Mask On: My Psychosocial Odyssey of Self Discovery and Acceptance

Before I get started

Some weird, if funny instances from my youth:

• When I was four years old I used to weep when my mother would have me cross the street with her. I was terrified of being hit because people did not belong on roads. “That’s where the cars live”
• At a friend’s pool party my mom found me isolated, crying, watching the other kids run around the deck with water balloons and youthful abandon. She asked if someone had hurt me. “No” I replied “They don’t see the danger. They’re running around as fast as they can and none of them care how easy it is to get hurt. I wish I could be like them.”
• I quit swim team one practice in because the other kids would brush up against me as we’d freestyle back and forth across our shared lane and I could not deal with that if I was also expected to swim fast.
• At my Aunt & Uncle’s wedding I thought the flower girl was doing a real shit job at emptying her basket so I did her a kindness by yanking the petals from her grip and dumping them on the aisle. We could them continue our preliminary promenade to the altar without further delay.

A couple concerning highlights in my youth-

• At 5 I flew into a jealous rage concerning my new baby sister, I tore a wooden doorframe with an embedded glass pane off of our family’s entertainment center. When I apologized, I told my mom that I needed to see a head doctor.
• Sometimes my friends would take the “good natured” ribbing associated with boyhood a bit too far. My emotional reaction would ignite their glee which would in turn result in me lashing out. Often violently. The counselor for my after school program told my mom she should get me someone to help control my emotions.

These patterns would reprise in disparate forms as I came of age.
________________________________________________________________

There hasn’t been a day of my conscious life that hasn’t necessitated some form of performance.

Social assimilation meant learning everyone for a couple hours in silence then mimicking the jokes and mannerisms they displayed to gain acceptance as the year went on. This is what everyone does. This is how all brains work. Right? Mine is just on manual instead of automatic. ‘

As time passed I’d go to different schools, bring what I learned and usually fall flat on my face until I learned what my new surroundings needed from me as a participant. The older I got, the better I got at transitioning from social groups: Summer camps, bible study groups, the children of my parents’ clients, my mother’s side of the family’s extended social network, etc. I had a me for every occasion. Each Alex liked slightly different media, talked more or less depending on the situation, knew what kind of jokes to make and to who. This isn’t an inherent social aptitude, this is years of data collection, research, and implementation.

When I really really think about it, I’m embarrassed to say I don’t think I actually believed in anything with my whole heart the first 15–16 years of my life. Up to that point I was Catholic because that’s what we were and I saw on TV what happens when you tell your parents you’re not Catholic anymore. I considered myself a Republican because almost literally everyone else was. When we moved from Miami to Fort Myers, I told and laughed at miserably racist jokes on the morning bus ride despite my internal dissonance because that was the new culture I needed to adapt to. And this isn’t some “I laughed because I was too afraid to speak up” cop out. I know that you need to do more than smile and nod to assimilate. I had already learned you can’t exist as an other peacefully in the midst of a crowd because then conflict will find you. I was a spineless worm who did what he needed to stand.

At 15 I attempted suicide and was hospitalized for three days. I had already been in therapy, but therapy oddly enough felt even more isolating as my therapist could only raise eyebrows and struggle to understand how I was taking the world in.

DEPRESSED, they’d say. You’re depressed! Sad for no reason? Check. Wanna die? Check. Bingo bango, here’s some Lexapro.

On the Lexapro, off the Lexapro, I still felt like an alien in my own skin and around other people. How do you medicate social grace? I don’t want to be the host with the most, I’d just like to be able to stop myself from talking before the eyes on the person I’m speaking with go dead. People will often ask me what should be a yes/no question but will receive fractals of information and eventualities in response. This isn’t because I can’t provide one. I totally could, but that’s a bad answer. My experience has taught me nothing is ever yes and no, not even yes’ and no’s because those have rippling implications. The question isn’t really “Do I want Soy or Oat Milk” the question is by choosing a specific type of plant milk I’m setting myself up for what texture my pancakes will be. How much of said milk will it take to get my coffee to the shade I like it? We haven’t even gotten into brands…

ANXIETY, they said my first year of college. You anxious thing! Obsessive/Obtrusive thoughts? Check. Ruminating on events that likely won’t come to pass? Check. Bingo bango, smoke a joint kid.

