Sooner or later, we all traverse this pipeline…

You’re a child. You’re so overwhelmed by the light, the sounds, the expectations, the turmoil the world throws at you from every degree that it crushes you, you either melt down or blow apart. Doesn’t help when people expect you to behave a certain way and your persistent state of overload makes that impossible.

Still, you’re taught that it isn’t acceptable to react that way to being overstimulated. As you gain more experiences of the world, you learn how to avoid some situations and react to others in a way that is “acceptable.” In short, you mask.

But over time, you get so tired of hiding yourself as you try not to be spurned by everyone you meet, you can’t keep a grip… and you start losing the ability to hide, to mask. You may even react to situations the same way in your early 40s as you might have in your early 4s, with overloaded reactions, distressed outbursts, outright meltdowns.

Now, what if we lived in a world where all unusual behavior was acceptable? Where being non-violent, non-aggressive, undistressed and yet not typical was considered just another extension of the human condition? How tiring would that be?

2 thoughts on “Hiding In Plain Sight”

  1. Oh, how I would love to live in that world!

    I write this having come very close to losing it at a coffee shop today. I have been learning so, so much, I am constantly on the verge of shutdown. I thus almost skipped the coffee shop, but went because I’d told my older son I’d bring him back a treat.

    The noise–audio and visual–was so terrible, I felt like I was back in the plan where I had my first incident I understood to be a shutdown some months back. I had to plug my ears and hum to pass the moments.

    I have spent the last few hours doing very little. It’s hard but important …

    All this could be so much less hard if there weren’t so freakin’ much sociocultural emphasis on (needless) conformity. 😔

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