Is this ASD masking?

[ShhhItsNotMe]

(Name changed)

I was a slightly weird kid. Very booky (I'd go to visit friends but instead of playing I would just read in their bedrooms, assuming they were happy to read too), not really plugged into popular culture, and a bit over-confident/unrealistic. If there was a fancy dress party, for example, I'd turn up in as some obscure character from a book in a costume I'd made myself that didn't really work because I'd been over-optimistic about it. I didn't make eye contact and had a weird blink. But I was happy in myself. I had friends and I was often the one coming up with new ideas for games and activities for the group. However I also went through periods of being bullied for having the wrong clothes and wrong toys.

About 11 or 12 I started to get more independent and wanted to fit in so I basically embarked on a conscious project to "normalise" myself by understanding how "normal" people interacted and dressed and changing my behaviour and topics of conversation to match.

I have been doing it ever since. I've let up a bit in the last 10 years or so (I'm late 40s) after realising that despite all my efforts at being normal I still read as weird but I have enough social skills now that people are ok with the weird interests and off beat comments.

I never thought of it as pretending to be something I'm not, more like developing abilities in areas I was weak. It was like "ok, I don't do/know this thing that everyone else does/knows, and it makes it hard for me to fit in so that's something I need to fix".

It's only just occurred to me that this deliberate "learning how to be normal" might be the "masking" that women with ASD do.

I'm not ASD that I know of, but my DM almost certainly is. DH says he can see why I might wonder about ASD but he thinks it's more likely to be that I was brought up by DM so picked up a lot of her traits.

Does this sound like masking or just the normal socialisation and pressure to conform that teenage girls go through?

I think trying to act normal is way more common than we realize. If I put in the effort I shock myself how sociable and delightful I can be sometimes but it takes so much effort and other times do my best to not engage with anyone. It must be so much harder for people with AHD to fit in, but everyone is so different I think so many people have to get up and act how they need to to get through the day.
I met someone recently this lovely woman but she was so chatty and confident I couldn't stand her. Nothing wrong with her she was fine but I just couldn't deal with her personality. Everyone's different

I have asd and it does sound like masking to me, yes. Have you read much about asd traits in women specifically? It might be of use to you in sifting through whether you are on the spectrum.

I'm autistic and this sounds very much like me. I was 'weird' but mostly happy with it as a young child, then at secondary school I desperately wanted to fit in and did exactly as you did - very consciously studied 'normal' people and copied their behaviour and then carried this on into adulthood. I went through life with various problems which I put down to shyness, anxiety, depression, etc, but got to my mid 40s and it became much harder to continue masking, and at that point various other things caused me to wonder if I'm autistic, including two cousins being diagnosed. I was diagnosed a couple of years after that.

My mum and her brother (dad of the two cousins I mentioned) were almost certainly undiagnosed autistic, but I have a brother who is not autistic but has some traits, and, like your dh says, he wonders if this is learned behaviour from growing up around autistic people, or it may be that he has inherited traits, but just not in enough areas of his life to be diagnosed. And, as quollaa says, masking can also be something that neurotypical people do, especially if they are introverted or shy people feeling uncomfortable around more extrovert types.

There are a few online screening tools for autism if you want to see whether you have traits/symptoms in enough areas to consider pursuing an assessment. There are several at aspietests.org - the AQ and Ritvo ones are probably the most commonly used. And there are lots of videos on youtube about autism in women. I found the Sarah Hendrickx ones especially useful.