Masking, or turning the volume down

Masking in the autistic world is acting like someone else in order to survive within society. It may look like keeping your body in uncomfortable shapes, or uncomfortably still, to imitate other people's behaviour. It may look like professing different interests or emotions or thoughts than you actually have. It may look like imitating the people around you, or not participating much, rather than understanding what is going on. There are lots of kinds of masking.

A therapist said to me a couple weeks ago that autistic behaviours are innately human behaviours. They're just scaled differently and those shifts in scale are clustered differently.

Some research I haven't fact-checked says that parts of autistic folks' brains are more entangled, that we experience some things as connected that others do not, including experiences and physical pain. That seems to be true.

PDAers are often excellent maskers; part of our profile is that we are "manipulative" because we "use social strategies" to get what we need. The difference between a PDAer and a neurotypical "using social strategies" is that a PDAer "lacks understanding". This is the diagnostic criteria, which is pretty hostile towards the survival of PDAers (obviously if we didn't use strategies to get what we need we would not have what we need, but it's considered manipulative to act like a neurotypical while not being one I guess).

I've been an excellent masker in the social strategies department. I feel a lot of emotions and experie3nce a lot of things, and if I can get someone to tell me a little bit about what's going on for them I can empathize. Until recently I thought that was because my emotions were pretty similar to other folks'.

Now I think my emotions are much bigger than other folks'. My masking has basically involved turning the volume down on my emotions before sharing them, and selecting which set of emotions to share. I thought this was a social thing everyone did -- there's all this stuff floating around in the culture about how it's healthy to open up to friends about your emotions, which implies that many people do not open up, so I thought I was just like normal people in that regard.

With more data, though, I'm not so sure anymore. On the one hand I have a lot of folks around me who have trouble sitting with a friend's emotion: they would be uncomfortable with any expression of "negative" emotion I think if they couldn't immediately shut it down and end it? But on the other hand when I express my full internal sense of emotion, even if it's just through language and with no body or tone involvement, folks get really worried. People who know me more often have a better sense that this is my norm, but just regular folks? Not so much.

Thinking about this is unsettling and weird. It explains a lot about the world and people's choices? I don't know, I'm still chewing on this one and will be for awhile.

Devotions

Eating a watermelon by cutting it in half and scooping out the insides with a spoon, with a little juice at the bottom to drink

Salads from the garden

Prioritizing rest

Tomatoes that are allllllmost ripe

Future plans. I love making these. I love looking forward to things, to figuring out what they'll be like

Folks who understand PDA

Learning more about PDA myself, it really helps to understand what's happening

A cat food my cats will eat and not complain about

Kratky hydroponics, it's so simple

The miracle of the modern technological/industrial complex, which creates things like air pumps for hydroponics, grow lights, instant communication of many kinds, floor washing machines, laundry machines, stoves, glass jars for canning, and an amazing network of roads and airplanes and just-- there are dark sides but it's also truly awe-inspiring

DWC hydroponics ;)

My mind. Even when I can't think well or remember anything, which is certainly true lately, it's home and is where I belong

An office window that looks directly out on the lake

Being able to access therapy regularly, even if it's not necessarily as much as I'd like

My counterpart coworker who was visibly frustrated with yet another newly-implemented set of time-wasting rules today. At least I'm not alone

Time to wash my floors tomorrow

The trailer being clean, so I can haul it down to pick up feed in without having to manually unload all the feed from the truck

This tiny window of non-exhaustion. I'd forgotten how good it feels

Aw

Open oak party is starting to tassel, though not to drop pollen. So is Early Riser, though it's a little behind.

I noticed with the gaspe that a couple weeks difference in planting time led to less time difference between maturities (I think, need to pull out all the relative dates and crunch them). I wonder if I'd got open oak and early riser into the ground three to four weeks earlier if it would have made a difference? Four weeks and there would still be the ghost of frost some nights, but probably gone by the time the seeds got above ground. With corn the growing tip stays underground in the seed for awhile anyhow, so frost is unlikely to kill the plant, but since they're so heat-activated they may not do much until it warms up.

