Been thinking about masking
Jul. 10th, 2023 11:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
resoluteI spent a little bit of my unexpected SSDA money on archery gear. A bracer, a quiver, nice leather ones with fantasy-medieval-LotR vibes. I'm not dressing in full cosplay to go practice archery, and in fact I'm not even cosplaying anything in particular. But there is a part of me that is mentally cosplaying some sort of badass archer while I fumble around and miss the target, etc. The mental game, the fantasy of being a fantasy character, makes me happy. So I got a fun quiver etc.
I was talking to my spouse about this and she said she does not do this, and asked me what the appeal was. I thought about it for a moment and said that, well, I'm cosplaying all the time ANYWAY. I spend my life performing slightly different versions of Socially Appropriate Sigrid *all the damn time*. Mentally pretending to be a fictional character -- a specific one from a media property, a specific one I made up, or a vague notional character -- isn't any more challenging than pretending to be me.
This, I think, is how I mask my autism. I pretend to be me, all the time.
I was talking to my spouse about this and she said she does not do this, and asked me what the appeal was. I thought about it for a moment and said that, well, I'm cosplaying all the time ANYWAY. I spend my life performing slightly different versions of Socially Appropriate Sigrid *all the damn time*. Mentally pretending to be a fictional character -- a specific one from a media property, a specific one I made up, or a vague notional character -- isn't any more challenging than pretending to be me.
This, I think, is how I mask my autism. I pretend to be me, all the time.