# Third Rail Basics - What if, desire, and misbelief 💭 So, let’s try to do this quickly - and with a lot of fun - in order to avoid the deep trauma confusion crisis we had when last trying to pin this down. So the basic spark, the basic inspiration for all I am doing here was the moment when I found out that I am [[!🧭 Unmasking|AuDHD]] at the age of 45. More specifically, it was the mix of finally understanding myself, the feeling of being robed of an appropriate concept to understand my experiences up to that point, the grief about lost opportunities, the rage and fury about missing supports, and about the massive gaslighting that had happened, both by some seriously manipulative individuals and institutions that were toxic for myself, but also the entire reality I grew up in. Which included my own, internalized abelism. Now, with the switch to a protagonist who is not me, I got specifically intersted in the idea of masking and unmasking and how this interacts with connection. At the end, it all boils down to an interaction of these concepts: 1. Mind shapes reality - and an AuDHD mind shapes an AuDHD reality 2. Connection really, really matters - and AuDHD, especially autism, has the potential to disconnect 3. To overcome the inherent lonelyness of being autistic (or, more universally speaking, of being uniquely you and understanding that not one other person in the world will truely understand you, ever), we need to take a step of acceptance - and of moving on. Like RuPaul said: If it’s all an illusion (here - theh idea of connection based on existential understanding), then you can as well have fun with it (here - take the courage to tell your authentic story, and trust that this is engough) So my point is: Connection really matters - and it does not come from similarity, it comes from trusting that telling your own story and listening to that of others is enough. **We don’t need to understand each other in order to feel connected - because on a fundamental level, we’re all one.** Based on this, I want to send a highly masking guy who constantly tries to prove himself worthy of connection into a situation where he fails in these efforts so fundamentally that he has to face the truth - that he’s never going to fit the picture, but that he’s worthy of connection anyway. So I guess my “What if” is something like: What if a guy who tried all his life to prove himself as worthy of connection, desperately trying to build a home, a community, and a safe harbor where he doesn’t need to prove himself any more is disconnected from everything that matters (his girlfriend, his audience, his chance of building a family). Left with nothing else than himself, he falls into a world that is a representation of his own consioucsness, and in this world, the pattern repeats - to prove himself worth of connection, he tries to save the world from destruction and disconnect. And what if he fails a last time, leaving him no other escape than the truth - that he will never be able to prove himself worthy of connection. And it’s only in this moment of ultimate failure that he dares for the first time to just be. And discovers, that openly telling the story of his perceived unworthyness is what bears the potential to finally come close to what he was looking for: Connection. So, based on this, I’d say that his fundamental desire is connection, to be loved. This will result in his goal - to build a home for his girlfriend and a family on his own. And I’d say his fundamental misbelief is that you need to be able to give others what they need in order to be worthy of connection. That he’s not enough to be loved if he doesn’t perform. I think that’s already quite strong. Lisa would probably argue that it’s not specific enough, but I’ll skip this critizism because I know I have a quite specific story in mind that I just don’t want to detail here to avoid getting lost in details. **So to boil it down, the third rail will be the conflict between the desire to be connected, to have a family and a home - and the misbelief that you need to proof your worth in order to get this, and that he has not yet proven his worth.** With this, we can move on to the next step, which is [[Five things we know about the plot ✅]]