Rushing to make decisions can be a form of masking.
If I’m afraid I’ll make someone impatient, I wouldn’t necessarily call that masking. But it’s masking if the thing that I fear is how I’ll be seen as a person.
My stereotype of an intelligent person is not slow. So I wear the mask of that stereotype, and make worse decisions as a result.
Like at the optometrist today. I wish I’d said, “Wait, please give me a minute to reconsider if I actually want to order new lenses here and now.”
Turns out, I could have saved money by ordering them elsewhere later. But my attempt to look intelligent made me behave less intelligently.
I hope this post gives you courage to ask for more time, accepting how it looks for the sake of how it helps.