Is camouflaging bad?

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There are different types of camouflaging. Many refer to camouflaging as putting on a social mask in order to blend into society. They mirror the actions of NTs. Over time this can produce significant stress and distress.

But there is another type of camouflaging. About half the population in the world are extroverts and the other half introverts. Extroverts are endowed with the social graces. I am an introvert and happy being an introvert. I see no reason to change. But somewhere along the line in childhood development I stopped advancing. I am in the "pleasing 4" stage of childhood development. So I wear the mask of an introverted adult to mask that I am still a child at 71 years of age. It works for me and it produces little or no distress.

There are layers of masking, not just types of it from what I can find...

It depends how the person reacts, what they want and what they have...


Shallow masking is generally very heavy. It's more of a flat out acting.

Deep compensation is just.. Less heavy.
Many of which rely on scripting and past experiences, and several levels of these requires cognitive resources.


Then there's this bizarre kinds of masking that simply goes beyond the gap beween internal preferences and external expression differences; ones that directly contort the internal preferences and inclinations.

One that doesn't really look like masking, one is almost like hypnosis or just on meds/states. The effects may break or make a person.

It can be environment and contextual sensitive, which makes it seemingly a natural skill of switching perspectives and perception..
It can be dependent on specific conditions, and not really a skill more like a straight up compensation coupled with management skills.



Then there's that layer that makes one question who you really are and what is it means to be human...
It's the lightest to carry and deepest, it is also the most flexible where everything is endless...

But also the most complicated and the hardest to pull off because it's very hard to find it. Also because finding this 'layer' can scare a person outright, let alone touch it.
A person with a rigid sense of self and a weak mind can be driven mad into misanthropy and nihilism if they find this layer without being internally prepared or ready.

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I guess I'd have to ask what the better option is.

I've never had good experiences with being out-and-out different, so much so that I realized that the only way I could be even remotely taken seriously was by phrasing my ideas the way other people would or with style and intonation that other people would use - and I sort of picked things up that way, maybe a bit more salad bar than most people like to see a person do, but I figured I was trying to get a match between me and the thoughts in my head vs. what society consistently thought it was seeing and I was fighting like hell for my own freedom and right to be seen as I wished to be seen.

Part of what really alerted me that something was wrong, or that this was an urgent task, was how often in my late teens I'd work with a girl who on first meeting me would do the sort of absent-eyed 'not my kind of person' stare past me, who'd then get to know me and say something like 'Wow - I thought you were a huge dork but you're actually cool', and I realized that it wasn't happening on repeat in the short term but getting better but that it seemed to be a permanent problem - ie. people didn't know who they were seeing and really didn't seem to want to know. Their minds had an instinctual way of framing things, they liked it that way and I wasn't supposed to upset it.

Almost 20 years later now - I get that the world, socially and domestically, is an insane war zone. So many people don't seem to grow up, so many people stay completely and utterly manipulative for their entire lives, and while I've heard some people say that narcissism is becoming the new normal I really have to wonder if subclinical borderline doesn't trail too far behind that. For example I often hear about just how terrible it is to have a manipulative or abusive parent, I actually had the opposite experience - ie. wonderful parents who had to throw me into a manipulative and abusive society to go to school, find a job, etc., and I don't know if they really had it in their fabric to properly understand what the world was or why it operated the way it did. I've known enough guys who had wonderful parents but had enough Darwinian instinct to be hell-raisers in school and in other places, get reputations and social clout for being aggressive, for whatever reason I didn't come with that wiring - rather I sort of just soaked up facts, did what made sense, and found out that doing so was great cause to get beat up and ridiculed through school.

I think the point being - life in this sort of situation is filled with crap sandwiches and there are some, like bad friends and relationships, that you can take a pass on while there are others you have much less say in. It might depend on the person but for me - I had to camouflage to such a degree and for so long that the camouflage actualy modified who I was. For me though - that's what I was really hoping for, I absolutely hated having people instantly ear mark me as a dork or loser, it's like something superficial about me meant that I had absolutely no right whatsoever to be my real self and to the extent that this was the case people would keep abusing me daily until it changed. Everything in me screamed f--- that.

I'd say at times it can be a good help but when done constantly it drains you. At least that's what I find for myself so I do my best to seek out kind people who understand because of their family/ they are neurodiverse/ are just an empathetic person. With them at least I can let the mask down and be my somewhat overwhelming, intense, too honest self. Even then, I almost had a break down towards the end of my term and I shut down over one of the days of the weekend, not leaving my bed. In the past, when it was a more full time thing I once was off school for almost a week and was a complete wreck. I'm hoping that once the autism & disability awareness group I'm in at my college gets to work my fellow autistic students can feel a bit more comfortable. I only know four so far and at least two looked absolutely drained at the end of term. But yeah, I think it can help with others but if you can trust anyone enough to not continue enjoy it because you can save that energy for something really good.