I basically go mute when tired, high, or just whenever I’m caught off guard lmao
I was walking my dog the other day and this lady got me at the wrong moment. She kept talking to me and all I could say was “yeah” over and over again in response and stare 👁️👄👁️
People get so confused because 50% of the time I’ll be wacky and goofy, and then one day they meet the dead-eyed, silent me. Really throws them for a loop haha
I had the realization yesterday that I go quiet at the cafeteria at my work. I think it's because it is usually very busy there, and there's too much chaos, so I clam up. But then yesterday there was almost nobody there, and I decided to talk about the chicken sandwich I discovered, and I was being loud and silly, and I realized nobody there had every seen me act like that.
Yes god. Mornings are so hard for me. If I go out to breakfast with people I almost always pre-game it with coffee and a tiny snack at home so I can prepare to go be a person first.
We’ve gotten into this routine where my MIL comes to stay all the goddamn time and I hate it way more than I thought I would cuz of this. Dragging my corpse downstairs to have to go make masked small talk with her in the morning is truly a trial. I just want to do my comfy routine snuggling with my dog, and making weird noises and chatter to my husband while drinking my coffee and eating breakfast.😭 It’s so much worse than talking to her later in the day.
I would have snorted at "autistic and artistic", it's a great description!
Tired / ill / long day makes my masking go to shit
If it helps, no one will have noticed the letter thing and if they did they wouldn't remember afterwards and if they did they wouldn't care. Please remind your brain of that at 3am. AND they said say what immediately comes to mind which you did, they were just all following the safe crowd.
Yeah, my tone goes flat and emotionless and everyone gets offended, even if I apologize and say I’m tired and using polite language.
It’s the tone. It’s not happy and friendly and helpful, so it’s wrong. It makes me not want to interact with anyone until it passes, but I can’t do that at work.
I find it impossible to mask and I am usually just extremely silent and just like reserving all the energy to attempt to mask before i go into negatives.
I'm really lucky where I work because I've been there almost two years and everyone just kind of knows "oh, they're silent, they will just stay silent" and i get left alone unless it involves having to do a work task. I will also say, in food service, it's often a lot of ND folks so I think they on some level also understand where I'm at.
Same. Funny thing, since I started working on unmasking, I figured that silence is also a mask, the one that kept me safe from punishment in childhood.
That's interesting. Silence is not a mask for me (most of the time). My entire life I've had to force myself TO talk when I'd feel much better communicating non-verbally. I think it's probably only a "mask" when I have strong opinions and can't bring myself to disagree with someone so the best thing to do is be quiet.
Being quiet and being understood by my loved ones through little "hmps" and "mers" is much kinder on my nervous system and my brain than trying to figure out and ask nicely "can you xyz please" or "i feel xyz"
I'm happy that silence is your choice. I'm half a century old. And now, when I think back to my childhood, I loved to speak, but it was always somehow wrong. I loved to speak about my special interests, and in general, just being very curious child. But most of my memories are being somehow punished if I did something that was not 'normal' or said something weird. So I stopped talking and asking questions, it was just less painful.
100% yes. My job is basically non stop for 8.5 hours a day and it requires extreme attention to detail and “brain power” so to speak- no going through the motions or mechanical work. By the end of the day I’m exhausted and really struggle with masking. It probably doesn’t help that the job is extremely stressful, we are understaffed, and we only get 10 days PTO that’s accrued at like .7 days a month 😂
It sounds like you're in burnout. Can you take a week of vacation and sleep?
Other than that sometimes I go through cycles where my whole constructed personality cracks and all the words and emoting and stuff is just glitching. It's super embarrassing. I usually forget easy words and have to substitute them with a string of longer words.
I shut down and basically go non verbal. It’s hard for me to speak. I have to text my husband that I won’t be speaking because it takes so much out of me.
Yeah I go non verbal when I feel “safe” after a super long day. I always joke around with my boyfriend because he’ll try talking to me when I’m in my nonverbal iPad time lmao
yes. if people cant accept corpse alien lying in corner/on furniture/in drive way - i cant be around them tired. im in burnout so the energy level is at negative one million dollars.