So smoke a joint I did! While equally as effective at treating my underlying despair as the Lexapro was, at least weed made me act pleasant. This allowed me the opportunity to, like, chill out, man. My thoughts slowed down; I was able to observe them like some cosmic third eye teleprompter instead of being mangled by their momentum. And while said prompter mostly signaled for more Ben n’ Jerry’s, it also allowed me to begin untangling the rat king that was all of the social “rules” and identities I had adopted over the last 18 or so years of purposeful consciousness.

I lasted almost a decade with the joint, and regular talk therapy sessions alone. I also went to acting school which was the greatest education in human behavior I had ever, or would ever, obtain. The work was literally “Analyze why this character saying ‘GO!’ actually means ‘Please stay.’.

This is great fun for everyone in acting school because most of us do these things without noticing and having them brought to awareness is a gas. For me it was like I had uncovered the lost tome of “WHY WON’T THESE FUCKING PEOPLE DO WHAT THEY SAY THEY’LL DO OR MEAN WHAT IT SOUNDS LIKE THEY MEAN”.

This was it, I thought. The Rosetta Stone of how to be a person.

Don’t get me wrong, I can differentiate between what is appropriate in movies and what is appropriate in real life….now. But the scene work I did and the newfound ability to analyze media and indeed the interactions between myself and my peers gave me the tools to build the best version of myself who definitely had everything under control now.

Then I had a baby and everything I thought I knew about myself shattered into a million little pieces. No longer did I live the carefree bohemian knucklehead life of yore. Now all of my precious sleeps and spoons were being deposited into a being outside of me. The Paper-Mache façade I had constructed to exist began to crack. Outbursts at home were more often, and they began to characterize themselves in a very peculiar way.

A concerning moment from 2021 —

My parents are in town for a few days and I reserve them a parking spot at a garage around the corner for the duration of their stay via an accompanying app. Day 1 we pay, they park, no problem. Day 2, my dad and I take the car out in the morning and when we return just after 10pm we’re told that we cancelled our reservation that morning and now the parking garage was full and we couldn’t park there anymore. Having paid nearly a hundred bucks for the reservation I start having a hard time understanding any of this at a systemic level.

Turns out, due to some fine print hijinks, taking your car out of a garage constitutes a cancellation of the booking. We weren’t informed so we were SOL. I then unleash a stream of vitriol at this man as I cannot wrap my head around any of the foundational questions buzzing around in my head

• Why didn’t the reservation, y’know, reserve our spot?
• Why didn’t the dude in the morning mention anything about the cancellation?
• Why does taking your car our of a garage count as a forfeit of the reservation? If my reservation was good for four days, that spot should be there regardless of where the car is.

Looking back at my father, the frightened expression on his face told me I had gone too far…again. I tearfully apologized to the gentleman, deeply ashamed of becoming that which I hate most in this world, and we found somewhere to park on the street. On the way back to the apartment my dad sheepishly asked if I was still going to therapy. I was.

The next few weeks saw me joining Emotions Anonymous for a few sessions, reading books on rage, specifically impotent rage. It makes sense. In the fall, seeing minimal improvement over outbursts, my wife and family ask that I revisit medication and perhaps seek an ADHD diagnosis as in the last year and change we had learned our son was showing some prominent neurodivergent/spectrum behaviors, and my father, god love him, exists, so maybe I might have some of that too.

ADHD!! They tell me A-D-H-D. Of course! The depression, the anxiety Check, The fact that you can’t step in the shower or perform basic functions some days because reasons. Check! This is it, the final stop on our Cuckoo Cruise through the DSM-5. Bingo bango, have some Adderall and some Zoloft. EXCELSIOR!

