I feel like I'm two different people

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I feel like I'm two different people living in the same body. I feel like one person (my true self) when I can be alone or am in a situation where I'm not concerned with how I may be perceived. But in other situations, such as a job interview or on the job, I feel like I'm someone else. My last job (technically just a volunteer position at a vet clinic) I didn't really have to hide true self...but then there were only three other people working there. I started going to their other place which was bigger and more staffed, then I did feel like I had to hide my true self. People basically ignored me but then I didn't really care. The only thing that depressed me about it was the way some of the veterinary technicians treated the animals when the vets weren't around. I never reported it because I'm not sure I would have been taken seriously and I didn't want to come across as a "tattle-tale".
I have an interview for the zoo coming up in a few days and wonder if I am going to have to "pretend to be someone else" there too. Both for the interview and on the job. I'm not even sure what I will be doing yet once I get the job. Contrary to popular belief, you don't work with the actual animals as a volunteer, you need a college degree to do that. I'm still working on my GED and wondering if I'll ever actually get it. Anyhow, I'm not sure exactly what I will be doing at the zoo, if I ever get the volunteer position in the first place, but I suspect it will be standing at a kiosk with things like bird feathers, elephant tusks, skulls etc and explaining them to zoo patrons and people I wouldn't likely interacting with more than once. People I'm only going to encounter once or twice don't worry me and I don't have to "put on a mask" to interact with them. It's people I'm going to encounter more than once that worry me. And I feel like I have to put on a metaphorical "mask" and become someone else.

I have the same issue with true vs public self. My public persona is so ingrained in me that I do it automatically, but I can't keep it up for long. If I stay in the public persona too long, I totally melt down and become suicidal.

I feel like this too.

The 'best' version of me (best socially, anyway) that I use for interviews, meetings, introductions etc. comes across very well to other people. They really seem to respond to it, to the point where I sometimes think 'why can't I just be that Rachel all the time?', but the truth is it's too hard to keep up , it's exhausting.

I wish I could explain this to people who find out I'm autistic and are all surprised and like, "Oh, but you don't seem autistic! You're nothing like my six-year-old!" Instead, I just say, "Well, I'm am a 29-year-old adult and have been around the block a few times."




I wish I could get my mother to understand that I'm so exhausted all the time from having to "perform" all the time...not from a deficiency of some kind as she believes. My mother also tells me I'd be a great actress. Unfortunately, I, in a way, already am.

I think your feelings can be generalised to the whole of the introverted population. We live in an extrovert's world.

What bothers me about the extrovert's world is how unaccepting it is of the introvert's experience. Like there is some moral superiority to extroversion. It reminds me of this children's song:

The more we get together, together, together, the more we get together, the happier we'll be. Cause your friends are my friends, and my friends are your friends. The more we get together, the happier we'll be.

I feel the same way, too. In fact, I don't blame myself for Lizard Boy's behaviour. (Lizard Boy is the name I gave to my amygdala - the lizard brain). He controls my body and makes me do things I regret later. I'm constantly at war with him, but it's often futile. When I say "me", I mean Pre, my prefrontal cortex or logical brain. Pre and Lizard Boy are constantly at war, bringing me closer and closer to the brink of madness.

Lizard Boy likes the sound of breaking glass. He loves smashing windows. He also seems to like climbing as he makes me climb over fences to trespass into places like police stations, buildings under construction, and so on. And, for some reason, Lizard Boy prefers that I'm naked, even in public. So far he's made me strip naked and walk the street, into parks and a supermarket. I have absolutely no control on the little bugger. He needs to be locked away. Pre wants me to throw a brick through a bank's window and get arrested to save myself from Lizard Boy. Sounds like a pretty good idea, actually.

I HATED that song...even as a kid. I was more fond of Paul Simon's "I Am a Rock"
"I am rock, I am an island."

I think you could even expand it further to the human race , I think everyone has a 'work' persona , an 'at home' persona and an 'out on the town' persona

If you look at it that way then everybody has myriad personas. I'm a different person if I'm speaking to a colleague, a customer, a bus driver, an elderly neighbour etc.

