unmasked

Thanksgiving is a time when everyone jokes about how unpleasant it is to socialize with certain people. So it’s almost a trope to say that I have anxiety about socializing over Thanksgiving.

The irony is that (I think) the joke is about how unpleasant topics are likely to come up at the dinner table and they don’t want to deal with someone’s repugnant political views, etc., For me, it’s just as risky if only superficial topics are discussed, because I get bored and socially awkward. Those unpleasant topics are likely the only thing I would enjoy discussing, but because of the social risk to me of getting carried away on a topic, it’s not safe.

But I do love Thanksgiving food and it’s acceptable (I thought) to veg out in front of screens on Thanksgiving. So until recently, I didn’t consider Thanksgiving an overly stressful holiday. Well, other than being a guest in a house other than my sibling’s or parents’ where I don’t know how to help out in the kitchen properly / fulfilling my politeness obligations.

So, it’s Thanksgiving and right now, my needs are to stay far away from unsafe social situations. I can’t do that forever, but for this weekend, it’s what I need. But what is a safe social situation? I am actually not sure I’ve ever unpacked or analyzed this fully before.

At the height of emotional overwhelm, which is my default lately, there is just no such thing as a safe social situation. It is not safe to be alone with my thoughts. It is not safe to be with close people, because I’m only capable of info-dumping what’s in my brain at the moment … and what is in my brain at the moment is so horrible, so harmful, so burdensome to others, there is no one I can interact with that I won’t feel bad about interacting with. Sometimes I need to do it anyway, and luckily right now my husband is playing that role seemingly without resentment. It is not safe to be with acquaintances because I might randomly start crying. I’m coming to see this crying thing as exhaustion from overwhelm and the best “failure” option when I simply cannot mask.

But outside of crisis mode, where I have gotten in the most trouble is misjudging people as safe, trusting people enough to believe that they won’t take me personally, that they’ll forgive some blunders or social differences. Because … even if I didn’t think of it as autism at the time, I have always been aware on some level that I do not enjoy the same social settings that most people seem to enjoy, that I dislike unstructured social time. But I like being around people that I don’t have to mask around, very much. So when I find those people and that setting, and—here is the new piece—maybe am not recognizing when I am overwhelmed but am overwhelmed and can’t keep masking, I let my guard down. And when I find out my unmasked self is disliked / received as harmful by others but I didn’t track it… it sends me into emotional overwhelm where nothing is safe.

Safer

• Public places around complete strangers where there is a very low chance of running into anyone I know. If I start randomly crying, whatever. If I’m stimming, whatever. I can’t care what random strangers think of me.
• Around acquaintances I know I need to mask around, best involving a shared interest that I have psychological distance from (classic example is work colleagues, which is why I’m here, but I still struggle with accidentally stumbling on a topic I’m passionate about).
• More structured, like “we are here to do ___ for ____ time period exactly”
• In a neutral location, so it doesn’t feel like I’m intruding on someone else’s space or they are intruding on mine (e.g. not in my house and not in someone else’s house)
• 1-1, with a sufficient comfort level and shared interests, and absent baggage, where I can do a better job figuring out how much I need to mask / reading their cues (caveat: I can’t get the eye contact right in these situations; when I try to approximate I’ll often miss and people will look over their shoulder to figure out what I’m looking at)
• groups of 3-4 with shared interests but not my SUPER interests, where I don’t have to carry the conversation but have something genuine to contribute to the conversation, but also isn’t a topic I’m obsessed with and will dominate (best example of this is some friends I have with kids my kids’ age)
• Alone, but only when I’m not emotionally overwhelmed or experiencing intrusive thoughts.
• Uncluttered, calming, sensory-optimized environments

