A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

I can't count! Anyway. You realise that your *entire personality* is potentially a manufactured confection, a literal mask - unreal and worse, unsustainable. If you mask all the time, where has your actual personality taken refuge over that period? /8

I say potentially because of course it may not be that serious, but you *fear* that it is, nevertheless. This is a horrifying feeling. /9

If you've been masking since school, then whatever your real, actual, genuine personality is has been hiding somewhere in your head, or so you feel. You feel like at a fundamental level, you just *don't know who you are*. /10

So you try to piece it together, try to separate your mask from your true self, which is rather like pulling icing off a soft cake: difficult and scarring. You cast your mind back to try to realise who you are. /11 #autism

For me, around the time of my burnout I was internally barraged by unbidden images of childhood peace and happiness, which were upsetting for how far removed they were from the current reality. It was a strange experience. /12

I started to realise that maybe this was part of my brain trying to reassert itself, trying to burst out of the mask if worn from childhood, but I really don't know at all - it's all very woolly and hard to explain. /13 #autism

But late diagnosed #autistic people have to deal with this alone, with no support from anyone other than friends and family who almost certainly won't understand and who will be alarmed if the mask is removed. /14

Feeling like your entire persona is a sham 8s one of the worst feelings I've had, and I'm yet to recover from it. But I feel like I'm gradually making sense of where the mask ends and real self begins. /15 #autism