The great drain

American author F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel, The Beautiful and Damned was, if you go by the critics, one of his worst works. Whether it is or not matters not because it provides a line that wasn't written with masking in mind, but really feels like it should have been.

"Tired, tired with nothing, tired with everything, tired with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear."

When I think back on my life with the benefit of hindsight, I can see a hell of a lot of masking (or camouflaging as it's also known). So I wanted to write about one of its unwanted by-products, because it is another constant that's been around me just as long – tiredness. Extreme, life-draining tiredness.

There were times in my life I went to see doctors thinking I had diabetes or other illnesses that would explain why I was constantly tired all the time. No matter how regular my sleeping patterns were, no matter that I got the recommended amount of daily sleep for my age, I was (and still am) in a constant state of tiredness. The doctors always said the same thing - that there wasn't anything untoward in their tests.

I know if you're from the predominant neurotype you're probably now thinking, we've all been tired, we know what it's like and there are certainly plenty of other reasons why someone would know what this is like to be constantly tired.

All I know is that if I was an iPhone, I'd be sold for spare parts on eBay. I wake up every day with an overnight battery charge that manages to get to around 45%. Unless you've spent decades waking up every morning thinking "maybe another 7 hours might make me feel less tired", then you really don't know what it's like. You might understand being tired but you likely don't understand being 'masking tired'.

Since getting a diagnosis, I've been better at listening to my own body, better at seeing the patterns. The tiredness comes in waves that mirror the masking... like a tide whose forces exerted aren't from the moon and the sun but the mask as it slips on and off.

Laura Hull (who wrote this fab article for The Moment recently) and the fellow academics who worked on 'Putting on My Best Normal: Social Camouflaging in Adults with Autism Spectrum Conditions' mention exhaustion multiple times in their research and this line stood out to me:

"In the short term, camouflaging results in extreme exhaustion and anxiety, although the aims of camouflaging are often achieved, in the long term there are also severe negative consequences affecting individuals' mental health, self perception, and access to support."

Most of my adult working life has been in roles that involve a heavy dose of dealing with people... in fairness, it's where I do my best masking work. In my early 20s in my first job post university, I lived in Pittsburgh for a six month role, programming in Visual dBase and Crystal Reports.

Six of us left Belfast, of which I knew one of the others when we boarded the flight to Pittsburgh in 1997. It was my first time living away from home. It was my first time living with virtual strangers. It was my first proper job. For six months we lived together, we worked together, we partied together. We spent nearly every waking moment together.

About two months in I just started taking an afternoon off every week. I didn't ask permission from the company owner, I just started doing it. I claimed it was to watch the Premier League. Soccer, however, was just another thing I pretended to like because everyone else I hung out with liked it. I would leave work and go sit in a local bar on my own and pretend to watch a sport I didn't like because it became one of the only times of the week I could be alone and not have to mask.

That commentary comes with the benefit of the knowledge I have today. I had no idea I was masking at the time. I just subconsciously knew my body and mind needed time out. But back in the late '90s and early '00s that came with the price that I thought I was a lazy asshole who just didn't show up to work for 10% of the week on a whim to go drinking self medicating.

In the past few decades when I've had a day of meetings that involve quite a lot of interacting with people, my evenings become a blur. I muster up the energy to drive home, get out of my car, walk through the door and am barely able to string a sentence together. My brain feels like it's been put in an extramundane blender and the contents are slowly starting to leak out my left ear. I can barely speak enough to say I need some space.

The tiredness is so overwhelmingly present that we've become frenemies. For years I tried to fight through it, to beat it. I wondered how other people could go home from work and just go about their lives. How could other people not need the weekend just to recover from all the hiding? More recently I've come to realise that battling it directly doesn't help - I just become more Zombie like.

I now know I need to reduce the amount of daily interactions I have and take some time when the working day is over to decompress. Thanks to my therapist I've created a new traffic light colour coding system for my meetings.

It means on a Monday morning I can see how challenging or not the week will be. It tells me how many times my brain will be through the otherworldly blender and that I might need to come home and grab a Playstation controller or lie down alone for 30 minutes.

I've been masking so long now that I'm not really sure how to stop. Maybe someday I'll properly let the mask slip, but in the meantime, it seems fitting to end with the last line from The Beautiful and Damned (even though Fitzgerald also once wrote we should stop using exclamation points because they're like laughing at your own joke):

"It was a hard fight, but I didn't give up and I came through!"