Recently diagnosed and in my 30s. I’ve always felt like everybody else have received a user manual that I’ve never gotten. A user manual on how to be human and how to interact with other humans. It’s especially interacting with people that trigger my anxiety. I explained this to my psychologist. Her initial response was that I didn’t seem like I had any issues interacting with her, so either that wasn’t true or I’m just really good at pretending. Now I’m sitting here, going over what she said, second guessing myself, and I just don’t know. This was relatively early on in my session, so I think she understood my anxiety later on. She definitely opened my eyes regarding being more aware of my own needs.
I don’t know. Now I just have this nagging feeling of maybe I’m faking my anxiety in regards to socializing.
“you learned to mask really well, so the problem being hidden by it obviously doesn’t actually exist"
Yeah, it was more like “you’re either REALLY good at masking OR you actually don’t have a problem in social situations” which led to her asking how I felt at the moment talking to her and then she asked me if I had an idea of why and when I first felt the need to mask. So this conversation did lead to us digging in to the reasons of why and when. To be honest, I did not know I was that good at masking, because in my head I always felt like I am wrong and I am convinced that people can see that immediately.