mask

Where to start. I guess we all wear masks in our interactions with the shopkeeper. And we wear a slightly thinner mask with our colleagues. A thinner one still with our family. And maybe none at all with ourselves. Maybe we spent 20 years meditating to find the true self.

Well the disparate masks you can take off. It exhausts you to wear a partial mask at work all day, so you melt into the sofa when you get home. Except you don’t, if you’re masked at home too. And then when you’re alone, too. You don’t allow yourself to feel weakness or sadness; you don’t allow yourself to cry for 30 years.

Masking is an essential defence mechanism but with autistic people I think it can go too far, probably because we take things literally. Everyone else is important but there’s nothing special about you, 80’s kid!

Masks are fine so long as we know we are wearing them and know how to take them off. I didn’t. 

In hindsight, this meant my family got the mask and strangers got the real thing.

Anyway how I think it would play out with me is that I would paint a picture of who I wanted to be (ironman) and then I would put it in a drawer and never think of it again. Then 5 years later I would have built structures and become that person. And then I would implode, lose my identity, and start all over again.

Masks are merely sets of rules. They are volitional action; the thing that Buddha says to get rid of in order to escape karma. They are action-reaction and prevent original thought. If you live like an athlete, you will become an athlete; all you need to do is create a good set of rules. My brain does not like it when it runs out of rules to optimise.

So essentially, the second that my mask is ‘complete’, it implodes. My brain can see no more pleasure to be had from crafting the persona, encodes it all to null, and I’m left wondering why life is void of meaning.

At the start of 2025 my mask-of-masks imploded. I wasn’t even aware I had been wearing it. I will call this one the fighter. He’s gone now; served his purpose. 

But he didn’t go out easy, and I'm only here now because of the family he built.

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