When everyone warns you that you start to lose your ability to mask in midlife, they are not kidding. I'm surprised at what I'm discovering about myself in the process: I actually do a lot of vocal stimming when I'm stressed out; I understand what people are saying much better if I make less-sustained eye contact (although the auditory processing issues are still there); and I really, really need to know what to expect in new situations or else it drains the fuck outta my spoons really fast.
I've been having a lot of grief over realizing the extent to which I've been masking for my entire damn life, and how ingrained some of these draining, counterproductive habits are. One of my earliest memories is of my mother literally screaming at me to make eye contact with her when she talked to me and to make damn sure I did the same with any other adult. I think I must have been two and a half. Throughout the entirety of my school years, from preschool onwards, she made my life miserable with pressure to make more friends, to say yes whenever other kids asked me to play with them even if they were doing something I wasn't interested in, to talk more, to STOP STIMMING, to do whatever adults expected me to do without hesitation even if it made me scared. And even though I'm a grown-ass adult now and I don't have to do any of this shit if I don't wanna, in the back of my mind there's still that drumbeat of pressure to do more, to constantly sacrifice my own comfort for the sake of not imposing on others, and above all that constant, constant running commentary in my head desperately trying to gauge whether I'm being successful at appearing relatively normal and in control of my situation... I've finally reached the point where the amount of RAM required to run these side programs is costing too much, but at the same time working to unlearn these habits that I've been forming literally since infancy is also stressful.
