wonders with strangers online who, for some reason or another, leave angry or uninformed comments in various places that I visit for knowledge or for pleasure.

By “works wonders” I don’t mean that those people change their minds or learn anything, since learning can only come from within and from openness towards learning something new. Rather, I say what I mean to say (an observation, an adage that may change the perspective), then move on.

But I’m pretty sure there’s still a lot of masking involved.

Every time I interact with someone like this, I have a whole routine that I go through unconsciously, since I’ve polished it over years of practice and interacting online and offline with unknown people.

I’m just now becoming more aware of it and trying to understand how it impacts my health and creativity (because it does).

1. There’s first the “do not offend”, which is why haters of PC hate it so much, since they think that “freedom of speech” means “I’m allowed to use whatever offensive words I want, regardless of the effect my words have on the lives of others”, which is not true, obviously.

This “do not offend” bit includes a lot of work, especially in the past few years, since I’ve been learning so much about racist, ableist and other types of hateful language. I don’t want to use this language, even if I may have been used to reading/hearing it in the past and not being able to do anything about it.

Some things I genuinely didn’t know, but some I’d observed myself and chose to never use. That may have gotten me called names like “wuss” and other stuff, but I’m glad I was on the proper side of the “fence” for most cases.

This comes from my passion or interest for social justice, that was fueled early on by exposure to religious teachings (which I took quite literally and haven’t let go of, despite letting go of religion two decades ago) and later on by reading about ethics and the like. I’m still learning.

2. Then there’s the “do not assume”, which is a principle that has served me well so far and not only in online conversations. This means that I should not assume anything about the person, anything about what they really know, who they are, what they like, what they do with their lives.

The only information I have to go on is what they do or what they say that is visible to me. That’s it. I can’t extrapolate from one reply that they are a bigot or that they are a saint.

Which is why sometimes I search for public background information on the person, to learn a bit more about them, before I answer in any way. If they are on a social media platform, I visit their public profile.

This is also part of the self-control. There’s no masking involved because it’s a one-sided thing, I don’t actually interact, just learn a bit about the person.

Again, I don’t make value/personality judgments based on what I find, I just make observations (if you are wondering now how I have internal space in my memory for all of this detective stuff, don’t worry, I forget it as soon as I’m done with the conversation).

Based on these observations, I can create a persona that speaks in a way that would not be offensive to the person painted by what I can find. This is the masking.

This is unnecessary and takes a lot of mental effort (that I don’t realize I’m using because it’s an automatic behavior by now, even though it drains me).

As long as I don’t use the offensive language in general, who cares about the personal sensitivities and personal drama and history of the person who writes crappy comments and takes care to not personally offend those sensitivities?

I do, that’s who. It me, as kids these days say (I’m still a kid at heart, sue me).

Should I unlearn this behavior? Yes, probably. Where did it come from? Now that’s a great question, let’s see.

1. Childhood bullying. There was a lot of that while I was growing up. Mostly from other kids, but from teachers and other adults too.
2. Disdain from medical professionals, ugh, they are the worst. I had an ORL doctor laugh at me once when I went to her with a nose bleed so bad that it hadn’t stopped for several hours. Instead of helping, she laughed. So I need to tiptoe around the egos of medical professionals in my home country (luckily, the ones in Germany are much kinder and down-to-earth and they don’t laugh at me, even though I can’t really speak German).
3. Desire to be a likable member of the community. Everyone wants to be liked, right? So what if it takes building a whole new person for each person I interact with? At least they think I’m pleasant, despite them having no idea who I really am.
4. There are probably more that I can’t think of right now, but aren’t those enough??

3. The third stage of crafting a “good reply” is “explain it as you would to a curious 3 year-old who can’t listen to you for more than 10 seconds”.

If the other two stages weren’t so energy-intensive, this one would take it all. But they are all just as energy-intensive, so there. Editing takes at least as much effort, if not more, to do right, than the act of writing itself.

Here I have to use all of my wit and knowledge to break the information that I want to convey down into the most basic principles, and come up with an easy to show example or metaphor that explains what I want to say in as few words as possible.

