Depression 2.0

I wrote somewhere else that I never wanted to be like everyone else, but I always wanted to understand why I wasn't. So much of that came from not understanding my own experiences. Everyone else seemed to move through life more easily, or at least without as much effort as it took me.

All the internal work and self-discovery I've done over the years helped me see that I learned to emotionally mask early in life. When you grow up hearing "Fix your face" and "Stop crying before I give you something to cry about," you get really good at it. You learn how you're expected to present, and you adapt.

Emotional masking is hiding or suppressing your true thoughts and feelings behind a socially acceptable facade. Smiling when you feel sad. Saying "I'm fine" when you're overwhelmed. It took me until my mid-30s to truly understand why I left most social interactions feeling completely drained.

People mask out of a fear of judgment. They worry about being rejected, shamed, or seen as a burden. It's often a survival mechanism when you've had to adapt to volatile environments, past trauma, or strict social expectations as a kid. For people with ADHD or autism, it can be a kind of "social camouflage," mimicking neurotypical behavior. And at work, it's how you keep up appearances and project confidence or control. Every single one of those reasons applies to me, or has.

So I could see all the common signs of masking in my own experience. Anyone who's known me knows how drained I'd feel after being around people. My friends who really know me have a running joke that after a social event, it could be weeks or months before they see me again, because I needed such long stretches of solitude to recharge. Other signs weren't as obvious from the outside, like overthinking conversations and losing touch with what I actually felt.

I realized I'd been chronically suppressing my emotions for almost my whole life. It was the source of so much of my emotional exhaustion, my burnout, and the disconnect from my authentic self. Until I found a term that accounted for it, I spent most of my life chalking it up to "this is just how I am."