I was originally going to comment something about “how do I balance this with the need to filter for niche nerds who are like me?”, but then I remembered that the post is actually literally about dunks/insults on Twitter. o_0
This, in meta- and object-level ways, got to a core problem I have: I want to do smart and nice things with smart and nice people, yet these (especially the social stuff) requires me to be so careful + actually have anything like a self-filter. And even trying to practice/exercise that basic self-filtering skill feels physically draining. (ADHD + poor sleep btw, but just pointing these out doesn’t do much!)
To expand on this (my initial comment): While I love being chill and being around chill people, I also (depending on my emotional state) can find it exhausting to do basic social things like “not saying every thought that you think” and “not framing every sentence I say as a joke”.
I was once given the “personal social boundaries” talk by some family members. One of them said they were uncomfortable with a certain behavior/conversational-thing I did. (It was probably something between “fully conscious” and “a diagnosable tic”.). And I told them flat-out that I would have trouble staying in their boundary (which was extremely basic and reasonable of them to set, mind you!), and that I literally preferred not-interacting-with-them to spending the energy to mask.
Posts like this remind me of how scared of myself I sometimes am, and maybe should be? I’m scared and of being either [ostracized by communities I deeply love] or [exhausting myself by “masking” all the time]. And I don’t really know how to escape this, except by learned coping mechanisms that are either (to me) “slowly revealing more of myself and being more casual, in proportion to how long I spend around someone”, or (to others) “doing a boiling-frog slow-burn to make it hard or awkward to point out or fix, in a way not dissimilar to abusive-type behavior”.
Like, if you think a teacher is about to yell at you for a medium-sized bad thing you did, you might accidentally hit on the tactic of “yell at myself louder”, which conveniently also looks a lot like “throwing a childish tantrum to deflect criticism”, because maybe it is.
This isn’t just idle anxiety, either! At least twice (to my knowledge), I have been told that my behavior in a social group that I loved was bad enough that I should not interact with those groups anymore / for a long “cooldown” period. Occasionally, my best friends really DID secretly hate me. And in hindsight, they were absolutely right to. I’m loud and overbearing and self-centered (and maybe worse?) in lots of social settings, and that’s often when I feel most alive.
I need better sleep, and maybe also to take my meds everyday (even though those solutions conflict with each other somewhat, and they both conflict with my day job). I got some counselling, but nothing too deeply useful.
Not sure if this is just emotionally-stunted spoiled whining, but I felt I needed to say this for my own sake.
In response to / inspired by this SSC post:
I was originally going to comment something about “how do I balance this with the need to filter for niche nerds who are like me?”, but then I remembered that the post is actually literally about dunks/insults on Twitter. o_0
This, in meta- and object-level ways, got to a core problem I have: I want to do smart and nice things with smart and nice people, yet these (especially the social stuff) requires me to be so careful + actually have anything like a self-filter. And even trying to practice/exercise that basic self-filtering skill feels physically draining. (ADHD + poor sleep btw, but just pointing these out doesn’t do much!)
To expand on this (my initial comment): While I love being chill and being around chill people, I also (depending on my emotional state) can find it exhausting to do basic social things like “not saying every thought that you think” and “not framing every sentence I say as a joke”.
I was once given the “personal social boundaries” talk by some family members. One of them said they were uncomfortable with a certain behavior/conversational-thing I did. (It was probably something between “fully conscious” and “a diagnosable tic”.). And I told them flat-out that I would have trouble staying in their boundary (which was extremely basic and reasonable of them to set, mind you!), and that I literally preferred not-interacting-with-them to spending the energy to mask.
Posts like this remind me of how scared of myself I sometimes am, and maybe should be? I’m scared and of being either [ostracized by communities I deeply love] or [exhausting myself by “masking” all the time]. And I don’t really know how to escape this, except by learned coping mechanisms that are either (to me) “slowly revealing more of myself and being more casual, in proportion to how long I spend around someone”, or (to others) “doing a boiling-frog slow-burn to make it hard or awkward to point out or fix, in a way not dissimilar to abusive-type behavior”.
Like, if you think a teacher is about to yell at you for a medium-sized bad thing you did, you might accidentally hit on the tactic of “yell at myself louder”, which conveniently also looks a lot like “throwing a childish tantrum to deflect criticism”, because maybe it is.
This isn’t just idle anxiety, either! At least twice (to my knowledge), I have been told that my behavior in a social group that I loved was bad enough that I should not interact with those groups anymore / for a long “cooldown” period. Occasionally, my best friends really DID secretly hate me. And in hindsight, they were absolutely right to. I’m loud and overbearing and self-centered (and maybe worse?) in lots of social settings, and that’s often when I feel most alive.
I need better sleep, and maybe also to take my meds everyday (even though those solutions conflict with each other somewhat, and they both conflict with my day job). I got some counselling, but nothing too deeply useful.
Not sure if this is just emotionally-stunted spoiled whining, but I felt I needed to say this for my own sake.