I learned to mask early.
Two, maybe three years old.
Before memory, but not before consequence.
My eyes didn’t answer back
the way other children’s did.
Too long on a face.
Too blank.
Too much or not enough.
People read it immediately.
Wrong look.
So I learned scripts.
Microexpressions.
Tone.
Breath taken at the right moment.
The smile returned in correct proportion.
What people said to me rarely landed intact.
Meaning dissolved somewhere between mouth and ear,
as if language itself arrived already thinned.
Later, I got good at it.
Not good — precise.
I could read a face
while the mouth delivered something else entirely.
The narrowing of the eyes,
the inhale that comes a beat too late,
the body interrupting the performance.
Trauma helped.
Survival sharpened the instrument.
I lost immediacy…
what someone wants right now,
but gained something broader:
what they don’t want seen
and can’t stop revealing.
Eventually I realized
this wasn’t unusual.
It was universal.
Every interaction is layered.
Even love.
Especially love.
People soften, translate, decorate,
wrap intention in abstraction
until the original meaning
barely resembles itself.
This fog is not accidental.
It’s agreed upon.
Maintained.
Neurotypical communication depends on it.
I’ve never been able
to consciously participate.
With systems, this difference is useful.
They respond to clarity.
At work, morale had been low for years.
No one could articulate why.
I spent a day talking face to face,
assembling fragments no one would state outright.
When the list went upward,
the system corrected.
Truth in.
Alignment out.
Humans don’t behave this way.
Years ago, I knew a man
a few years older than me.
Very religious.
From a very religious family.
He was preparing for the priesthood.
Late entry.
Serious.
Spoken of
as if already decided.
At a party…
intoxicated enough
for control to thin…
hesitation radiated from him
before he said anything.
Posture.
Delayed sentences.
Facial muscles
working too hard
to hold shape.
We talked.
That’s when I learned about the priesthood.
I began testing the structure.
Thoughts.
Questions.
Nothing explicit.
What returned was not belief denied,
but belief absent…
abstraction, deflection, relief.
Enough.
He did not believe in God.
Not minimally.
Not residually.
What he believed in
was obligation.
Family pressure.
The cost of refusal.
His thinking tightened.
Looped.
Searched for support
that wasn’t there.
Months later, he left the path.
His family severed contact.
I don’t know what weight
that night carried.
Only that the alignment was false
before I named it.
And that once exposed, even indirectly…
it could not persist.
Since then, I ration clarity.
Nearly all the time.
It’s a lonely way to live.
Cost — solitude
not safety.
Camouflage pays
in disappearance.
Most eyes pass through me
like light
through clean glass.
Few ever stopped.
Saw
the shape
the weight
the heat…
me.
I suspect plain speech
would appall most people…
not because it’s cruel,
but because it refuses the fog.
There are some people like me.
I speak more freely with them.
They remain.
I see recognition in the eyes.
We don’t meet inside the fog.
We see each other
across it.
— UpsilonA
This story resonates with me because I grew up nonverbal until age 9. I had to learn to adapt to neurotypical environments.