Acting

Post Reply New Topic

I was just wondering, do any of you who have learned to get along socially fairly well find that you are mostly acting?

Even before I ever found out what Asperger's was, I came to the realization that most of my social skills (which were all obtained through months of research and practice) are a facade that I put on around people. I "set" my face to appear as if it is full of life, character, etc. And sometimes I may actually be feeling an emotion (happiness at the way a conversation is going, or at a joke) but may forget to transfer that feeling to my facial expression, so I had to learn how to transfer my emotion to my expression.

And also quite often I will lose myself in my thoughts and forget to set my face, so that I get an odd look on it and someone will say to me, "are you okay?" or something like that. And really I'm feeling just fine and may be involved in the discussion or whatever, I've just forgotten to translate that to my facial expression.

Just wondering if any of you do this as well.

Yes, although I don't really enjoy it, and I doubt I am good enough to pull off an Academy Award winning performance (although one can always hope, I suppose.) And I HATE that "are you okay" thing because I forget to smile sometimes, and it is inevitable that whenever I forget, someone comes up and asks me what is wrong. I get worried sometimes because my face must look pretty off or something...

A facade pretty much describes how I deal with social situations, it takes a lot of mental effort to pretend to care about mindless chit-chat.

I wanted to add something on to this..

I'm always acting in groups, I would even say I've become a pro at it.

However, after say 2 hours of talking, something weird continues to happen to me, instead of focusing on one conversation or person, I suddenly am overwhelmed by every word, every person, every single thought coming in at once.

I seem to get total overload, and no matter how skilled I am at hiding it, I have to run away, this is ruining my chance to keep friends..

I experience exaclty the same thing

Yes, I have learned how to "participate" very well in social settings, but it never feels natural, and is always very taxing mentally. However, I suppose it only makes me look like a jerk or somewhat conceited because I believe that people think that I don't socialize because I'm a snob or something, not because its totally draining and utterly uninteresting for me.

I act almost so well, I'm basically flawless when I'm in a good mood and state. I'm easily mistaken as NT by even disability workers when I act.

But it's very taxing to my other mental skills so I find myself too much like an NT when I act too well, and I burn out extremely fast if I'm not careful.

I can only act when I'm not tired, not hungry, not angry, not hurt and when there are only a few people around. And then - they have to be people that I have an interest in making sure they don't know about my AS.

I know, I know ... if they were really important to me, I would straight out tell them about the AS... (let the emotional beating up myself process begin for not being honest with them)

I can act quite well...but it really wears me down after awhile. I used to be better at it when I was younger.

I zone out more frequently now.

Yep last night at a party, I managed it for say.. .an hour?

After that I escaped by playing a banjo for around two hours

Nicely put - I'm the same way.. I'm good for a short amount of time then all I hear is a bunch of noise.. One of my new 'hyper' friends put it this way when the girls were all talking:
'All you hear is YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP YIP' < -- funnier with actual observation of him doing it

Now, when I got to parties, I generally only stay a couple hours.. Once I find myself looking for a t.v. or something to play with I know I am done

Oh, and my acting skills are quite good.. "they" state those in actually 'acting' tend to do better at it if they are 'less socialable' in life (Tom Hanks is an example)

Acting is the bane of meaningful friendships. While you will feel more immediately accepted by doing so, acting puts a distance between yourself and those around you. By acting, they see your image, rather than the real you.

My brother (who has many AS traits, but doesn’t have the full-blown syndrome) took the art of acting to a ridiculous extreme: In any social situation, he could read the acting of those around him, mirror what they wanted to see, and could interact with anyone.

He crafted an image, an enormous one, and gained a tremendous cult of personality because of it. People all over town “knew” him, yet it all led to one thing: apparently socially accepted, but very, very few real friends. While he had an almost cultish following (the character associated with his image became a household name in our town), he talked about how isolated he really was.

Eventually, he decided to drop the entire image. He disposed of his superficial and meaningless friends, only to find that he had no one left (besides his girlfriend, one of the few people to truly see him as he was).

The entire experience left him without real friends, without knowing who he really was, and isolated emotionally despite outward popularity.


Personally, I observed this acting behavior in my own life at an early age (fifth grade), which I dubbed “The Mask Game” (mentioned in this post: http://www.wrongplanet.net/modules.php? ... ic&t=15997 ). I understood a lot of the superficiality, what people wanted to see, and how to react in certain situations. I developed elaborate scripts of what I thought people wanted to see, and for a time, it worked. I had some “friends”, but they were superficial and pointless. Some of these people betrayed me, other friendships stagnated and became lost.

Moreover, friendships gained via Mask Game behavior were often very limited in duration, since I would run into situations in which I had no scripts, and in those situations those around me would be surprised by the sudden strange behavior. Situations such as this have had many pitfalls: loss of friendships, intensification of bullying, physical and mental exhaustion, and more.

