Masking, mimicking and acting, we need to separate them. (Some notes)

I guess some of us develop a mimicking ability. And there is a mimicking aspect in acting, where it can be applied. However acting and masking are completely different things and it's not good to compare them. 

Here are some comments and notes I've written about this. 

(...)

Masking is lose/lose. It's not going to get you far. You will still be eventually rejected and with a lot of trauma accumulated along the way. It's our authentic selves that are being rejected, it's us, with or without masking. 

Masking is humiliating. Neurotypicals are not superior. 

And please don't compare it to acting. Acting is art. Masking is a survival mechanism and trauma response. 

(...) Masking messed up with all my natural talents and distorted me. It was like going against myself, in order to meet expectations. I struggled a lot. 

(...) Apart from the mimicking ability itself, that's the actual problem, because art is not mimicking and it can even lead to problems longterm. (...) Generally I think mimicking is not the way in art, we need to develop our authentic selves. 

(...) I had to eventually compromise though and do things I didn't like in order to achieve any real goal. And that's a systemic issue, as society/systems are made for neurotypicals, and we need to struggle with a lot of unnecessary and harmful things in order to achieve anything. 

(...) 

As an actress myself I would like to say that it's not good to confuse masking with acting. Acting is art, not a survival mechanism and trauma. There are a few relative skills that we may have developed, and also we may have observed a lot human behaviour, however there's more to it. If we are interested in it we can go very deep of course, but that isn't because of masking, but because of our interest, it would be the same as with any other interest. Also to actually manage to get a job and really get paid from acting can be quite tricky. Pursuing a career in acting is very hard and requires a lot of neurotypical socialisation, and you don't get easily trusted. I don't like to see it this way, because I feel it's not doing "justice" to any to confuse them, for masking is a survival mechanism and it's not acting, and acting is art and is not masking. 

We need to separate the two. We don't want to play theatre in our lives. Masking is to "appear neurotypical" and camouflaging our autistic traits. That has nothing to do with being on stage. 

[There's more to it than appearing neurotypical, it's an over-simplification, here is an article that goes deeper about it https://www.facebook.com/1877213049253584/posts/2689351641373050/ ] 

(...) So automatic that you may actually struggle to get rid of it even on stage 😔. It can cause other problems to an actor. (Especially if they don't really know what is happening.) Masking is painful. It's the true self we want to develop. 

(...) I denied everything, my inner world, my way of thinking! (...) I pathologised it. (...) How much development of my true self I have missed all my life 😥 just fighting with a mask. 

Now I see why I had all this tension. I had to do everything in a NT way. 

I messed all my procedures. (...) Even the way I moved! My own rhythm! I was breaking everything. I just opposed anything that was natural to me. 😥 

Theatre was supposed to liberate me from this, however this constant opposition to myself, this anxiety to always appear NT, or worse to be one, had eventually become so strong that I realised I couldn't get free from this, not even on stage anymore. (...) I knew this wasn't right. I wasn't supposed to be a social self on stage, noone was, why couldn't I get rid of it anymore? 

I had found that [it] was causing me the tension. This opposition to myself, going against myself. 

[That last note was written around March, it was all quite new to me. I should note that *I* didn't do anything to myself, the oppression is caused by others, that's what was expected from me, and that was the cost I paid in order to achieve the slightest goal. It's unfair to blame ourselves for how society oppresses us and how others abuse us. We are not abusing ourselves. And we are not "self-sabotaging", that's one of the most awful things one can say. Why should we do that to ourselves? We are not self-sabotaging, others are sabotaging us. Let's see through this manipulation and toxic beliefs imposed to us.] 

And a final note. Real-life situations can feel like a performance. However we need to understand that this is not healthy. When social situations become an exhausting theatre stage, it isn't acting. That's not what an actor is supposed to do. That's not art, it's unhealthy, and noone understands what you are doing. The world is not a stage. Not really.