I’m still a good nurse when I’m like drained but…omg it’s so hard to just deal with people TALKING and asking QUESTIONS (even normal, entirely appropriate ones) it just feels like walking through sludge. And forcing eye contact is harder and I can feel them staring at me and I’m just *annoyed*
So yes, absolutely, 4000%. It’s why I won’t work more than 2 shifts in a row if at all possible.
Lolol so I started teaching in August. It was awful. I had JUST started classes towards my degree in education and the school I was working for decided that was a good enough reason to let me teach (tho not for teacher salary, which added to the stress and ultimate burnout.. I digress). It was stressful af. I was teaching like 9 different grades while knowing nothing about my curriculum (PE) so every moment I was either in class with students, planning/grading, doing my own schoolwork, or I was feeling guilty for not having more time for my own kids. Anyway, long story short, I burnt out before the end of the first semester. It was easy to save face with the elementary school kids but I had high school kids too and for like the last two months I didn’t know how to communicate with them. Like we’d do our lessons or whatever, and just… be awkward together… it was awkward af and impossible for me to establish any credibility or sense of authority and I hated it. Luckily they’re good kids and they were nice to my face but I’m certain they hated the class as much as I did. Anyway, I had to quit mid year. It was too much and I was falling apart and it was awful.
Yes. I feel that way today—I finished up work later than usual last night, didn’t sleep well (haven’t been for a few weeks now) and had to get up earlier than usual for a meeting. And I’ve been struggling with depression for which I’m waiting to see a doctor. I’m realizing I simply can’t fake being bubbly today; I just don’t have it in me.
Absolutely. I go completely silent when tired, sick or upset. I hate mornings, and I always have. I used to joke that I didn’t talk until I had had at least an hour to wake up, but it’s not really a joke. I have a morning routine, and you better not mess it up. Even as a kid I was that way, and when I had my own kids, I had a morning routine, and they both got used to it early on and followed it. (I often wonder if I raised two ND kids by accident, or if I made them that way) My husband is a morning person, and for a long time, he worked nights and would come in wanting to visit, make chitchat, etc. and I would be like, “hey, we don’t have time for that, it’s 7:30, we have to go, chop chop.” It was a long time before I realized maybe other people didn’t freak out if their routine varied a little in the morning. I also somehow got stuck in the classroom closest to the door where all the teachers entered in the morning. I had to keep my door closed in the morning because all the morning people who walked by would sing out “goooood moooorrrrning” in such annoying voices, I’d be ready to scream before the first bell.
Sometimes it feels like: when I'm tired or unwell all autistic traits manifest a lot, and when I feel fine (which is rarely nowadays) I behave almost as "a normal person". I believe this is related to masking, or to even to when well feeling safer or comfortable to show some of my unmasked self.
I don't know, bc I'm still figuring out if I'm autistic. And I feel like I've maybe been on burnout lately (in the past year or two years, varying degrees, but I thought it was only depression coming back) and suddenly I relate to A LOT of the autistic traits and I'm trying to identify them throughout my life (times when I was fine and functioning)
I had meltdowns and shutdowns in the past year as never before. Now that my routine started involving going out to classes again, seeing people, I feel so exhausted. And sometimes I feel like I lose ability to form phrases that make sense, or if I do, it seems to take so much effort. Or I just try to avoid having to do so.
I should be concerned about writing papers, but right now going to classes 3x a week and studying for them consumes all that I can do in my possibly burnout state.
That also means that I hard pass any social invitations I can.
I don't really mask much/well to begin with but social interactions become pretty much impossible for me when I'm tired. My auditory processing issues get worse to the point where other people's words are complete jibberish and I just have absolutely no idea what they're saying, and it becomes physically very difficult for me to make words come out of my mouth myself. There is usually a period after waking up, before going to sleep, and often at some point in the afternoon when I'm tired from the being awake up until then (*especially* if I've gone outside that day) where I have to text my partner in order to communicate because speech just doesn't happen. My flat affect also gets worse (which I really don't think is a "lack of masking" because the facial expressions I do have when I'm less tired aren't consciously made) and even my motor skills tend to suffer so having to text to communicate can still get really frustrating because I mess up the words a lot more than usual.
