This is a personal reflection on my experience of, and learning about autism. I have committed to a blog post, every day, for the month of April, as my commitment to Autism Awareness Month. In this post, we will look at denial, interoception, and alexithymia.
Most people would know what denial is – from the childhood state of being tired but claiming that you are not tired, to the adult state of saying you’re fine, but you’re not.
Interoception is the body’s alarm system, the helper in your head that tells you how you are feeling; hot, cold, hungry, thirsty, need to go to the loo. It’s our internal awareness and alarm of bodily sensations, functions and emotions.
Alexithymia is when you have trouble identifying, understanding, and expressing your feelings. For me, before I was diagnosed, this made itself apparent in my grief before (anticipatory grief) and after becoming a widow. Sadness, yes, but any other emotion was bewildering.
Masking, camouflaging, is an incredibly damaging state that autistic, and other neurodivergent, people engage in order to fit in with “normal” society. It requires mental energy, physical energy and social energy.
What can it be like? There are a number of challenges in social media, where the challenge is to not react in any way when a hit song is played. Think about how hard it is to not twitch your shoulders, shimmy your hips, tap your feet, thrash your head when a favourite song comes on. Stopping a stim (self-stimulatory behaviour) is significantly more challenging, and more energy-depleting, than not reacting to a favourite song.
But that can be what masking is, stopping or transferring a stim. For me, it’s running a rhythm with my fingers in a repetitive pattern, or tapping my teeth in a rhythm. It can also be about the language we use.
My big inner revelation about my autism, just this morning, was just how much I mask. So much of my communication, written and verbal, is prefaced with softening words, such as “so” and “well”. I was typing something in a chat this morning, and started to type in “so”. My inner voice spoke up, loud and clear. “Don’t do that. Doing that hides your intelligence, your literacy, your autism.”
Mic drop for the inner voice, and instant tears and grief for the 4-year-old girl I was in 1976, and all the masking, the camouflaging of her true nature that she had to do to become 51-year-old me, discovering my autism just months ago.
It’s as if my “heart knowledge” and “head knowledge” have finally aligned about my autism.
So today, (see, there it is again!), my interoception is working for me, alexithymia is absent, denial is in abatement and, I’m okay. I’m shaky, after such a big revelation, my heartbeat is a little elevated, but I’m okay. And that’s good enough for today.
The Auld Skald's Fudgel 