I think it's more the intensity of the feelings. From what I've observed most 'normal' people don't seem to get exhausted by this constant switching, whereas a lot of (if not all) autistics find it draining.

I remember when I was at school, my mum could always tell if my best friend had been off sick for the day, because I would come home with so much more energy than usual. Socialising, even with someone I actually gelled with, made me physically and mentally burnt out every day.

i feel like i'm more of a spectrum of different people, with no well-defined triggers or compartmentalizations

one thought that often echoes in my head is that "i am a failed human", and this irreparably blurred self-perception is a major part of it. i don't equate it to being a failure though, unless i'm trying to be human

yes. that's widely acknowledged to be the norm (regardless of how it's worded), and not having different personas is much more likely to be maladaptive. i think the problem happens when, for whatever reason (good or not), you disown or fail to recognize facets of yourself as part of yourself, and perceive them as alien to whatever you understand as "you"

persona means exactly "an actor's mask" after all, and that's even where the words person and personality come from. even if today we associate those words with the entirety of what defines us as unique individuals, it reveals how those concepts can be blurry and evolve in unexpected ways over the course of history

When you say echoes in your head, do you mean you find yourself thinking it unintentionally? If so I have this 'echo' too, except mine says 'I'm not a real person'. Strange I suspect constant masking/chameleoning is at least part of the cause.



Maybe then a public persona is a negative experience for many aspies because we have to put so much conscious effort into it. The resulting extroverted (or even vaguely sociable) persona is so wildly different from the natural, comfortable state that we can't reconcile it as part of ourselves; it is almost entirely other, almost entirely an act, rather than (as it seems for many NTs) just another shade of their own perception of themselves.

yes


i'm actually not surprised. i usually identify with the things you say

in the other forum where i used to post, there were at least half a dozen people who, at one point or another, told me that they felt either that "i could read their minds" or that they and i were somehow the same individual. which is a kind of feeling i also have sometimes (and it was even the way how my one real-life relationship started). "i know it doesn't make sense, but i believe i'm an automaton", or "i'm entirely convinced that i am only half a person" or "don't you ever you wish you didn't have to be a person?" or other similar feelings/beliefs were a shared thing between all of them. i guess "i am a failed human" is my version of it

i think that that bizarre "quantum entanglement" kind of feeling happens because of the pervasive disconnect from everyone else that the person is used to, when all of a sudden, for the first time, there's someone who seems to be saying a lot of things that resonate with your own experience (and i do typically talk a lot). it can be ecstatic at first, but it can be quite a fall when you eventually realize that they're no less flawed than all the unrelatable people out there (and no less flawed than yourself, for that matter), and realize that, because they have the power to reach you, they also have the power to hurt you


yes. i think that's exactly it. you understand that it's vital for your survival to act in certain ways, but (for whatever reason) it never ceases to feel like you're attacking your very core when you do it. there's a perception that what keeps you alive is also what kills you. and that thing is you, or part of you. it's an awfully difficult thing to wrap your mind around, at any level of cognitive or emotional understanding

Last edited by anagram on 06 Nov 2016, 6:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Fully aware of the irony here, but I can totally relate to this idea .

I tend to take a solipsistic view when I come across people with the same (weirdly specific) experiences of life such as this. I feel like in a way they're extensions of my consciousness, or somehow we're the same person/part of the same 'thing'. I acknowledge that these coincidences might seem more bizarre than they are, because they're on subjects I never voice in real life. I could come across a hundred people with the same psychological disconnect as me and I wouldn't know it, because it isn't talked about. All the same, I do have the "quantum entanglement" feeling as you describe it with some frequency on WP.

yeah, and it's really hard to talk about these things in any way (even just superficially) without feeling like you're only seeking attention (when in fact you typically don't want to draw attention, because you're aware of how weird these things sound. which doesn't change the fact that it is what it is, and it's the only first-hand perspective you have access to). it's a vicious cycle of self-alienation with no clear solution. any possible solution will be inevitably as clear as mud