📓 Imposter Syndrome
Created: Mar 26, 2025

In therapy today, I mentioned that I felt like I didn’t deserve the label “autistic” and related it to imposter syndrome at work. The professional opinion in the report by her colleague was giving me stress before I had it and shortly after I did, it was a form of relief… that there was some explanation to why I was so awkward in school or work or family.

But there was also a wave of self doubt. Like, “surely he’s been able to manage for so long, he can’t have a disability.” That anything that changed in my behavior might be an act that I’m putting on in addition to however “weird” I’ve been being.

I just wanted to drop masking as soon as I realized that yeah… I do mask.

In one way, it’s been a relief, not so much as to say that “the sky has opened up and I can see the wonderment of the universe finally!” No, it’s more like I don’t put myself into feeling awkward because I didn’t play myself into saying something awkward because I thought the silence was deafening and… well… idk. I’ve never understood, really I guess.

Maddy has been saying to me and also in our couple’s counseling, that she’s afraid of me changing. She has some trauma I won’t go into, but she’s also new in knowing this more as a fact about me than a rumor or a family suspicion.

I’m rambling…

I feel like I need to make a post to this blog, and I’m forcing myself to emote in a way that’s basically not natural to me. Forced emoting for assumed personal quota at my non-job blog.

Ha.

Yesterday was really bad for my focus. I was able to do work when someone poked me about a new task, but that was about it.

I came up to my desk after the doctor and breakfast. I had showered and didn’t want Maddy to mention it. I wanted to be quiet to myself and I put my black bucket hat on, put in my noise canceling ear phones and pulled my hat down so it was essentially blinders. I was just getting into work when a foam dart hit me from the side. I recoiled in surprise, turned to see Maddy who’d just tossed it at me, kept acting like my response was “over the top” and melodramatic. Eventually she asked the question she wanted my attention for.

Update: Maddy came home and we caught up. I shared how I was having a hard day, and I probably would have responded to a text today. We hugged, and we seem good.

Will this cause issues like having my LiveJournal did?

Like, when I used LJ, the issue wasn’t so much that I emoted into the vacuum of the internet, but that my words could be lamented over. “Oh, I’m so upset that you said ‘blah’, for if you are able to think ‘blah’ then you must truly not have what quality I need you to have.”

Different person, of course, but like, boundaries, trust networks, and the ability to speak at least one’s personal observations as a form of personal truth.

Ugh.

Urge to have a post, vs not having someone yell at me or get sad for me having sad thoughts.

I deleted my bluesky account. Different for why I deleted Instagram. IG, I just never used, I didn’t like the few accounts I felt forced to follow because of idk, friends of friends. Bluesky looks like old twitter, but it lacks one or two key security features. Specifically, I want to be able to soft block people, Or more to the point that I wanted to approve all people who follow me. Mastodon is good about that. I can look at a profile before I accept them into my network.

But like, Bluesky is too much like twitter than I care for. And it’s too easy to follow one “spicy” account and then you’re apparently on a list and despite little to no engagement on what projects I tried talking about there, I’d get chests and backsides show up in my followers faster than I can keep up with. I can’t tell who’s a bot, and who’s a real human. I want to have empathy, so I don’t like the idea of using regular blocking for this task, and I need more local, on-device filtering of my timeline, which the feeds system reveals how little privacy a bluesky user really has, in consideration of social media at large.

Been playing the “Class of ‘09” trilogy this week.

I don’t know if that’s a bad influence on my spirits. The drama is rather engrossing, although. The writing and acting feel relatively good while of course there are stereotypes being leaned on for many of the caricatures that I recognize from my own “class of 2k” classmates and self.