“She doesn’t have her own personality, she just acts like whoever she’s with.”
An observant, but cruel bully said this about me, I think I was about 12 years old at the time. As mean as this classmate was to me, this statement was actually spot on, but it was people like her that contributed to my attempts at blending in that she was now criticizing.
Who wouldn’t want to blend in with the crowd in an attempt to escape relentless bullying and try to fit in for a change?
Not to mention, having undiagnosed ADHD and being not-yet-identified as twice exceptional (2e) meant that I really did have an unstable sense of self. I knew I was different, and was being told every single day the ways in which being different made me less than my peers. Adults stood idly by and allowed this to continue, so I didn’t have a refuge with them either.
Little by little, I learned to adapt and change myself in order to avoid the constant mocking, belittling, and insults. Right at a time when teens are beginning to “find” themselves, here I was doing my darnedest to lose myself.
As Crocetti states, “The biological, cognitive, and social changes that occur in adolescence stimulate young people to think about themselves, reflect on the kind of people they want to become, and find their place in society.”
At a time when teens are beginning to find themselves, I was doing my darnedest to lose myself.
Not me, I was busy reflecting on everything I had to become in order to stop the daily psychological torture that was my education. Crocetti concludes, “the extent to which adolescents find a stable identity is intertwined strongly with their psychosocial functioning and well-being”.
Well, crap.
What is Masking?
Masking is defined as an attempt to hide or conceal undesirable traits. Who defines “undesirable”? According to McRuer’s crip theory, disabilities are culturally constructed categories that mark some individuals as deviant in order to support the primacy of the normative order.
Well, that is certainly relatable. My peers decided, based on their own perceptions and experiences of how one should behave, that I was undesirable.
In the neurodivergent community, we conceptualize masking as hiding the outward symptoms of our disabilities in order to fit in with the majority neurotypical society.
When we mask our neurodivergence, we attempt to “achieve” and demonstrate neurotypical behaviour by using compensatory strategies.
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