Less safe

• Situations in which I don’t know whether I need to mask.
• Around people I know I do need to mask around but know I will struggle to mask, e.g., because of the relationships, likely topics / special interest, or anticipated long stretch of unstructured time (I can only mask for so long)
• Around people I incorrectly believe I don’t need to mask.
• Messy / cluttered environments, particularly if I feel responsible for the environment.
• Hosting responsibilities
• Guest-ing responsibilities (I really do not understand when one should help in a kitchen and when one should stay out of the way.)
• Situations in which it is unclear who is paying the check
• Unfamiliar settings in which I have to discern norms that everyone else seems to understand intuitively and I don’t (e.g., going for a massage and not knowing what clothes to take off or where / how to lie down, and the instructions being vague)
• 1-1 with someone who I have baggage with, feel judged by, or was recently overly vulnerable with / feel shame about

I hate being alone but I also don’t really like being around “people” in general, and maybe now I understand that is because being around “people” means I have to mask. If I’m in a group, I am masking (sometimes failing), or engaging in a special interest (and usually still feeling nervous that I’m not masking enough).

And if I am placed in an unbounded social setting a la “sitting around on couches in someone’s living room,” or “cocktail party at a conference”,” I won’t last long. I won’t have good energy, particularly if I don’t have a sense of when the next activity is (or if the next activity is too far away). It’s theoretically possible but unlikely that someone will strike up a conversation that interests me; so there have been examples of social events I have enjoyed. But generally, I strongly prefer when people get together to do a thing, like a board game or a prayer service or making music or going somewhere.

I need those spaces desperately, in which I can let my guard down while I am with other people. Earlier in life I have managed to function by finding one female “best friend” and one male “romantic interest / boyfriend” and these two people met my basic social needs (= cannot be alone, want connection, but am overwhelmed by unstructured group social settings). My “groups” were mostly low-risk groups (e.g., if they decided they hated me tomorrow my life wouldn’t change that much) or activity groups (and with the exception of APO in college I was not socially comfortable in these groups either, but was sometimes able to enjoy the activity or the company of 1-2 people present). I definitely had meltdowns and problems throughout—I simply am incapable of burning zero bridges—but they just haven’t seemed so existential, both because of the way I’d hedged my social risk and because I was in an inherently temporary setting like college or law school or a year in China. (I say this, but I had experiences of suicidal impulse during these times too, so I don’t know how well I can trust this analysis either.)

As I spent more and more years in Atlanta, more of my “group socializing” has been the unsafe kind: unstructured, more like high school where reputational risk is a long-term issue, and the main reason people hang out is because they like each other’s company for some reason as opposed to shared activities, goals, and interests. I have still hedged in Atlanta. Impressively hedged! To the point where I started to forget how socially different / inept I am! Or believed I added enough value to be forgiven for insufficient masking!

I found out I’m never safe.

Or maybe I just found out I’m autistic and resourceful. That feels a little better? This is a conclusion I have only come to today, and it helps me make sense of why it is in the past few years that this pattern seems to come to a head over and over.

Back to this weekend, my plan is to spend time this weekend only with people who are safe and who know about what’s been going on recently. So that means only my husband, spouse, kids, sister, BIL, and niece. We’ll hang with my BIL’s parents too but I don’t worry too much about masking around them, they are relatively low-risk as they’re removed enough from my daily life and I have evidence that they are not judgmental and/or their judgment doesn’t matter enough to me to send me over the edge.

In the midst of writing this post, I texted the conclusion to my husband who reminded me that his dad and stepmom are coming over Friday afternoon, which is an archetypal *unsafe social situation.* There is even an eerie email chain last year in which I was trying to escape unstructured social time with them last Thanksgiving (after a DIFFERENT meltdown the Thanksgiving before with a DIFFERENT set of his family members). In this email chain, my FIL canceled a visit abruptly in response to my attempt to structure the time / excuse myself from the time, saying “We will try to plan a visit in the future that allows for us [all, including you] to be together in a home environment” because my boundaries meant that “we would not be able to talk, catch up or have the kind of visit that we had hoped for.”

So … they want to be in “a home environment” in which they can sit around and “catch up” with no activities planned. And I want… need? … the exact opposite. And I’m too close to the emotional edge to compromise right now!

I’m about to leave for the airport; I suppose I will write again on how it turns out.