Do you fake it?

Post Reply New Topic

I remember being really social up until about my Sophmore year in high school. I faked being NT all the way until I was 16 then I got really tired of acting. I'm 24 now and am starting to realize it might be in my best interest to hold back a little and try to act a little more NT.

What say you?

I fake it because I need to survive. I was a genuinely outgoing child, though, just not... social-social.

Not really able to.

yeah,but I come off as a college stoner

In terms of functioning in general society, it is a good idea.

I did it for years myself.
However, it can have its draw backs.
For instance, my sister has seen nothing but the acting self.
When she saw my true self recently, she told me to "stop acting out for attention".

Others have had this reaction.

While it can have its benefits, it can also have it's drawbacks. Keep that in mind.

I try to, but I find that the longer I keep at it the harder it is to keep up the charade. I kind of do it in spite of myself because I hate how much it makes me feel like a fraud, and yet it's the only way I know how to get by in life.

I attempted to fake it and will continue to attempt do so at times to survive. Now that I am diagnosed I am astonished that I was able to do it as well as I did but at the same time realize I probably was not nearly as good as I thought I was. I also realized the cost has been very high. Specific costs have been Autistic burnout and trouble at times distinguishing what is acting and the real me. Another cost has been emotional deadness caused by endless suppression of myself. But the real scary aspects are the costs I don't know about.

I accept those that make a decision to be as NT as much as possible as often as possible because I have no idea what it is to be them. I truly wish there choice works out and they become the NT they want to be. Back in the day I allowed for time during the weekends to be myself and still are having these costs so I am scared for them.

As for me while I know I will need to fake to survive I also know my future quality of life if not survival depends on faking as little as possible. My diagnosis has helped me to know myself but only partially. I want to meet the rest of myself, I need to meet the rest of myself.

Reading that was actually quite shocking to me, as it's almost exactly how I have feel and I was just about to make a thread about it.

I've been acting and/or changing major aspects of my persona constantly for so long that I can't even distinguish what parts of me are real and what are fake now. In addition to that I have been somewhat of a pathological liar (more-so when I was young) and I seriously think I developed that as a survival mechanism due to having literally nothing to say. Like you, I've also suppressed so much of myself and experience this 'emotional deadness' you refer to.

I also feel as if I have a 'behavioural deadness' due to suppression. For example, I legitimately used to have strangely strong attachments to objects (and I no longer do to the extent that I did) and rituals that caused me distress if I didn't abide by them. My rituals weren't typical of AS though as far as I'm aware, as most of them were in the video games I played. For example, in one of the games I played, all my creatures when they died had to die in a line next to the same tree outside. The new batch of creatures would have to have the same names as the generation before them. If this didn't happen (small positional errors etc didn't matter), I would crash the game intentionally and load from an auto-save so that I could make it happen. I had other personal rituals such as having to tap each knee the same amount of times if I accidentally tapped one of my knees etc as well.

Anyway, I could go on and on about behavioural deadness. My main point is that if you took the 3-12 year old me, you'd almost instantly be able to diagnose me with AS, but now its as if my true self has disappeared in the process of 'normalizing' and most behaviours typical of AS have been eliminated or suppressed. Even my stimming (which at one point my mum cried about as she thought I had a major health issue) has become far less obvious to the point that I thought it was normal.

I try to but it's very difficult. Still I realize it's a necessity.

I've never understood the concept of losing oneself, even through lies. It's one of the more alien ideas out there. I've (almost) always known exactly who and what I am, no matter how young I was or how different what I was saying was from the truth. My adult pursuits are even what I wanted and practiced as a child.

Trying to imagine not knowing me is like trying to imagine not having language or not digesting food for energy, or believing that the kitchen sink is pink and not grey when I interact with it every day and it's directly in front of me - being grey.

Wow that describes me too. One of the reasons I don't know if I have aspergers is that I don't know which symptoms are really part of me. I acted so much my whole life I'm a different persona with every different acquaintance and I don't know who I am anymore. When I realized this I went through a search to find myself, and in one of those roads I found aspergers and WP.

I don't think it is necessarily "faking" it per se.

Neurotypicals have traits as children that are no longer present once they reach later stages in their life. Same goes for us, we're different but not THAT different.

For example, I used to stimm in the middle of the classroom when I was in Grade 1, 2, etc. I now have learned to "suppress" it outside of the home, but I don't even attempt to suppress it when I'm home alone. I used to be very obsessive on topics and completely dominate conversations. I still struggle with this, but much less so, I've learned to let other people talk and to listen to other people.

I've learned to look at strangers in the eye when I walk past them on the street if they say hi to me.

What's my point in bringing these things up? I don't view myself as "faking" it one bit with any of these things I have changed over the course of my life. In-fact, and I would be curious if I'm in the minority amongst our community with this viewpoint, but I view someone's current self as their traits in combination with their life experiences and learnings... and to intentionally ignore these learnings just to be more autistic, or more like I was as a kid, would be faking it in my opinion.

"faking" or "acting" here doesn't mean naturally changing or supressing some autistic traits or learning how to be more functioning etc, but consciously changing yourself in order to fit in, acting different personas. That's how I understand this topic.

In terms of suppressing stims and all that over the years, I wouldn't call that faking but rather normal growth as I believe you are stating there. When it comes to personality and actions however, I definitely don't know who I actually am. When I talk to most people, I feel like I'm talking for the sake of talking because I feel good that I am talking to them and doing it right, rather than what they are talking about or actually caring who it is for the most part. I too used to be obsessive on topics and dominate conversations, but now I almost never talk about what I would really like to talk about because I that hasn't worked for me in the past (mass rejections etc). Some kind of classical or operant conditioning I suppose.

In other words, I feel like I'm doing too many things for the wrong reason. I don't even know why I do them, and it is almost automatic. It's like I'm in autopilot and the real me is a boring person on standby, or something like that. I really can't express how I feel about it and even talking about it now is incredibly difficult because I'm currently distracted by this and so many other things.

I'd never intentionally ignore learnings as I can't, they are for the most part essentially ingrained into some part of my brain.. as I said autopilot. As I alluded to, it feels like some of those learnings have actually demolished a huge part of who I actually was. It's as if I have a virus called 'experience' in my brain and it's screwing me over. I'm just confusing myself now. >.>




I would also agree with this, though to some extent it sometimes feels out of my conscious control for me too.

EDIT - I guess what I mean is that I feel as if I've been both suppressed AND repressed.

EDIT II - I once read somewhere that some people with Asperger's (more commonly females) can get so good at 'performing' that they barely even have a sense of self, they are just constantly acting and even without realizing it most of the time. I guess this is sort of what I mean.

I completely misunderstood what you were saying, my apologies. I'm going to blame it on the fact it is almost 4AM and I'm still awake for some reason...

For myself, I have carved out a few people in my life (a few close friends and my mom mainly) who I can be myself around (minus some of the autistic traits I mentioned earlier). They know I can be obsessive about things I'm interested in and sometimes won't shut up about them... they hear about TV shows I'm interested in and games I'm playing almost constantly. But around them I'm me. I'm the "different" one in the group and they are fine with it. They also share some of my interests and can participate.

When I was younger, I was basically faking it 100% of the time. I guess what I'm trying to say is it is reversible. I'm 26 now, and I act more myself than I did at 15 or 16 by a mile.

Maybe you need to try to find a friend or two with similar interests... possibly even someone on the spectrum as well... and maybe even practice being yourself around them, so to speak?

I usually change myself in the inside. Most of my inside changes aren't noticeable until a few years later. I do a bit of acting, but most of the "acting" I do is just being polite.