I have such a hard time recognizing people when they change their hairstyle; it’s like they turn into completely different people. I’m sure I read the association before, because it’s there in my skull, but it just now hard-clicked what an indicator this is for face-blindness.

This, right here, goes closely along with the whole forest-for-trees issue of autism:

Individual features are fine, but I can’t make sense of the whole unless it’s something I’ve previously put a huge effort into mastering.

It’s that inability to hold more than one small thing in my short-term memory at a time, basically. And, I think I specifically don’t filter facial information down into my long-term memory very much at all, except maybe in the most abstract sense. Like, verbal descriptions.

It also strikes me how I subconsciously built these mnemonic tools to get around these problems, much as I have for all of these other masking behaviors, by vaguely associating new faces with other well-entrenched faces. Like, I just see this person as Mark Zuckerberg, and so on—which in turn over time screws up my sense of reality as to what the original model looks like. It gets strange when I see footage of an actual person who has been depicted by an actor in some medium, and I get weirded out that they actually exist, because they look sorta wrong.

All day, every day, interacting with this world that wasn’t built for me, I’m drawing on this deep, carefully curated set of tools that I don’t even realize I’m using in order to hack the fucking baffling system in front of me. And it’s exhausting. Nothing comes naturally.

At the same time, all of these coping mechanisms I’ve built up, for years I think they’ve led to false results when people have tried to test me and figure out what’s going on—because I’ve broken down the systems so meticulously and set up so many glitchy back-door workarounds.

Like, right now I’m taking the Cambridge Face Memory Test, which is the official thing they tend to use to assess this, but I’m mnemonically cheating my way through every trial. I know there will be three faces, and I’m memorizing, oh, David Duchovny. Or Haunted Eyes, Browbone.

If I weren’t concentrating so hard, putting this energy into memorizing specific details or making associations, this would all wash over me and I’d be lost. But that terrifies me so deeply, I can’t let go. I can’t stop the masking behaviors, these lifelines that keep me going—even as it siphons away my energy like a straw in my jugular.

If there were a delay between showing the faces and identifying them; if they showed other vaguely similar faces in-between; if they did a fake-out, like a police lineup, and it were possible the originals weren’t there; if there were more options to choose from, I’d flub it all.

But it’s this hacky… videogame logic, kinda, that I apply, in order to cope. I learn the system so I can write my own internal code to cheat it. Or else I’d be lost.

Even so, working as hard as I can and draining my battery until I feel ill, which I now do, I still don’t cope all that well:

Which is representative of every area of my life, pretty much! I just barely do better than a coin-flip. Which is… pretty much the extent to which I can rely on my masking behaviors at all. They’re so incredibly unreliable, but they’re all I have. It’s enough to let me sort of scrape by under certain conditions, avoid falling down the pit, but never quite function adequately.

This is what it means to be “high-level” autistic: to be able to fake it well enough to fail at being “normal.”