It was because of this that before abandoning the Mask Game entirely that I limited its application to things like church camps, where I would never need to talk to those people after the week or so I was there. Within such situations, I would never run into situations where I didn’t have adequate scripts, where I could act how I thought those around me wanted, and guess what? It worked, spectacularly. At camps I would have lots of friends, but by the time they were over, they would be lost, and I never made a single lasting friendship because of it. I continued the process since it helped with the surface-level feelings of loneliness and isolation, even though superficial friends really don’t help in the long run, since you really can’t count on them.

Eventually, I decided to discard the Mask Game behavior was pointless. I couldn’t continue “acting” indefinitely, and it always backfired in the end, so I gave it up. After giving up the act, I must admit that I had very few friends, but those who were friends were real ones, people who would listen, people who I could trust, and I’d rather have one real friend over a dozen superficial ones.

Real friends are still few and far between, but I don’t need to act in front of any of them. Honestly, I think that the whole acting thing is why so many aspies are alone and isolated:

They are afraid to assert who they really are, and are instead concerned with how they appear in the minds of others. Personally, I say **** what everyone else thinks.

I am myself.
By being myself I can be the best that I can ever be.
Why should I pretend, even for a moment, to be anything else?
(stated in this topic: http://www.wrongplanet.net/modules.php? ... c&p=333525 )

Furthermore, by establishing certain scripted behavior, those around you come to expect continuation of this behavior, meaning you’ll need to continue the superficial and shallow acting in the future

If you socialize one-on-one with other people, they are generally more open, and in such situations you can more fully be yourself. If the person rejects you for being yourself, are they truly the kind of person you want to be dealing with? Isn’t it best to find out right away, rather than through a lengthy and mentally exhausting process of acting?

Most people can’t handle “the real me”, but that’s OK.

At the core of the entire thing is gaining a better knowledge of yourself, so you can more fully be yourself, but that is a whole different rant.

I've started copying the body language ppl use (at least the part that i can see) years ago without really knowing what i was doing and now im 24, just diagnosed with AS last wednesday and i don't really have to act anymore, smiling when i feel happy and not smiling when i don't feel happy etc come so natural to me now that i don't even have to think about it and in the last 5 years the only comment i got was from a co worker a week ago about that i can't handle much lol!
AS it is now, i don't really see my acting as acting anymore, since it really visualizes how i feel, the same as with NT's i don't really see the differens between them and me except in that we learned it a different way.

As a younger man, I was very into comedy (I still am, but that's not my point here). My best (only) friend of the time and I were partners in writing and performing comedy, and for about 3 years, we had a weekly comedy show at the local community radio station.

Growing up and then living in Chicago/Evanston as I did/do, The Second City was and is the pinnacle of comedy study. So it was that I came to start studying Improvisation.

There are things in Improv that fit VERY well with being an Aspie. For instance, finding patterns in the dialog and working to extend them.

Most of all, Improv teaches you a huge number of "games" and tricks for interacting with people. I suggest that Aspies should look into leaning/studying Improv.

But to your point, yes, it is acting. And it isn't fullfilling when you find that you're in a situation and you hide behind the mask of games and tricks. And it doesn't apply a lot of the time. In groups, you "Act" like you're participating. You "Act" like you're being "yourself" and you are sharing who you are.

There is some feeling of accomplishment that you have succeeded in the act, but it always follows by a hollow feeling that yet again, you weren't there, no one knows you, and you don't know them.

It's a way to get along, and it does work, in my case, very successfully... And then I'm home again and back with myself, the only person I don't have a act for.

I do the same thing. I view it as two different people. I'm really out-going and crazy with my family, by myself, and people I really know. However, in social setting or around people I don't know I become quiet, shy, and don't talk alot. I have agree with some of what has been said above, being in social setting/around new people, really takes a lot out of me, so I have to be in a good mood and have enegry to socialize or talk to someone I don't know.

So for the acting part, I think I do a great job at because most people don't have a clue I have anything wrong with me, unless I'm not feeling well (like sick) then someone might pick up on it but they just think i'm not feeling well. Its one of the reasons why I've always wanted to be a movie actor, because I've been doing all my life so I've have pretty good idea how to do it. But I decided that I could not handle all the stress and worry that would come with it, so I'm not going that way all more.

Gsilver - a lot of your post sounded a lot like me. Not all of it, mind you. I have some really good friends who really care about me. If I let my facade fall apart, I think I would still be left with a large group of friends.

But the thing is, I don't want people to get close to the "real" me. I have a crazy fear of people getting attached to me, because I am so unpredictable. I feel distanced from my emotions and don't get attached to people, not even my best friends. I lead two different lives in two different towns (one where I go to school and one where I live) and therefore have two different sets of friends. I am different around each group and I would never, ever let my hometown friends mix with my larger and more wild school town friends, because they would not even believe that I am the same person.

To be honest, I love it. I wouldn't trade my social life as it stands for anything. (Well, almost anything...) It doesn't wear me down, because I really enjoy consciously directing my social life. And becoming a different person based on the image I want to maintain. I am my own person, and no one knows the real me.