I am a firm believer in the principle that “if you can’t explain it to a 3 year-old so that they can at least make a bit of sense of it, you have no idea what you are talking about”, so I stand by it.

We all know that people nowadays “don’t have time to read your walls of text” (ahem, I interpret that as “are not interested in making the slight effort of reading something attentively enough that they actually understand what is being said, as opposed to just reading some words that seem random to their minds”), so I try to be as concise as possible, while also explaining things.

This inevitably leads me to writing comments/answers that are several paragraphs long, regardless of how much I try to condense things, because there’s a minimum amount of words required to transmit an actual message. “LOL” is not enough, it doesn’t respect the principles.

Which means that most people don’t read my answer or skim it and don’t understand what I’m trying to say.

Please tell me now. How much of this article have you skimmed? How much have you skipped? How much sense does it make if you skip parts? I am really curious.

4. This leads me to the last step. Either publish or delete.

Why would I delete my hard work? Because sometimes it gets me so worked up, so angry, so emotional, that I can’t continue respecting my principles. So instead of publishing a piece that I might later regret, I just delete it and move on.

This, again, is self-control. Not allowing the emotions to run the game, even if they are valid and should be felt and should be worked through.

If you think I don’t work on my emotional responses, you are wrong. I just don’t do it in public. Sometimes I do it in writing pieces like this one, which I may or may not publish just for the sake of the overall message.

Sometimes I do it mentally, sometimes I leave it for later, for my brain to make sense of the emotions while I sleep and get the weirdest dreams.

And sometimes I swallow up my emotions and end up burned out because I didn’t realize I was masking so much that I didn’t have time, nor energy, to work through everything and get back to baseline.

This is my system for answering something in writing (mostly online, either in public conversations, or with friends/people I chat with), but what happens offline?

I try to follow these steps, but they take a lot of time and a lot of energy, and some of them don’t work. I can’t check out the public social media profile or publication history of a person I’m talking to while talking to them…

I can only listen and observe what they are doing and saying, plus I can remember our previous interactions and make comparisons with what they used to say versus the present time.

So I end up not saying anything most of the time, despite having so many things to say, because I don’t have the space or time to do all this work, before I can say something that aligns with my principles.

I become a listener in most cases and people wonder why I don’t have much to say, despite them knowing that I’m full of knowledge and opinions (which can change easily if you show me some evidence).

Sometimes I catch a break in the conversation and insert my observations at double speed, but I constantly try to edit myself while talking (not a good idea) and my ideas run on ahead of my words, so I end up making a mess of things. Ah, I get interrupted mid-idea anyway, by the person changing the subject.

I hate it when that happens, so I disconnect and go into reaction mode. That’s both self-control and masking. Controlling the disconnection from the conversation and masking an interest in what the other person has to say, when I obviously wanted to talk about the other topic, but I can’t bring it back up because they then call me rigid and repetitive, when I hadn’t even had a chance to present my ideas.

So I continue the idea in my head and sometimes end up writing it up and organizing it and presenting it to the world in a corner of the internet that nobody visits. But it’s fine, because if I wished to make my ideas more known, I’d spend more time on marketing them, which is not something I’m interested in doing for now.

If that seems like a lot of work to you, it’s because it is.

If you think I should rather skip the whole “answering to a certain person on a certain topic” when I want to express something, and instead make an article about it, which might benefit people, instead of a comment that will be belittled and undermined with personal attacks, you might be on the right track.

This is what I intend to do in the future, now that I’ve observed this behavior and can do something about it, but I have interests in so many topics, that I fail to find a decent platform where people will not expect me to keep on writing on one single topic that they are interested in.

So maybe I’ll do it, maybe I won’t. You have to stick around to find out if I do. And if you like my overly elaborate self-referencing writing, but don’t like a topic, just skip it. Go read something else. Life is short, so you might as well enjoy your reading.

Do you relate with any of this? Is it completely alien to you?

I’m really curious to find out, so please let me know in the comments.

Also, please mention if you are ND or not, I seem to not really understand how NT minds work, despite close to three decades of trying to emulate one.