I was having a think about masking today. People normally associate masking with autism, but very few people know about the masking that borderline people do. It actually serves two different functions with us.
First, we mask like autistics do, in order to hide the “socially unacceptable” parts of ourselves from others. We can’t let them see our emotions, how we really feel about what they’ve said or how much they mean to us or how hurt we are. We mask so our passions don’t overwhelm others, so that our intensity won’t frighten them away. We mask because we don’t want everyone to leave us.
The other reason we do it is because it helps us relate to others. We pick a new mask for every situation, one that’s made precisely to help us through that situation. When we make a new friend, we mirror them so they won’t hate us. When we’re in a meeting, we pretend we’re polite or “professional”. When we’re at work, we put on the face of someone who doesn’t abuse themselves regularly. We find new people to be all the time and we live so many different lives.
But the reason we mask in this second way is because we have no self to go home to. When we are alone, when there’s no one else to reflect, we look inside and we don’t find anyone. We don’t feel like a person. We might experience an intense chaos of emotions, but there’s nothing holding them together, no me to refer back to. We mask because the person we could have been died from all the pieces being taken away by people who were supposed to love us.