Cascade ruby gold is dropping pollen happily but I don't see much silk. Saskatoon white looks like proper corn, full tassels, full silks, just kinda miniature (maybe 4' tall). Gaspe never quite looks like corn because it doesn't get tall enough to have that rows-of-stalks effect.

Harvested what I'm almost sure is a minsk early tomato from beside the corn and squash beds, and the spotted promiscuous tomato from beside the first promiscuous tomato.

I'm still intrigued by the super multiflora tomato volunteers. They don't seem to be setting fruit still but they sure do have huge clusters.

I need to get my fall grain and favas in soon.

My spring favas do have some pods, but it's really only some that do. Super interesting. I wonder if they needed frost to trigger pod formation and I planted them too late and missed it, if it's a water issue, or if it's something else. Hopefully the pollen from the podless ones got into circulation though.

I guess it's time to take the ducks out of the greenhouse area and clear both it and the south slope for those winter crops. I ended up with a bit of an issue since the corn and tomatoes and squash won't finish until a little later than the grain needs to be planted, so I don't think I can put things above in the big garden for winter. I could probably do a barley or fava and gaspe or saskatchewan rainbow rotation if my grain will overwinter, but I can't do full-season corn or tomatoes. And there's not time to run the pigs in for long in between, that's for sure.

The greenhouse is a cloth pop-up greenhouse, the first I ever bought, and the cover is worn out so I need to take it off for the winter. This will leave me without any greenhouses again and no money to replace the cover. I might be able to sort out a roof on it from odds and ends anyhow. I thought I'd have a big greenhouse by now, a 10-20' x 40-50' or something, in my 5 year plan.

That's life I guess. I have more garden space than expected anyhow, and keeping grain etc around my perennial plantings while they establish isn't the worst thing.

Tomatoes are almost all up from the micro plantings. My own F1s all have at least one plant, which is exciting. I'm interested to see how the cross between the dwarf sweet baby jade and the micros go, both Hardin's mini which has unusual foliage (I think it's reduced by different genes) and the aerogarden seeds which have standard mini growth.

Waiting to see which corns actually produced seed before frost, and which crossbred, is so difficult. There's nothing to be done about it though. I wanna see!

Post-counseling thoughts

I definitely want to have a community of folks I'm comfortable with around me, specifically who do things outside my home sometimes I think

When I dig into the idea of partnership and whether I want to be partners with Tucker in a scenario like that, solo, or with someone else-- I think Tucker stands in for the idea of "someone who works on his issues and who I don't need to perform for, who can accept the what of me so we can get on to the what's next and how" except that of course Tucker is not historically strong at discussing the what's next and how, though he's good at doing it in the medium term.

I definitely like things I can control, and I don't like unexpected changes. I've probably made changes in my life so that I can proactively create changes rather than reactively sitting to wait for changes to happen to me. I like big changes into new environments rather than fiddling with many small things that aren't working unless I can see progress.

There are certain times the unknown is comforting to me and I can embrace it with curiosity.

Most humans probably do not have to accept the feeling of imminent death and danger from their bodies on a more-than-daily basis, which is why they're bad at handling fear or situations where their body is telling them a situation is perilous? My emotional choices for a lot of things are to fight back as if my life depended on it or to accept death, so I have a lot of practice with those things.

That's probably related to folks feeling like I'm exaggerating. The more I know about myself in plain words, the more I think folks will believe I'm exaggerating, because I'm outside a lot of folks' experience or their imagination. Especially since I'm having a pretty good life.

My eyes going to different places when I'm thinking about things probably has a mind-body connection/therapeutic effect?

I am deeply annoyed when people say I have a good mind-body connection or that I'm self-aware.

Devotions

The most beautiful tomato (even if it didn't taste spectacular) out of the promiscuous patch

Clean floors, clean self, clean sheets

I harvested fruit from here. That I planted

An invite to the fall fair by my friend Ron

Fava bean pods swelling

Glutinous barley, it seems so neat, I can't wait to play with it

The possibility of doing pottery

Dancing in the park next weekend?!?!! It's been years

Properties with creeks in the back

The cool of my basement

Clean sheets, freshly showered self, clean floors, still.