It was like night and day. They finally brought an adult into my head to get shit done. Day one I nearly cried because of how effortless answering emails was. I didn’t feel the need to snack myself into stasis while working. I didn’t agonize over my work volume. I existed free of concern.

This was the solution I had been searching for. At long last I found a skeleton key to the snack cabinet. Like my son, I had to develop in my own time and the results would speak for themselves. What a relief. It’s over.

• A Very Concerning, if Dark, Episode from August 2022.

I’ve already brought up the concept of not being able to medicate ineffable aspects of my experience. I can take medicine to make me less sad, but it won’t help me when it gets too loud somewhere. I can take medicine to help me focus at work and not forget what I literally was just doing a second ago, but it doesn’t fix that I’ve never been able to feel comfortable in my own skin, or any skin of my own design.

August of this year my parents took us on a Disney Cruise. We arrive at Cape Canaveral, clear covid precautions, and head into the port. We soon discover that my father had mistakenly brought my parents’ Global Entry cards instead of their passports. The woman at check-in grimaces and says it might be a problem but we’d have to discuss it with a supervisor.

I already feel myself stewing. It’s been a long morning. It’s day 2 of no Adderall (I keep a 5 day/2 day schedule to prevent dependency) which has me feeling a little bit like a half-drunk Capri-Sun. I am also hangry thanks to the drive and our desire to get to the port on time with oodles of vittles awaiting us on the other side. The odds are not in my favor.

To cut this long story inside of a longer story short, they were not being allowed to board the boat even after pleading with the supervisor who says that while the GE card is as good as a passport for air travel, it is not considered that for voyages across the sea.

This is where I break. Like in the parking garage, I am haunted by these pressing questions to the stupid answers we’ve gotten buzzing around my head like an upended hornet’s nest.

• Why do you need that specific form of ID?
• What is the goal you’re looking to achieve with the passport? Assuming it’s to ensure the person getting on the boat plane whatever isn’t a threat to national security, and the process to get GE is way more rigorous than getting a passport, why the hell won’t you accept it?
• Does US Customs have a specific set of questions to determine if people are sky terrorists instead of water terrorists that makes the distinction in documentation so fucking crucial? (I actually asked this one out loud and they did noooooot like that).

The conflict hit a fever pitch when I grabbed my now crying son and held him in front of the agent demanding she explain to him that he won’t be able to go on the vacation we’d been building him up on for almost a year because US customs doesn’t like the color and shape of our legitimate credentials. My parents, in the meanwhile, had found a way to get what they needed and were set to board. This behavior I exhibited (reasonably) frightened the people next to us who then called the port police on me. They characteristically arrived long after the conflict had resolved so we began a new conflict amongst ourselves.

Here’s a fun fact about your boy, even on the best day of my life, I fucking hate cops. So this was not going well.

The new issue now, was that I had been deemed a cruise security threat. My wife Yamilet, after talking down the officers, made contact with the head of ship security who was, unlike the cops, quite reasonable. He gave me the green light to get on the ship having heard how the conflict had begun and asked only that I not consume alcohol on the boat which was fine with me because I don’t really drink.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

So why talk about any of this? To out myself as an emotional unstable Neanderthal? You already knew that about me, so what gives?

Earlier this year my son was officially classified as Autistic by the DOE here in NY which has opened up a bevy of supports for our kiddo. As he’s grown I’ve seen him bump into many of the same obstacles I did socially, his made worse by symptoms that affect his ability to engage such as motor speech functions and thought organization. My struggles growing up mirrored his in enough ways that I’ve always been somewhat curious if I too am autistic.

NOOO they’d say You can’t be autistic! You’re too social for that. Also even the “high functioning” ones sometimes come off as jerks and you’re as sweet as pie!

I am. I am sweet as pie. ON PURPOSE. You think it’s easy not to call people doing dumb shit dumb? That’s my whole life; a perpetual exercise in dialectical restraint. Concurrent to this period of discovery, I started to have all of these time travel moments to memories where I wasn’t quite fitting in or did something I’d never do JUST to make someone I probably would never meet again think I’m a normal person who’s okay.

