When I was young, well… not so long ago, I had developed this skill in reading and emoting what other people would do in order to mask and get along with people.

This helped me immensively, as I’d mask well enough to get through social and communication with relatively ease. What I speak of is one of the major skills that neurodivergent folks, like me, are forced to develop to get by in life.

Masking might be competing with the first place for the tier list of coping mechanisms that we use, along with stimming. In fact, it’s so much of a skill that it becomes a second nature: a knee-jerk reaction each time we meet someone new. We make the living room tidy enough to let someone in.

While often people mistake it for being fake, it’s actually one of the many coping skills that we developed in order to avoid abuse by our peers. However, like a bird within a cage, an elephant within a circus, what happens when the cage is the only thing that we know of?

Am I inside the cage? Am I behind a facade? What am I if not the entirety of the cage that I built these years? Am I the wall that I hand-crafted and painted graciously over the years?

I want to follow through this entry while fighting the urge for being perfectionist or having to go through a linear process. I want to see where it goes.

What am I?

Tough question with a tougher answer: I don’t know. While I can go with a more socially acceptable answer to partially cover who I am without sounding pretentious: the real truth is that words cannot fully describe accurately who am I.

This is a hard truth to ANYONE in this planet, neurodivergent or not, we are NOT and we CANNOT describe ourselves entirely with words. It’s something that I still struggle with, and I get frustrated enough by the lack of consistency, but change is inevitable: we cannot be the same person that we’ve been years ago.

The fact that we age and die is enough to tell us that.

For someone that had torn an ACL, I’m no longer the same kid that used to skateboard or fight Judo in a Tuesday/Thursday night with the same fierce of before.

For someone that once met one of the most kind and funniest person in his life, I’m no longer an edgy teenager with a broken heart.

For someone that now makes a living with computing in the comfort of my own home, I’m no longer the same kid that once dreamed in being an aircraft pilot.

What a misery would it be to not be able to change ourselves, carrying the past like a cross as if we didn’t have a choice. Having to fight with a torn knee in an seamingly endless fight, and what is the use of a fighter that cannot fight back? What is the meaning of that in my life?

What is the meaning in being someone that you loathe and hate?

Someone that loathes and hates others, when deep inside, it knows better?

Being someone that you don’t understand?

Someone you no longer relate. Like a snapshot, a picture of the past.

Authenticity is not real

In the bigger scheme of things, I think everyone faces the same dilema as I do when we grow up, especially ND folks: we don’t feel real or authentic.

But actually, if you take a closer look at authentic people, or rather, excentric people, they’re not as original as we might think. I can grasp the references, the things they see, do, talk, emote, it’s like I’ve seen it before.

In fact, the so called original stereotype is mostly to sell new hoodies or casual clothing to other people, and it’s what I actually wear, with the most comfortable clothes that I can get away with.

The world hasn’t been done with originality, but only for convenience and pragmatism. It’s what is effective, what isn’t, and what lies in between. We take two ideas and bring the best out of them. Or we make a connection between two things that we know about in a way that we didn’t hear before, but then we look for it in the internet and figure out that it was well thought before but didn’t work out.

Like a good cliché, I guess life is a life-long experiment.

From the curiosity and the question, we try to comprehend.

From the comprehension, we make the hypothesis and test it.

From the test, we gather feedback and analyze it.

Based on the outcome, the difference between life and the experiment is that life itself does not come to an end. Because there’s no hard truth to be discovered, there’s only what we feel is right or not, with ethics and morals aside.

We can only hope for the best and believe in what we think and feel is right.

And whenever we’re proven wrong, I guess that I should say that to myself more often: I can always gather the pieces, adjust, and start over.

To whoever is reading this: I hope you can hope for the best, try to find a bit of comfort in the uncertainty, and another bit of strength to start over.