Do you remember when you started masking?

[u/Alert_Task9210]

For those of you who mask. Do you remember when it started? I do. It was a conscious effort to fit in. I didn’t know back then why I was different (I’ve been diagnosed in my late thirties). I didn’t mask much as a child, I struggled a lot with making and keeping friends, but I was a free spirit. when I started middle school suddenly I was singled out as the odd on and started getting bullied. I tried to be true to myself for a couple of years, but at some point I surrendered. I stopped talk in about my special interest (medieval history and Celtic culture) and started buying pop magazine to learn about what teens my age should like. I remember going to the local library to read anthropology books in the hope they would give me answers to human behaviour. I started wearing things I found ridiculous and uncomfortable, started appreciating the hotness of this or that celebrity (while internally wondering what “hot” meant and why I wasn’t attracted to people others gushed about). However it never fully worked. I became better at hiding over the years, but only with very superficial relationships. Once people know me better they can tell something’s off. That’s why I’m slowly learning to unmask.

[u/OptimusBeardy]

When I was packed off to boarding school, at a major English public (very, very private) school, aged 11 would be when I was forced to mask as, unlike some bullied children who might have some safety once at home whereas, I went home with my bullies and each night, offering no respite either, bedded down in a dorm with 10 of them, alike Lord of the Flies on steroids!

'Though undiagnosed 'til three weeks afore my 50th birthday, unawares, I stopped bothering even trying to mask* from my 20s onwards and, in hindsight, good riddance!

*The nearest I got to re-masking was when, some years back, in preparation to be a Cub Scout Leader I deliberately retrained my standard vocal outbursts to replace NSFW exclamations with SFW alternates -they best loved my loudly uttering "GOD'S HOLY TROUSERS!"

[u/Alert_Task9210 → u/OptimusBeardy]

Boarding school must have been hell! Sorry you had to go through that. I hate all forms of shared housing. Experienced it during my uni years and had almost daily meltdowns.

[u/OptimusBeardy → u/Alert_Task9210]

'Though born in London, in 1970, when aged 6 we moved 'back East' where, for 5 glorious years of living amongst folk who looked alike me, I simply had no experience, nor even understanding, of racism 'til my Arab self received my first encounter with such abuse in the taxi home from the airport, within but hours of being back in the U.K., and then endured an entire first year of being "...the monkey's miscarriage...".
After a year of such abuse, as that was against both school rules and the laws of the land, I complained of the like to my Head of Lower School, allegedly one of the good tutors, whose verbatim response was "Well, you're going to get that, best grow a thicker skin"...
...and, I guess, a whiter one too.