Hi Jenn,

 

I am a 53 year old British autist. I can talk about many things but I want to talk about my lifetime experience of masking and how it led to the total collapse of my life.

 

I can distinctly remember my first decision to mask, although that's not how I would have labelled it at the time. It was the moment I realised that who I was, was not socially acceptable.

 

I started school at the age of 4 at a small, private school, where I was in a class of maybe 20 children. I had already learned to read before I started this school, and in this school, I remember being accepted for who I was at the time, and I was allowed to read my own books while the rest of the children read what I thought were 'baby books'. It was a lovely time in my life with some great early memories. Unfortunately, this was the mid 70s, and there was a major financial crisis, and my family could not afford to continue sending me there. I had to move to a state primary school ("public grade school" in the U.S., I think?). This was when the trouble started. I clearly remember a few incidents. In the first week, we had "class reading", when each child had to read a paragraph from a very basic book, in turn. I'd read the whole thing through before it came to my turn, so I got told off for not paying attention. That incident seemed to be the starting point of the conflict between me and that teacher. Everything I did was wrong. The other children thought I was stupid. I responded by play-acting as a way to try to survive this living hell. I would walk around the class making stupid noises and hand and head movements, including, of course, the famous arm flapping movement. The other children called me a "Spastic" (the 1970s British term for someone with cerebral palsy).

 

My mother was called in to the school to speak with the head-mistress about my disruptive behaviour.

 

That evening, my mother was both sad and furious. She said that because she was a widowed single mother, the social services might come and take me away and put me in a children's home, if I didn't stop acting up. I was so scared that I stopped. That was the start of my masking. I shut down and kept quiet at school. I endured primary and middle school in that state. I hated it so much. There was nowhere I could go to be myself around other people.

 

During that time I discovered the local library and I spent most of my spare time in there. When I was 11, I got interested in computers, and there was a man, a friend of my mother, whose retired father had been a signals engineer during WW2. He had what would now be called a man cave. He let me sit in there while he worked on various hobby projects with radio, computers and electronics. He let me just sit there while he smoked his pipe and soldered. I loved being there, and eventually I saved enough money to get my own computer when I was 12, which led to my eventual career as a computer programmer. I didn't have to mask in his man cave and I could ask as many questions as I liked and he didn't show any lack of tolerance for me.

 

During secondary school, I was fortunate enough to have teachers who encouraged my interests in maths, science, computers and history. I was very lucky. I was seen as a nerd of course, but I didn't experience the bullying I had at primary and middle school.

 

The problems really came when I went to university. The first two years were fine. I was studying maths and physics and everything was going well for me. I enjoyed being around other nerds and I loved the wider educational opportunities of university life. Then I met the girl who would become my first girlfriend, and everything fell apart for me.

 

For me, it was love at first sight. I quickly became infatuated. We became friends and we shared a sense of humour, but I knew I could not share my real, inner autistic core with her. I kept it covered up and only interacted with her through quirky humour, which she loved. I was very good at hiding everything I now know is autism. Unfortunately, the strain of not revealing my nerdy core to her led to what I now know is autistic burnout. I completely flunked my third year of my degree, partly because of the burnout, and partly because I was trying to reject my own self as a 'nerd'. I wanted to be a 'normal person' for her, which meant putting my interest in maths and physics into my past. I thought that personal growth for me was to become a 'people person' and reject what I had been, as something from my childhood and not relevant to my future with her as a normal adult. Without maths and physics, I had nothing, so I put myself forward to be ordained as an Anglican priest. I built a complete new persona around this idea, because I thought it would be something socially acceptable. Of course, because of my burnout, I ended up breaking up with her, but I continued with the trainee Anglican priest persona, all through theological college, which I excelled at, although the ordination never happened because fundamentally I wasn't suited to it and it was obvious to the Bishop (but not me) that I wasn't fundamentally suited to it.

 

I met and married a woman who was attracted to the mask, and of course that would end in complete disaster, but not before we had two children. She had her own mask too, a narcissistic one, so it was mutually disastrous. I won't say too much about in detail about this because I don't believe in washing dirty laundry in public, but basing my life on this persona led to everything completely falling apart around and inside me.

 

I eventually found my way back to maths and computing, and I was able to build up a consultancy business in that area. I quickly learned that I am not capable of working in an office ... because of the effort of pretending to be a 'professional person', so I developed a way of working that would be called 'hybrid' now, long before it became a trend.

 

The problem with being an autist is that where most people have strong social instincts, I have a gaping void. I have no social motivation whatsoever. For NTs, their entire lives are lived in their social context, but for me, social interaction is an unwelcome interruption of my constant stream of thoughts and research about what I suppose are my "special interests". But only a fellow autist can understand this: while I have no social motivation at all, I do have a need for normal human connection -- that is, to be meaningful to someone, and to find someone who is meaningful to me. I am very lucky to have found someone with whom I can co-exist in a fairly permanent state of "parallel play", which is all I want. I am now married to someone with whom I share a sense of humour and outlook on the world and with a similar "emotional temperature". She accepts my nerd-core although she doesn't understand it at all. (Nobody can of course!) She loves me for my traits, and not 'despite' them.

 

This is what I have learned: the vast majority of people seem to be fully motivated by social factors, although it seems to be much stronger in women than in men. Most of the women I know (except for my wife) seem to make decisions based on social factors that I can't even begin to guess at, let alone understand. I spent my teenage years completely baffled at the strange decisions my older female cousins made, and I found girls my age to be completely impossible to understand. I think that in men, it seems to manifest in social behaviour such as supporting football teams etc, or in rivalry to be the top dog/alpha male. I don't fully accept the alpha/beta male model, but the vast majority of men seem to be anxious to fit in, not rock the boat, keep their head down, pay the mortgage etc, whilst the wannabe alphas jockey for the positions at the top. I'm not interested in being either ... I just want to be free to do my own thing and follow my own interests.

 

The outcome is that since I have learned about the concept of masking, I have come to believe that it still an essential tool in a world where autists have to deal with allists (i.e. "allistic, non-autistic, NT" people). Either you mask, or you deal with the fallout from allists getting yanked out of their comfort zone, and to be honest, the ensuing drama can be more exhausting than the masking.

 

But that said, I will never, ever, again, attempt to build my entire life around a constructed persona based on what I think might be more socially acceptable.

 

I'll stop now ... this is turning rambly.