Sometimes I feel things very strongly and right in the moment that they’re happening. These moments are few and far between and though they aren’t exclusively sexual that remains the place I am closest to having baseline human normal emotions.
I am trying to do this whole unmasking thing by acknowledging my emotions as they happen, I’m not at the point in most places where I can admit that I’m not having an emotional response when I’m not because that makes large swathes of people hugely uncomfortable. I suspect it really explains why I’ve parsed most things sexually as an adult, it makes it possible for me to authentically feel things in the moment.
Unfortunately I have discovered that being honest about my emotions to my sister makes her really angry in almost all instances. But especially when I’m too late with them by any normal measure, two weeks between something happening and me having feelings about it is too long. I think masking is a default state of adult life and it’s not just neurodiverse people who do it, it’s just that it’s harder for us because it’s so much further than our reality. In anycase I think the closest I’m going to get to unmasking is attempting to know when I’m masking and when I’m not and with the Princess definitely pretending I’m not feeling things too late is a necessity.
I am very convinced that a lot of my alexithymia isn’t so much being without emotion (you gotta love Giggles calling me a robot that one time, that really stuck with me) as it is being told that my core emotions weren’t the right ones or weren’t expressed in the right ways… and I’m left feeling most authentically emotional with the core emotion of sexual arousal – huh is that the one that I got to work out on my own? Why gosh yes I think it is.
Delayed emotional responses at least make me good in a crisis but it would be nice if I could access them in real time.
