There’s one thing in your post that I haven’t seen you mention yet it’s all over the place: depression.

I don’t know anything about you but this post, and I’m not a professional, but from very painful personal experience I’m almost sure you’re severely depressed, maybe even to the point where you need hospitalization.

Depression fucks with your head. It makes you not-do things you’re looking forward to and you don’t understand why. It makes you unable to see anything positive. You cannot get out of it without help after a certain point, and you cannot trust your own thoughts anymore.

These days, after years, I’m better. For me it’s never going completely away, but I recognize patterns, I know how to break the spiraling (and most importantly, no one shames me for how I’m doing it anymore) and I can say " this sounds like depression speaking, let me do something else and return to this thought tmr and see how I feel."

But it took years of therapy and several months of hospitalization. If you’re at the point where your outbreaks scare your family, maybe it’s time to look into that.

Another thing: depression in men is critically underdiagnosed, because most docs look for physical reasons if a man comes to them with symptoms of depression. If you haven’t been diagnosed yet, it may be that it didn’t occur to your doc, maybe because you’re masking well or because he’s just not used to seeing men with depression.

However you go on, I wish you all the best. I hope that you can find a way, with or without meds, to live in peace with your brain.

My special interests are very special to me (ugh, what a terrible pun. Defo not intended!) and I reserve sharing them for people I trust. That alone is a reason for me to mask.

It’s actually harder for me not to mask than it is to mask a lot of the time, even though my mask is far from perfect. But I’m “out” at work and it’s fine if people realize I’m masking.

I think for me donning the mask is like donning armor to protect things I care about from a majorly uncaring world, and if I unmask around you it’s a sign of trust.

Still relatively new to Lemmy and can’t figure out RN how to dm you, but I am not in the US, so most likely we are not in the same country.

I can tell you broad strokes though - I got super lucky with my therapist at that time. Sadly he’s retired now :( I was super exhausted, had gotten out of hospital and then diagnosis and at the same time (since in paper I looked like an easy candidate to find work for) the unemployment agency was hounding me. I told my therapist as an off-comment “I wish I didn’t have to do shit for the rest of the year.”

He said that can be arranged and I thought he was joking - it was October or something. Nope, he stalled and his practice became unreachable. All I could tell the unemployment agency was that I didn’t hear back and I don’t know what’s going on until they got frustrated and backed off. Come new year, everything went back to normal and it went fast-ish. Took maybe a year in total? I think less, maybe roughly 9 months?

I didn’t realize what happened until after the fact, but he bought me the time I needed to process things at that time.

Better - but not through age.

Since I got diagnosed late, my before-diagnosis time was a mess and I had no idea why. Since my diagnosis and me subsequently understanding what’s happening I have become less likely to compromise on things that will cause meltdowns.

I also have disabled status so I can request accommodations at work, and lucky enough my team and workplace are lovely about that.

I can’t tell if time made a difference for me, but I feel like I’ve lost patience for people telling me “don’t be like that”, but that’s probably also due to knowing what’s going on now. I keep asking them if they’d tell a quadriplegic to not be like that and just real quick get them something from the high shelf. Surprisingly efficient, although there’s always people claiming you’re just being dramatic. Thankfully they are a minority around me.