Someone We Can Trust

“…[W]e must first recognize that the version of ourselves we’ve been hiding from the world is somebody we can trust.”

Other Peter

My mother loved to tell a story from when I was a toddler, about how when I would get in trouble, I would blame it on “Other Peter”. I didn’t do it, Other Peter did it. She thought this was funny, and retold this story well into adulthood. Kids can be so clever.

Looking back on it now, I think I can see early masking going on, early hiding of my self. Feeling like there’s a part of me that gets me in trouble, and if I can wall it off and disown it, then I’ll be a good boy again. I was never secure about her love, and so being a good boy again was important, if she’d let me. Sometimes she made me stew in my own juices before she’d let me be a good boy again.

Trust?

What does that mean, “trust” our other selves? When I read this, I had trouble with this. I didn’t understand what that meant. To be fair, I first read the book when I was trying to unmask and was failing miserably. I was having a hard time seeing outside the box at the time.

But that was the problem. Because I hadn’t stopped to remove the hurdle of my internal ableism; because I hadn’t recognized that it was my internal ableism that was making me mask, not other people; because I didn’t trust Other Peter, because Other Peter made Mom threaten to take her love away; and because I had transferred this primal wound onto my partner, who was going to take her love away if Other Peter came out; because of all these, I actually started masking harder, until there was nothing left of me, and I burnt myself out.

Because I didn’t trust what was under the mask, I tried to hide it even more when I tried to unmask. The irony being that it all came true not despite my efforts, but because of them. My masking led me to withdraw from my partner. Eventually I moved out. I left her no choice, and she ended it.

But by ending it, she broke the spell. There was nothing left of me save this shell, but there was also no reason to not trust Other Peter anymore. Mom wasn’t yet gone, but was beyond talking to, so I had to resolve my feelings towards her on my own, which has been really hard. I’m making progress, but it’s been slowed by grief, which I’ve been dealing with since she passed six months ago.

Part of the process has been allowing myself to feel “bad” emotions, for which the grief has been helpful, I guess, in that it’s made of these emotions. It was hard to allow myself to feel sad. And though anger and frustration have been in ready supply the last few years, de-stigmatizing them took some effort.

Do I trust Other Peter now? I’m at a point where I realize the question is do I trust myself. That Other Peter is the one true Peter. And the one true Peter has a lot of problems. He has emotional regulation control problems. He has executive dysfunction problems. He has no self-esteem. He has been devalued so thoroughly by me, the actual Other Peter, for so long that now neither of us see the value in being him.

But we’re working on it. It’s been challenging to let the one true Peter drive, but it helps that we’re mostly alone now. Other people are still getting me, the actual Other Peter. I’m slowly learning to trust the one true Peter, standing up for him and slowly building his self-esteem.

So, a year later and burdened with grief, I think I finally understand what that means, to trust your hidden self.

Excerpt From: Devon Price, Ph.D. “Unmasking Autism.” Harmony/Rodale, 2022–04–05. Apple Books.