06.20.23 – Self-masking

Something I’ve struggled with in the past has come back yet again to roost: I’m masking from myself.

I don’t know quite who I am because I’m not telling myself. I don’t trust myself not to out me to everyone else, and so I’m hiding a huge part of myself away and not letting me see it.

Emotional state: I have been feeling void a lot. Null. This isn’t the same thing as depression; it’s not even really the same thing as acedia, although it’s closer to that. It’s just… a lack of feeling, including a lack of feeling deeply about that lack.

Feeling “blah” is a feeling. Feeling down is a feeling. Feeling numb is even a feeling. This is the bastard child of acedia and comfortable numbness.

I suppose it might be Autistic burnout. Maybe.

I can’t sleep lately. I thought that once the school year ended, my nagging insomnia would at least subside, but it’s getting worse. And it’s not that I’m sitting up feeling tense and unable to relax. I just lie down and… nothing happens. Sure, I’ll sleep eventually, but I’ll have vivid dreams and be far too easy to wake up.

At the same time, I don’t generally feel exhausted during the day. I work through my list of things to do. I do them. Executive functioning is on auto-pilot.

This sounds like depression when I put it into words, but that’s part of the masking. As a child, I had to always explain my non-bright moods in terms of what was happening, emotionally. I couldn’t have acedia. I couldn’t have an emotional nullness. I had to be “depressed”. So that’s my programming now, and the words make me sound like I’m depressed.

I’m not.

Or… am I masking it from myself?

I know I’m scared. The Inside Me is scared of being themself.

The other day I saw a TikTok where a trans-femme AMAB creator was talking about how she really wanted a baton when she was growing up, and how her father had been so mean about that. It reminded me that I had had a baton as a child.

Until that TikTok, I had repressed that memory.

Why would I have repressed a memory of having owned a baton? Of having twirled it? I didn’t even repress it as a child: I remember being older, even into my twenties, and “yeah, I had a baton, I twirled it, it was fun.”

Now it’s: Bad sector on disk. Attempting to fix.

Clothes are inane. I wear clothes because being naked is illegal, and inane. I know it’s fashionable for emo-enbies to want to be balls of energy without corporeal form, and I guess yeah that would be an improvement, but that’s inane too.

This is self-masking, too. I won’t tell me what I really want to wear because I’m afraid that I’ll wear it, and so I’m left on the inertia of wearing whatever I happen to have in my closet. And the mean old voice says I’m too old and unattractive for it to matter anyway, no matter what I wear, I’ll look frumpy and pathethic.

I could either put a bunch of work into looking good only to be mocked and feel miserable, or I could just wear whatever’s clean and look blah and feel eh.

I’ll try door number 3, Monty.

Except that door is locked.

Anyway, this is just me talking to myself. Thanks for reading.