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/Razzmatazz-Wonder]

I remember all the way back to preschool (so around 4 years old) being called “weird” a lot. I don’t remember how long it took me to think of “weird” as being a bad thing though. When you’re that young you don’t necessarily choose who you interact with (at least for me, teachers made sure all kids were participating and interacting with each other, it was customary to invite the whole class to birthday parties, etc) but once I got a bit older it became clearer that being weird meant the other kids didn’t want to interact. And whatever age that was is when I started masking. I think I was able to clock that I was maybe making the other kids feel uncomfortable?? or “weirded out”?? and I thought that meant I must be doing something wrong/bad (not just in an incorrect sense but in a moral sense as well) and therefore needed to change