Feeling abnormal at work

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I have a part-time job (I've been there 10 years) and when I am at work I have to focus the whole time on appearing normal. It isn't as if there is any specific thing that I do that isn't normal but I focus the whole time on appearing normal even when everything runs smoothly. I am always concerned that if, for example, people knew that I have learnt to read 20 languages and spend most of my time alone and notice that I feel really uncomfortable around people then I would be seen as a pariah. If people talk about normal things like family or children or social events I can't join in and don't want to and don't like it at all when people ask me about me because there aren't really any normal things about me, or at least the normal-looking things only look normal.. Yesterday somebody asked me a question and a second person pointed out to me that I had answered "yes" ten times in quick succession. I should have only answered "yes" once, but because I wanted to show willingness I said "yes" ten times and it came across as ridiculous. Today I was giving some information for my job in front of some people and tripped over two separate chairs on two separate occasions in front of everybody. I also tried to demonstrate something with a bottle and it flew out of my hands and I ended up juggling with it in the air trying to bring it under control. At the end of the session I had to make some photocopies for the participants and couldn't operate the machine. Someone I didn't know was in sight so I got him to show me, but I was so flustered that I didn't even interact with him properly and in a polite manner.

Most of the time in public I feel like a wooden puppet with myself being the puppeteer. I feel really uncomfortable except when I'm by myself or with someone I know really well (and that is only one person).

The reason you feel like wooden puppet is because there's two of you - your actual self, and your social mask.

When other people are talked to, it goes directly into their core, and the answer they spit out is generated by a balance of their brain and subconscious.

Our kind... tends to only use the brain. The logic. So first, someone addresses your mask, the person you're pretending to be, and then your mask sends the information to your ACTUAL self, and then you mull it over, and shape the response in the form that would work with your mask (puppet), and send it back.

This is a very arduous, draining process.

If you're pretending to be more social or happy than you actually are, the filtering back-and-forth between you and the mask will take a lot of "brain cycles".

I know that NTs also pretend, a lot of them aren't showing their genuine feelings, but they somehow managed to integrate the "mask" into themselves, so the pathway back-and-forth between them and their mask isn't NEARLY as long and arduous to deal with.

Our masks, on the other hand, are something distinctly outside ourselves, built out of learned, often painful experiences - they start off just being a simple shape, something we push out to defend ourselves against ridicule, and then all the stones thrown at it during school years eventually etch out something resembling a "normal human behavior".

I felt 100% like you describe until the end of my 20s. I'm almost 35 now and I've partially succeeded at shortening the mask<--->self pathways, so that my interactions are less draining and allow for smoother dynamic adaptation to the usual chaos of social interaction.

It still drains me. 2 hours of being at a wedding, and I am done for. The social battery needs recharging. Quiet time. But that's just who we are.

Wow, thanks Monsterland, that is a really useful explanation!

As you say, it's the same at things like weddings. About 4 or 5 times a year I have to attend small family gatherings of 6 to 8 people around a table and after a while it is impossible to follow the conversation any more. The rest of the day it feels as though one has suffered some kind of brain damage due to the overload on the brain's capacity to process what's going on and being said all at once. Unfortunately it's impossible to explain to anybody what it's like, so that it just appears as if one is unfriendly or neurotic or something but it's not that at all. But try explaining that to people.

Goodness, can you really read 20 languages?? If so, that's amazing, I'd think that would be a good bragging right lol. I think most people would be really impressed if they knew you could speak 2, much less 20.

Yeah, first of all your brain got tired from processing multiple audio sources, reconstructing overlapping audio, filling out missing pieces with contextual speech recognition. I don't know how NTs manage. I think they selectively ignore, accept partial loss of audio, and yell a lot, so more of their own audio gets across without error...

Second of all, our kind tends to pre-process and post-process. Before the event, you generate some "escape plans", or find quiet corners, or who would you talk to if you are seen as too antisocial- plan A, plan B, plan C, plan D.

These are pre-cached, pre-thought complex behaviors you can quickly access in your brain.

Chances are, in addition to that, you may spend hours or even days pre-calibrating your mood stability, to make sure you retain some control within the whirling chaos.

More energy is spent.

After the event, you post-process, your brain tries to reconstruct "what really happened", did you miss any cues, what did that look mean, what did that tone mean, why was something phrased in a certain way, did you screw up or succeed somewhere, what lessons can you learn from this toward future "similar" interactions...

Because you know yourself to have a pattern of missing cues. So this post-processing debrief becomes a part of you.

As result, after its over, you may end up finding yourself enjoying some really monotone, low-brain-load task, like staring at a wall or a humming television for hours, cleaning or sharpening something, upgrading your computer, or taking a long walk through the park...

Yes, I can, but I keep quiet about it because it's the result of abnormal over-focussing on my part and I can't do anything with this knowledge in normal terms. I just use it to read books alone in my home. In fact I think the fact that I have this skill is just the result of the AS trait of engaging in stereotyped, repetitive activities with excessive focus, combined with a lack of integration into broader cognitive structures in the brain, so that the knowledge just sits there . On the other hand, it is cool to read books in loads of languages (unfortunately I find the content much much less interesting than the words themselves so it doesn't lead to anything academically or otherwise). I think it is something like a mixture of stimming and collecting things combined in one.

As regards bragging about things, I found out a long time ago that it is much safer passing under the radar than presenting a high profile to be shot at .

Second it. It seems almost like a savant skill. Did you learn them autodidactic?

Yes. At school I was bottom of the lowest of three parallel classes in languages and learned absolutely nothing in five years. I'm not quite sure how that was possible either, because I would expect everybody to learn something but I learned absolutely nothing and found the lessons completely incomprehensible . Later I developed my own learning strategy by myself and found I enjoyed reading foreign language texts. Then I got kind of stuck and just kept doing the same activity (learning to read) over and over again.