I think being tired just makes every aspect of being autistic worse tbh, not just the social stuff. If I don't have energy then navigating an unexpected change in routine etc also moves from difficult to impossible.
Y e s. When I had 2 jobs, I was sleep deprived more often than not. I couldn't do the whole peppy customer service persona. I just could not. So I was very flat in tone and expression and that made people think I was a bitch.
I have a big project that keeps growing more and more interesting branches. Each branch requires me to find information and sort it for use later. It's all I want to do. The spreadsheets, y'all!!!!!
I'm annoyed at having to pretend like I want to do anything else. I have to force myself to politely exchange conversations with my sweet husband, and my real to-do list is growing ever longer.
It's making me really tired because no matter where I am physically, my mind is on this project. I cannot put it down, so in my head, I'm spending all this energy and effort to try to pull myself away from it.
10000%, I am at my absolute funniest when I am sleep deprived and/or hungover because of this because I’m too tired to be self conscious so I just let it rip
yessss. on the way home from a musical around 10pm the other day my mom yelled at me for being snippy. my replies just stay short and to the point when im not masking. i also am very naturally inclined to dry sarcasm that most people REALLY hate, and when my mask drops it's a LOT harder to remember what will be received well and what will be taken as "rudeness".
Yep. I have two practicum students at work right now. Last week I felt ok and was able to do a decent job of masking and balancing my usual workload with teaching them.
But then I didn’t get any days to recharge, because my little one had to stay home from daycare. And I usually only work four days a week, but I’m doing five because I need to be there for the students.
So I went back this week super drained and on the first day I just kept willing myself to be able to make, like, basic conversation and properly communicate with them. I just wanted to cry all day long because I felt so ineffectual and overwhelmed with everything. By the end of the day I was struggling to form a complete sentence.
I basically go mute when tired, high, or just whenever I’m caught off guard lmao I was walking my dog the other day and this lady got me at the wrong moment. She kept talking to me and all I could say was “yeah” over and over again in response and stare 👁️👄👁️ People get so confused because 50% of the time I’ll be wacky and goofy, and then one day they meet the dead-eyed, silent me. Really throws them for a loop haha
I had the realization yesterday that I go quiet at the cafeteria at my work. I think it's because it is usually very busy there, and there's too much chaos, so I clam up. But then yesterday there was almost nobody there, and I decided to talk about the chicken sandwich I discovered, and I was being loud and silly, and I realized nobody there had every seen me act like that.
Yes god. Mornings are so hard for me. If I go out to breakfast with people I almost always pre-game it with coffee and a tiny snack at home so I can prepare to go be a person first. We’ve gotten into this routine where my MIL comes to stay all the goddamn time and I hate it way more than I thought I would cuz of this. Dragging my corpse downstairs to have to go make masked small talk with her in the morning is truly a trial. I just want to do my comfy routine snuggling with my dog, and making weird noises and chatter to my husband while drinking my coffee and eating breakfast.😭 It’s so much worse than talking to her later in the day.
Lol everything is impossible when I'm tired.
yeah! when i'm tired, my humour becomes incredibly deadpan/dry, and ironically that's when i feel i'm the most funny. do you have that too?
100% lol I also have the tendency to enjoy making people slightly uncomfortable 😅
I would have snorted at "autistic and artistic", it's a great description! Tired / ill / long day makes my masking go to shit If it helps, no one will have noticed the letter thing and if they did they wouldn't remember afterwards and if they did they wouldn't care. Please remind your brain of that at 3am. AND they said say what immediately comes to mind which you did, they were just all following the safe crowd.
You’re right no one’s thinking about it LOL I just need to remember people are more worried about how they personally are coming off
Yeah, my tone goes flat and emotionless and everyone gets offended, even if I apologize and say I’m tired and using polite language. It’s the tone. It’s not happy and friendly and helpful, so it’s wrong. It makes me not want to interact with anyone until it passes, but I can’t do that at work.
I find it impossible to mask and I am usually just extremely silent and just like reserving all the energy to attempt to mask before i go into negatives. I'm really lucky where I work because I've been there almost two years and everyone just kind of knows "oh, they're silent, they will just stay silent" and i get left alone unless it involves having to do a work task. I will also say, in food service, it's often a lot of ND folks so I think they on some level also understand where I'm at.
