Feel confident?

Hello, dear reader.

Do you get called ‘confident’? What about ‘natural leader’? How about ‘commanding’?

At every point in my life, there has come a time and a situation where these words have been used to describe me, and every time I am left wondering what the hell they mean.

Just recently, I was told that I made handling a social situation “look effortless” and that I was naturally commanding a group setting very well. But I had a secret. I was on edge, worried, overanalysing every little detail, thinking that I might be coming across poorly, practically the whole time. I felt that what I was saying in this situation was driven by pure social pressure, and to be honest, I felt overwhelmingly that I was an impostor who might not really be good enough. Almost everything I said was motivated by a desire to avoid rejection even though, to be honest, rejection didn’t feel likely. It was just habitual. Perhaps it’s just who I became and haven’t had a chance to unlearn.

So, what about you? Are you The Performer? Do you mask your inner awkwardness when you fear the spotlight has landed on you? Do you have routines that make you appear active and on top of things, which you almost play back automatically, sometimes without even realising?

It does make me wonder, where is the line between getting social rejections and changing tactics to achieve a goal, and being traumatised by the cumulative effect of all your perceived missteps and the fallout to the point where you find it very hard to command yourself to unmask?

Many of us have been unable to maintain relationships as a result of behaviour that is seen as anachronistic and strange in our society. I know I have personally begun and failed to maintain many friendships and a few romantic relationships. I don’t think I want to get in the habit of minimising these kinds of breakdowns. At several points in my life, a few things kept popping up:

• I would move house, change schools, or both, and I would not keep a single friend from one place to the next, having to start over completely
• I would get into a relationship with somebody that lasted only 2 weeks to a month because we would inevitably spend so much time together that I would be forced to unmask, and they would not like it
• I would make surface-level friends in so many different friend groups, knowing that if I had friends here and there and everywhere, I would be safer in general from bullying and rejection. This meant I basically had very few or no very close friends, and I have never had a ‘lifelong’ friend. I eventually ended up having mostly online friends who may not even live in the same country as I do.

Most of these things I never attributed to neurodivergence. I just thought that I was unreliable, a bad friend, a bad person, that people didn’t like me because I wasn’t good enough, I was rude or mean or angry, I didn’t care about people enough, and that if they didn’t want the relationship, they were probably right. I had become hostile to myself, ashamed of myself.

I have another lens to view these things through now, but I’m still mastering being the authentic me. Before, I would mask as long as possible until I snapped like high tensile wire, doing damage as I spiralled into full shutdown. Now, I can live more of my life unmasked, with more of my needs met, and I stand a better chance of being accepted for who I am, because I am not putting across that I’m never a little bit weird, or that I never need to just shut people out for a while to calm down, or (importantly) that illogical things that most people tolerate don’t absolutely infuriate me.

So next time somebody compliments me on my confident competence, I’ll think about whether I did it as myself or not, and try not to see it as a win if I fooled everybody.