The grace they won't give you

I started noticing the pattern maybe fifteen years ago, before I had any word for what I was. Everybody else got to be a person. I was being recorded.

My coworker snapped at her team in a meeting and was forgiven by the time the meeting ended. She was stressed. She had a lot going on. She didn’t mean it that way. Six months later I asked one too many clarifying questions in a project handoff and I was “difficult to work with.” That followed me for two years.

I have been watching this for a long time.

The way other people’s flaws get absorbed and forgotten. He’s just like that. She’s been through a lot. They’re going through a rough patch. And then the way mine get stored. Catalogued. Brought back out, intact, when a new incident needs context.

I understand, sort of, why this happens. I mask most of the time. I’ve been holding myself to a standard nobody asked me to set since I was maybe eight years old, because the consequences of not holding it were worse. So when I finally crack — when I’m finally sharp or visibly done — it lands as a violation. I trained them to expect the performance. When the performance drops, it reads as evidence.

But here’s the part that actually gets me. The years of maintaining the performance earn me nothing. The effort that goes into keeping the mask up doesn’t build any credit. When I finally lose it, nobody says “she’s been managing this for four years without complaint, she’s earned one bad morning.” They say: there it is. That’s what she’s really like.

It doesn’t matter that they’ve spent the same four years being irritated, snapping, having short tempers, doing all the things I’m apparently not allowed to do. Their bad days are weather. Mine are evidence.

I got my AuDHD answer two years ago. The mask made sense after that. But so did the recording. Why people seem to be waiting for proof of something they’ve already decided. The mask is so good that when it slips, even once, it’s more alarming than if I’d never worn it.

I don’t know what to do with this, exactly. I’m still finding out. Some days I’m angry about it in a clean way, which feels almost useful. Some days I’m just tired.

The pattern is real. It’s not anxiety or sensitivity or me misreading things. It’s been happening in roughly the same way my whole adult life, with different people in different rooms. The recording doesn’t stop just because I’ve named it.

But it does look different now that I know what I’m looking at. Which is something.