Are you EXHAUSTED?

there's this term autistic masking and what it means is a neurod Divergent person who learns how to operate in the world in ways that are socially acceptable what people don't realize is that takes an incredible amount of energy somebody who's masking will be literally exhausted physically and emotionally drained just from going out and about and having regular social interactions because the amount of energy and focus required to have regular socially acceptable interactions is enormous so what people don't realize is how tired someone whose neurode Divergent is what is also not very well understood and I wish that it would be studied properly is that someone who's stressed out like this from life will often turn to addiction as a form of self-medication to numb themselves from the constant stress of just having to deal with Humanity I think also what should be studied because there's an incredibly uncanny overlap between these situations is minority populations when they go out and about among the majority population something linguistically we refer to it as code switching where you have to constantly behave in a certain way that conforms with what's considered a normal social interaction for the majority population that is literally exhausting and a person who has to do that day in and day out can also be extremely distressed just from regular interactions and also may turn to self- numbing behaviors in order to alleviate that stress I think there are these unseen populations of neurode Divergent people of minorities highly sensitive people empaths use whatever term you want who are literally exhausted just from having to pretend to act the way that Society calls normal and I say normal in quotes because it's just what convention determines is normal because that's the way most people act and the burden the load of having to accommodate that is an unseen and unrecognized liability