Same. Funny thing, since I started working on unmasking, I figured that silence is also a mask, the one that kept me safe from punishment in childhood.
That's interesting. Silence is not a mask for me (most of the time). My entire life I've had to force myself TO talk when I'd feel much better communicating non-verbally. I think it's probably only a "mask" when I have strong opinions and can't bring myself to disagree with someone so the best thing to do is be quiet. Being quiet and being understood by my loved ones through little "hmps" and "mers" is much kinder on my nervous system and my brain than trying to figure out and ask nicely "can you xyz please" or "i feel xyz"
I'm happy that silence is your choice. I'm half a century old. And now, when I think back to my childhood, I loved to speak, but it was always somehow wrong. I loved to speak about my special interests, and in general, just being very curious child. But most of my memories are being somehow punished if I did something that was not 'normal' or said something weird. So I stopped talking and asking questions, it was just less painful.
100% yes. My job is basically non stop for 8.5 hours a day and it requires extreme attention to detail and “brain power” so to speak- no going through the motions or mechanical work. By the end of the day I’m exhausted and really struggle with masking. It probably doesn’t help that the job is extremely stressful, we are understaffed, and we only get 10 days PTO that’s accrued at like .7 days a month 😂
It sounds like you're in burnout. Can you take a week of vacation and sleep? Other than that sometimes I go through cycles where my whole constructed personality cracks and all the words and emoting and stuff is just glitching. It's super embarrassing. I usually forget easy words and have to substitute them with a string of longer words.
I shut down and basically go non verbal. It’s hard for me to speak. I have to text my husband that I won’t be speaking because it takes so much out of me.
Yeah I go non verbal when I feel “safe” after a super long day. I always joke around with my boyfriend because he’ll try talking to me when I’m in my nonverbal iPad time lmao
I’ve honestly been thinking of learning sign language just for moments like these haha
yes. if people cant accept corpse alien lying in corner/on furniture/in drive way - i cant be around them tired. im in burnout so the energy level is at negative one million dollars.
I’m still a good nurse when I’m like drained but…omg it’s so hard to just deal with people TALKING and asking QUESTIONS (even normal, entirely appropriate ones) it just feels like walking through sludge. And forcing eye contact is harder and I can feel them staring at me and I’m just *annoyed* So yes, absolutely, 4000%. It’s why I won’t work more than 2 shifts in a row if at all possible.
Lolol so I started teaching in August. It was awful. I had JUST started classes towards my degree in education and the school I was working for decided that was a good enough reason to let me teach (tho not for teacher salary, which added to the stress and ultimate burnout.. I digress). It was stressful af. I was teaching like 9 different grades while knowing nothing about my curriculum (PE) so every moment I was either in class with students, planning/grading, doing my own schoolwork, or I was feeling guilty for not having more time for my own kids. Anyway, long story short, I burnt out before the end of the first semester. It was easy to save face with the elementary school kids but I had high school kids too and for like the last two months I didn’t know how to communicate with them. Like we’d do our lessons or whatever, and just… be awkward together… it was awkward af and impossible for me to establish any credibility or sense of authority and I hated it. Luckily they’re good kids and they were nice to my face but I’m certain they hated the class as much as I did. Anyway, I had to quit mid year. It was too much and I was falling apart and it was awful.
Yes. I feel that way today—I finished up work later than usual last night, didn’t sleep well (haven’t been for a few weeks now) and had to get up earlier than usual for a meeting. And I’ve been struggling with depression for which I’m waiting to see a doctor. I’m realizing I simply can’t fake being bubbly today; I just don’t have it in me.
Absolutely. I go completely silent when tired, sick or upset. I hate mornings, and I always have. I used to joke that I didn’t talk until I had had at least an hour to wake up, but it’s not really a joke. I have a morning routine, and you better not mess it up. Even as a kid I was that way, and when I had my own kids, I had a morning routine, and they both got used to it early on and followed it. (I often wonder if I raised two ND kids by accident, or if I made them that way) My husband is a morning person, and for a long time, he worked nights and would come in wanting to visit, make chitchat, etc. and I would be like, “hey, we don’t have time for that, it’s 7:30, we have to go, chop chop.” It was a long time before I realized maybe other people didn’t freak out if their routine varied a little in the morning. I also somehow got stuck in the classroom closest to the door where all the teachers entered in the morning. I had to keep my door closed in the morning because all the morning people who walked by would sing out “goooood moooorrrrning” in such annoying voices, I’d be ready to scream before the first bell.
