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Posted this in the schizoid forum I visit, thought it might be worthwhile to post here too.

I mask constantly. All the time. As a child it worked because I had a lot of alone time, and I didn't have to schedule things for myself. As an adult, I have less down time where I can not have my mask on. Going away to university I didn't even have a solo room I could sit in. Always people around and never ones like my family with whom I was more comfortable. And then there's the planning, must plan my day, then must go and do the plans, then must come home and do housework. And the more I am capable of doing that, the more I lose myself. In a very fundamental way.

I can only be myself when I'm alone. I am trying to be able to be myself around my SO but it's hard. A different kind of hard than 'must do x' hard, which we all know is nigh impossible hard. When I do reconnect to whatever parts of me I left behind, I find I am depressed and that life holds no meaning.

It seems that the few chances I take to try and reconnect to whatever part of me I disconnect from in order to function, my behaviors become that of someone with autism. I experience emotions but I cannot form language around them, at least, I can't verbalize around it. Thoughts go like this for me: thought->language->speaking. By the time I get to speaking, it is no longer the thought. Where is emotion on this scale? Before thought? Part of the thought? Damned if I know, but it's there, I can feel it (haha) but I don't have a framework for it so at times like right now, when I'm in speaking mode, it might as well not exist, because I can only talk about stuff that has followed the outline from before, and emotions don't follow that pattern. Maybe?

Everything I say or do when it's about something about myself, it is not me while I am being me. When I am describing myself, it is post-hoc logic applied to the situation, and the logic therefore could easily be wrong. Probably is half the time. This wreaks havoc on any relationships. Rather, it allows me to have relationships with just about anybody, because it's not actually me in them. And now that I'm in one and I actually want to connect, I can't. I don't know who me is. I can go through the motions of connecting but it doesn't mean they're representative of what's going on inside. And I can experience something strongly but not convey that outwardly at all, apparently. How on earth am I supposed to actually connect and live with someone and have it be truthful if my actions are probably, like, opposite to the strength of my emotions??


And ALL these thoughts I've just put here are...novel. The past year or so I feel like I've awakened from some sort of daze. My level of self-awareness feels like it's jumped 100 points, just enough of the million points it could be to realize that I don't have good self-awareness in the least. Before I had no f*****g idea.

Even more galling is that when I read this at a long enough time from when I posted it, I do not get the impression that it is representative of what's actually go on inside me. Like, if someone else posted that, I am not sure I would understand that person as similar to myself at all.