What’s The Hardest Part of Unmasking? Remembering.
For many late-identified autistic individuals, we began masking at such young ages that it altered our ability to remember our own experiences. As well, many learned to dissociate as a coping mechanism, which further affects our memory and can have long-term effects such as difficulty focusing, gaps in our memory or amnesia, emotional numbing, and so on.
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Can the average person remember early childhood memories? No, not always. But it goes much deeper for us Autistics. Why? Because most of us weren’t allowed to be our authentic selves growing up, let alone allowed to figure out who that was in the first place.
I’ve told this story before, but I’ll tell it again.
I remember consciously masking by the first grade. I would have been five years old, six max, given I have a December birthday. I looked lost in thought, zoned out from the math problem we were working on, so the student teacher recommended a “thinking” face. Apparently, there’s an expression you can make that lets those around you understand you’re just thinking. I thought it was ridiculous.
But think about it. I was five years old. Five. Someone was already commenting on my lack of facial expressions and offered a fix, a solution to my problem. I wasn’t…