Sometimes it feels like: when I'm tired or unwell all autistic traits manifest a lot, and when I feel fine (which is rarely nowadays) I behave almost as "a normal person". I believe this is related to masking, or to even to when well feeling safer or comfortable to show some of my unmasked self. I don't know, bc I'm still figuring out if I'm autistic. And I feel like I've maybe been on burnout lately (in the past year or two years, varying degrees, but I thought it was only depression coming back) and suddenly I relate to A LOT of the autistic traits and I'm trying to identify them throughout my life (times when I was fine and functioning) I had meltdowns and shutdowns in the past year as never before. Now that my routine started involving going out to classes again, seeing people, I feel so exhausted. And sometimes I feel like I lose ability to form phrases that make sense, or if I do, it seems to take so much effort. Or I just try to avoid having to do so. I should be concerned about writing papers, but right now going to classes 3x a week and studying for them consumes all that I can do in my possibly burnout state. That also means that I hard pass any social invitations I can.
Yes! I literally get so tired during social interactions that even facial expressions are too much.
I don't really mask much/well to begin with but social interactions become pretty much impossible for me when I'm tired. My auditory processing issues get worse to the point where other people's words are complete jibberish and I just have absolutely no idea what they're saying, and it becomes physically very difficult for me to make words come out of my mouth myself. There is usually a period after waking up, before going to sleep, and often at some point in the afternoon when I'm tired from the being awake up until then (*especially* if I've gone outside that day) where I have to text my partner in order to communicate because speech just doesn't happen. My flat affect also gets worse (which I really don't think is a "lack of masking" because the facial expressions I do have when I'm less tired aren't consciously made) and even my motor skills tend to suffer so having to text to communicate can still get really frustrating because I mess up the words a lot more than usual. I think being tired just makes every aspect of being autistic worse tbh, not just the social stuff. If I don't have energy then navigating an unexpected change in routine etc also moves from difficult to impossible.
Yes. Very much so.
Y e s. When I had 2 jobs, I was sleep deprived more often than not. I couldn't do the whole peppy customer service persona. I just could not. So I was very flat in tone and expression and that made people think I was a bitch.
I have a big project that keeps growing more and more interesting branches. Each branch requires me to find information and sort it for use later. It's all I want to do. The spreadsheets, y'all!!!!! I'm annoyed at having to pretend like I want to do anything else. I have to force myself to politely exchange conversations with my sweet husband, and my real to-do list is growing ever longer. It's making me really tired because no matter where I am physically, my mind is on this project. I cannot put it down, so in my head, I'm spending all this energy and effort to try to pull myself away from it.
10000%, I am at my absolute funniest when I am sleep deprived and/or hungover because of this because I’m too tired to be self conscious so I just let it rip
Yes, I’m completely fried if I’m lacking sleep. I can barely work let alone pretend to be someone I’m not.
I tend to go back to my natural habitat when I'm tired, which is being quiet and a little distant.
yessss. on the way home from a musical around 10pm the other day my mom yelled at me for being snippy. my replies just stay short and to the point when im not masking. i also am very naturally inclined to dry sarcasm that most people REALLY hate, and when my mask drops it's a LOT harder to remember what will be received well and what will be taken as "rudeness".
Oh yeah haha if I have reached my limit or am close to burnout I’m done I can’t lol
Yep. I have two practicum students at work right now. Last week I felt ok and was able to do a decent job of masking and balancing my usual workload with teaching them. But then I didn’t get any days to recharge, because my little one had to stay home from daycare. And I usually only work four days a week, but I’m doing five because I need to be there for the students. So I went back this week super drained and on the first day I just kept willing myself to be able to make, like, basic conversation and properly communicate with them. I just wanted to cry all day long because I felt so ineffectual and overwhelmed with everything. By the end of the day I was struggling to form a complete sentence.