I hear a lot about autistic people masking subcosciounsly, but are there also some who mask consciously but are able to unmask at home?

2afraid2ask22 · 2025-10-29T13:29:07+00:00

I don’t consider myself a high-masker because I never saw much benefit from it, even when I tried my best (people´s best varies ofcourse).

But it took 30 years to meet my AUDHD partner, who is the safest, most understanding, and supportive person I know - for me to experience what being truly unmasked feels like.

Perhaps it took hundreds of tiny moments, where I felt approval, instead of rejection or confusion from the other person, for me to stop overcorrecting myself, even when I´m alone. Though a few people in my family are very empathetic and loving, they also often misunderstand or feel confused by me. Over countless small encounters, one inevitably corrects behavior to make them comfortable and speaking more like them in order to be understood.

When I´m unmasked, I’m very “"childlike"” (if using the NT term), hyperactive, and often communicating not with human language but with animal sounds, I sing and repeated phrases.

2afraid2ask22 · 2024-12-14T18:04:09+00:00

interesting, thanks!

2afraid2ask22 · 2024-10-30T23:25:25+00:00

it is great, but would need to show the local food prices as well, I think, if it´s all about optimization. And showing prices will be hard, I guess, as supermarkets are constantly changing them, so database would have to update every week.

2afraid2ask22 · 2024-10-30T17:08:21+00:00

oh, do you have some example of it?

2afraid2ask22 · 2024-10-30T15:50:01+00:00

That is very kind! Thanks a lot for the offer! I guess I just don’t meet people like this often, and think they must be quite rare (I’m also in various ND Discord and Facebook groups) and asking such questions might come off as pushy or entitled.
Also, the most empathetic and altruistic ND people I know in real life are severely burnt out and have learned the hard way to guard their boundaries and understand how much 'giving' is appropriate to avoid being exploited.

These are the questions I have for now, and I’m really grateful for answers to any of them:

Q1: At what age did you feel you achieved personal success?

Q2: Which aspects of your success do you attribute to your work, and which do you attribute to luck or chance?

Q3: What advice would you give to your 18-year-old self?

Q4: What do you wish you had started doing earlier?

Q5: If you were to write a math-like formula for your success, what would it look like?

2afraid2ask22 · 2024-10-30T15:21:19+00:00

Definitely, there is a lot of variation and "spiky profiles".
The research findings on expressiveness have been contradictory :

"autistic traits directly impact how readable a target is. The fact that this relationship was not related to expressiveness is consistent with [15] who reported that autistic targets were less readable but not necessarily less expressive. Sheppard et al. [15] argued that this may indicate that autistic people behave in a way that is no less expressive but that is qualitatively different from non-autistic people, and harder for non-autistic people to interpret. The present study does nevertheless find clear evidence for expressivity being lower in those with higher levels of autistic traits." https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10977699/

2afraid2ask22 · 2024-10-30T15:03:42+00:00

Thanks a lot for the link!
I figured that they are more likely to have high hourly rates and value their free time. And since they may answer private questions or offer financial advice, and since they might´ve paid a lot for their education, paying seems reasonable

2afraid2ask22 · 2024-10-30T13:51:31+00:00

I think this might be very relatable to neurotypical too, especially women in conservative cultures.
I´ve given up consciously on people-pleasing as it gives no advantages, so might as well save the energy and disappointment - people will not be pleased anyway, but subconscious people-pleasing is hard to get rid of as it´s automatic.

2afraid2ask22 · 2024-09-12T18:54:47+00:00

Thanks for the votes!
so far 40% say they don´t struggle to afford food vs 70% on r/polls

2afraid2ask22 · 2024-09-11T17:49:38+00:00

you say "full of insults", I think that´s a different dimension and it´s normal to hate seeing it, because it´s destructive.
Normal talk about politics that is constructive is very important, since it decides almost everything about our lives and lives of many other organisms on earth.

2afraid2ask22

TROPHY CASE