Expressive doesn't always mean extroverted

People tend to read “expressive” as “extroverted,” and I understand why. They usually show up together, but they’re not exactly the same thing. I’ve spent a lot of time being read as one when I’m actually the other.

I can be genuinely animated about something I care about— video games, books, specific TV shows or movies, the projects that I’m working on —and depending on who I’m with, I can keep that going for hours without it seeming to cost me anything. The bill just doesn’t come due right away. It’s usually not until the day after that it catches up with me all at once, at a thousand miles an hour. That’s not a contradiction to me, even though it seems to read as one to other people. The energy I show and the energy I actually have just aren’t always on the same schedule.

Some of that is social masking, which I think gets talked about less plainly than it should. Masking isn’t really just “pretending to be someone else.” It’s closer to running a second process in the background the entire time you’re interacting with people. Tracking whether you’re making the right amount of eye contact, whether your tone matches what the moment needs, whether you’re taking up too much space or too little. None of that shows up on the outside. What shows up is just.. a person, functioning, maybe even seeming fine. The cost is invisible by design.

That’s also why “you don’t seem neurodivergent” has never landed for me the way people probably intend it to. Part of it is that I’m not the stereotypical, handbook example of it. I stand out in plenty of ways that don’t match the checklist people have in their heads, even though I still tick off quite a fair few of the boxes on it. But it’s usually meant as a compliment, and what it actually tells me is that the effort worked exactly as intended— that the mask held up well enough that nobody clocked the checklist underneath it. The version of me that people are responding to is the version after the masking, not before it.

I don’t have a tidy conclusion for this one. Mostly I just want it on record that visible energy and internal state aren’t always the same thing, and that being perceived as “fine” doesn’t always mean the effort behind it was small.