I’ve got an infinite, ever growing mental list of “If/Then/But” scenarios that branch out to cover any sort of situation I’ll find myself in. I’ve meticulously curated these to almost any circumstance I can think of (a brutal limit to be sure). This is why I gravitate to customer service work. I can develop a script and variables therein and instead of being a weird robot who can’t deal, I have “strong communication skills”. I can tailor my responses to a customer confidently as I am backed by the almighty company line that tells me what I can and cannot do for these people. I can talk to waiters, cashiers, most service folks because we’re both there to play our part, and our script is for the most part predetermined. Nothing fancy or flashy AND I get to pretend like I’m a member of society. Lots of people hate small talk, but I thrive because it’s a situation where I and someone who is ostensibly neurotypical are equally uncomfortable. In fact, I’m at the advantage because I prepared for this already and boy have I got an anecdote about this sleet that will knock your socks off, stranger.

Bringing this behemoth in for a landing, the entirety of the experience described in this essay came to a head when I learned about a specific, burgeoning, sub-type of Autism known as Pathological Demand Avoidance. Like when I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety, like when I learned I was ADHD. It was a series of days crying in front of Youtube videos made by other adults whose experiences so fully resembled my own.

I cannot afford a medical autism diagnosis. Many people cannot. If not for the NY State Department of Education, we would not have been able to afford our son’s classification either. There is a prominent community of folks with Autism who have self diagnosed and I, for various reasons, have always felt uncomfortable with that.

The autism identity is personal but it’s also medical. It’s not something you can fully self-determine like gender identity. And even then, that can be a struggle depending on who you are and where you’re raised. Recently I watched the newest episode of PhilosophyTube which deals with the channel’s creator Abigail’s odyssey through the NHS in search of adequate healthcare as a trans woman. Towards the end of this masterpiece, Abby points out the arbitrary nature of requiring Trans patients be formally diagnosed with “Gender Dysphoria” before they can start receiving treatment. Now, I am NOT comparing neurodivergence 1:1 to folks with alternate gender identities, what I DO relate to here is having to seek permission from someone behind a paywall/authority wall before being given permission to treat the problem.

I cannot say with 100% certainty that I am autistic. I don’t have those qualifications and I refuse to pretend to, even if it’s for my own understanding of myself. But dammit, if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, has feathers, a bill, and wings; do we really need a zoologist to confirm what kind of animal it is? Certainly I couldn’t tell you its Latin name or even it’s species, but I know enough to know it’s a duck.

For over a decade I’ve been treating surface symptoms while doing what I learned is known as “masking” to cover up the gaps I can’t account for. With each new psychiatric/psychological revelation, more of what makes me unhappy about myself and my relationship to the world sets itself apart from the symptoms that are being treated successfully. These are factors out of reach for the methods I’ve been applying. If I have any hope of being happy, I need to call this duck a duck. Too long have I sacrificed what I want and need for what “the show” demands. Ignoring myself in that way turns me into a monster and I don’t like being a monster. This isn’t to excuse my past behavior but rather a new means of mining those experiences for a solution.

Do you know what the REAL problem in August 2022 was? It wasn’t the Global pass, or the cops, or autism, or a lack of lunch.

I didn’t want to go on the cruise.

I didn’t want to be trapped on a boat, filled with food I can’t eat, with thousands of people I don’t know or like, with the constant demand that I have fun.

My mother asked me “Why didn’t you just say you didn’t want to go?” to which I replied “I didn’t know that was an option”.

I need to start saying no more. I need to say yes to myself more often, lest I leave that handsome devil behind. I need to call the thing inside me that makes me special, unique, and a bit of a pain what it is once and for all.

Yes, I self diagnosed and as long as there are insurmountable challenges keeping everyday people from getting the help we need, for god’s sake let us try and help ourselves. Some day I may finally have the resources or luck to get a proper diagnosis from a medical person, but I no longer need that to accept myself for who I am. Until then, this is me and I’m so excited to meet him.

Hello again, friends. My name is Alex and I am Autistic.