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Today's session was spent talking about stepping out of my "mask"... how it has felt to open a door and be honest with myself about something that I haven't been honest about before. It's felt very liberating, but in a lot of ways I also feel vulnerable and exposed. We talked about when I first began wearing my mask, how and why I developed that set of mannerisms, and how life is different without it.
When I was a freshman in highschool, I remember not fitting in at all. I felt like some kind of psychopath... everyone else seemed to know something I didn't and I just floundered, tried to be invisible. Bit by bit I adopted habits and mannerisms that helped me fit in. I smiled a lot- I remember looking at a mirror and teaching myself to smile even though I never felt like it. I dressed to fit in, joined a sports team that I didn't really like, and buried myself in my school work. I learned to be pleasant and approachable, but not let anyone get too close. My therapist brought up the concept of Winnicott's false self and I told him my metaphor of an attack surface; in a security analysis your attack surface is the sum of all the possible ways that you are vulnerable and that someone could potentially bypass your security or gather information about your defenses and what you are protecting... my mask was a way of minimizing that attack surface. Not altogether fake, just limited... narrow... a cross-section of myself that got me through my day-to-day life.
When I was a freshman in highschool, I remember not fitting in at all. I felt like some kind of psychopath... everyone else seemed to know something I didn't and I just floundered, tried to be invisible. Bit by bit I adopted habits and mannerisms that helped me fit in. I smiled a lot- I remember looking at a mirror and teaching myself to smile even though I never felt like it. I dressed to fit in, joined a sports team that I didn't really like, and buried myself in my school work. I learned to be pleasant and approachable, but not let anyone get too close. My therapist brought up the concept of Winnicott's false self and I told him my metaphor of an attack surface; in a security analysis your attack surface is the sum of all the possible ways that you are vulnerable and that someone could potentially bypass your security or gather information about your defenses and what you are protecting... my mask was a way of minimizing that attack surface. Not altogether fake, just limited... narrow... a cross-section of myself that got me through my day-to-day life.
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