My Facade

cf. Pretending To Be Normal by Willey

I feel that there is a vast gulf between who I am on the inside, and what others see of me on the outside. My name for what people see of me on the outside is The Facade. To borrow the title of Liane Willey's book (which I will do very freely and very often), it is what people see of my Pretending To Be Normal. As we all do, we learn to conform to the expectations of others. When we don't, bad things often result. The trouble with this 'bad things often result', when combined with an oversensitive Anxiety Avoidance mechanism as I have, is that one easily gets encased in a robotic exterior that is so drilled to conform to expectations that it becomes hard to direct it otherwise. So it is with me.

Interior vs Exterior

I'll talk on the subject of Interior vs Exterior some more, especially when discussing matters I associate with the word 'Spiritual'. As it pertains to me, personally, there is a vast gulf between who I am on the inside, and who I appear to be on the outside. I am aware of this gulf, I have tried in the past to explain this to others, thus far without success. Writing this here is my next effort.

On the outside, on the Exterior, you'll see a quiet mathematically-minded computer enthusiast with mild autism. On the inside, the Interior, things are a little different. Due to Anxiety Avoidance and related issues, I face massive, complex constraints on what I am able to make my Exterior do or say, for which I have come to use the metaphor of an Invisible Maze. Some of the communications issues and the motivational issues I discuss elsewhere.

The trouble with this vast gulf between Interior and Exterior is that people on the outside misunderstand me, thinking of me only as what they see on the outside. To attempt to bridge this gap entails finding ways through the Facade, to find ways over and through the walls created by Anxiety Avoidance, and the trouble is that in doing so, this destabilises the Facade, leading to signs of mania, which in turn leads to worries about intervention, leading to further anxiety, and as such risks a runaway feedback loop of either anxiety-driven mania, or else freedom-driven-mania, the latter being a consequence of suddenly finding myself free of the anxiety issues which normally constrain me. A naive onlooker may struggle to tell these two apart, and frankly a psychiatric professional who doesn't know me has little chance of doing better.