Disclaimer: I have a very good life and I don't mean to sound ungrateful, I understand that I have much more support than some other people, this is just something I need to get out.
Masking has always been a struggle for me. For those of you who don't know, masking is a method that autistic people use to seem less autistic. It helps us blend it when we need to, and for most of my life, I mask.
Whenever I go to the store, go out of my house, even with family I tend to mask because I don't want to be a disturbance. This is exhausting and drains me throughout the day.
One of the things I do to mask is, I change my voice.
From a very young age I was ridiculed for the way I would talk, both by my peers and my preschool teacher.
My natural voice has a deadpan tone, showing little emotion or range. It may seem like a strange way of speaking, but it's my natural voice, and it's what I'm most comfortable with.
But over the years, I've slowly realized that my voice unnerves people. So I changed it.
I started looking for a voice to impersonate. It took me a couple of movies to find a voice that would suit me, but I ended up choosing Anne Hathaway as my voice. It wasn't any hard to impersonate her, and to this day I still use her voice.
The thing is, people were a lot nicer to me after I changed my voice, and it was the first time I fully realized that if I kept acting like myself, life would be more difficult for me.
I just thought I should put this out there, it needed to be said for my own sake. Sorry if it doesn't make sense.
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Synesthesia and Autism Moments
HumorMy name is Sarah, and I have synesthesia along with high-functioning Autism, and these are just some of my random thoughts and encounters with these conditions.
