BatElite

No idea how long this one will be. Probably quite short.

 

A couple of days ago I had another emotional outburst, which I think makes three so far? There's the smaller on in the autism post, the one that my first post was part of, and this recent one. I think I've been on Mastodon for about 3 months?

 

Notably, all three so far have for at least some part involved me trying to guess at the reactions of others. This isn't much of a revelation to me, but more interesting is some of the language employed: in the autism post I described myself as "bitching" and the hovertext for the text I wrote recently (posted as a screenshot of notepad) reads "An awful bit of whiny [...] text."

 

One thing that occurs withs autism (and probably other things as well) when you're diagnosed at a young age is that there is certain narrative about the condition. If it's not explicitly stated during therapy/treatment it tends to creep in at some point. It may have been exarcerbated by looking up stuff later myself, as I can't remember specific moments from childhood but I do have some feeling that it was present at that time. In this case I'm talking about "Autistic people lack theory of mind and empathy". That stuff stuck.

 

In recent years I've started making efforts to talk to people more. Being lonely isn't the most pleasant of things. I think I'm doing it quite well so far. Another bit of language I've noticed is I think I considered describing myself as leeching off others (similar sentiment to the bit at the beginning of the autism post) and well, you've read the title of this.

 

I think what's going on is that if (a big if) I lack the theory of mind/empathy as asserted above, then any social interaction I do is both effectively mimicry and only for selfish ends. Doing this I will eventually end up hurting people. I don't think that is true though, so there's probably some shift going on in my mind. Ironically, the earlier bitching/whining remarks seem to stem from a desire to help. I do want to try and help people. I can't really help them with many of their problems anyway, but when I'm the one solliciting help from them I'm just making things worse on them. I don't think that quite all there is to it; there seems to be some genuine feeling of inferiority in there as well, but I don't know what goes on with that at the moment. Food for thought.

 

Forums are probably the easiest given the generally accepted time between replies. That doesn't really mean a whole lot if at first you're too scared to look at people's replies, but I've been better at that. That being said, I still took 4 days to make a thread and haven't looked at the few replies, since I feel like I made a dumb thread. I think that's been three days since posting now. Eventually I'll get to it?

 

Mastodon at least works on the understanding that one can take a little while to answer since people are actually doing things and timezones. I've not seen a lot of interaction about posts older than a day though, so it feels like a much more leniently timed chat. I've started making the occasional post-and-run in actual real-time chats as well.

 

At least I have so far not yet burnt trough anyone's goodwill even if it feels otherwise sometimes. I wonder how many more of these outbursts it will take for that to start happening. On the recent one a much-appreciated response talks about trusting others and while I think trust is starting to grow, the large paragraph above suggests I don't trust myself quite yet either. One line from my Mastodon bio is "Please don't assume I ever post or ask anything with ill intent" which I knew full well was only there for my sake when I wrote it. I keep feeling like people are more negatively judging of me than they actually are, and I'm pretty sure that's reflecting myself on them.

Still, trusting people (and using direct contact for this stuff as she suggests as well) might lessen how often this happens.