#I've been in such a delusional mood lately it's so crazy. What's in my head and why is there an evil little mouse controlling my brain

[warmspice]

Thinking about a girl in my tutorial class last year who was soooso cool and that I wanted to be friends with soooo bad. and also how she lingered a bit after I was chatting with her but then had to chat with a friend I ran into... sigh..

[donnerpartyofone]

your posts about self esteem were really interesting. I hope you don't mind if I ask, but do you struggle with empathy? I've got friends in psychology who say self compassion is correlated to compassion for others, so often low empathy = poor self image. Social skills are often hampered by conditions like autism, and compassion is social.

Thank you for this provocative question, anon! I like that you say those posts were "interesting" instead of like, sad or delusional or something. I had to start blocking people who were compelled to tell me what to think or how to feel about myself, or who thought they were helping by denying the nature of what I was reporting. A few people recently had a more thoughtful or inquisitive reaction and I found that really refreshing.

Apologies in advance for this long dissertation on ME, but I'm glad you asked this specific question because it relates to something that came up recently that I think is important to talk about. More below the break so I don't ruin everyone's dash.

First of all I think I do not struggle with empathy; if anything I seem to have a hyperactive sensitivity to other people's moods and dispositions. One of the reasons parties are hard for me is that it takes a lot of energy to be immersed in other people's, uh, "vibes" or "auras"--please don't take anything mystical from my word choice, it's just hard to describe otherwise. I start syncing with other people to make myself less weird and off-putting (who knows how much I'm succeeding!), and then I need a lot of solitude to get back to my baseline. I'm very concerned with how other people feel, which is why I've been so good in hospitality-related jobs. But I'm sure this is related to the fact that I have major boundary issues, I get so hung up on how other people (seem to) feel that it can make it hard for me to assert myself until someone has pushed me way over the edge.

But I guess there's a limit re: the "reading social cues" bit. I *think* I read the room pretty well most of the time (I must! For my survival!), but I have a history of taking people at their word too much and not noticing that someone has bad intentions until it's too late. Maybe there's a certain amount of literalism going on. Like a really simple example is, I have a hard time with the concept of being "fashionably late"; if a party starts at 8, I will arrive anxiously right at 8, and there's a good chance that I will get there at like 7:57 and lurk on your front steps until the clock turns 8 BECAUSE YOU SAID 8, YOU MUST HAVE MEANT 8. I have finally learned that nobody really likes this unless they're my best friend or something, but I can't tell myself "Just relax and get there when you get there," that's too confusing, I have to say "We will now arrive at 8:20 because this is the secret code of party start times." That's a benign sort of dysfunction, but another version of that is, my boyfriend says he loves me and he doesn't want to break up. Actually he cheats on me all the time and screams at me and scares me, but because he like *technically* loves me and doesn't want to break up because that's what he literally said, my stupid brain thinks that's the rule and the other manifestations of his feelings must be anomalous, and then I'm in a really bad relationship for a long time because I just don't see the subtext until I'm really being beaten over the head with it. There have been a lot of times where I acted like I was legally obligated to come to an understanding of what someone else thinks and feels, when it would have been more rational to say, "This person is being an asshole, it doesn't matter why, I'm ditching."

I *think* this is related to your question about empathy, sorry if I'm being crazy.

So now for your question about self-compassion: I'm grateful for your prompt because I just had an argument about this with someone I love, and I don't think I did a good job of explaining it. I've also fielded some other feedback around these parts that was suggestive of the same idea, which is like: If I say that Behavior X is a crime when I do it, it must mean that Behavior X is an equally punishable crime when someone else does it, so therefore it is rude and inhumane of me to be mad at myself. This argument is missing a consideration of both context, and what exactly criminalizes Behavior X. The first note to make is that Behavior X is usually something that is NOT destructive when it happens just once in a while, innocently--but It becomes a big problem when it happens all the fucking time, like an infestation. If I "innocently" fumble something 50 times a day, that has a much more destructive effect than you making the same mistake just-sometimes. But let's say you DO make the same mistake a lot, so you still feel accused by my personal self-loathing. Now we get to the more important question of what or who is affected by the behavior. I feel sorry for people whose quirks and compulsions and such make their lives hard, obviously I relate! However, if those people came to my house and started doing their quirks and compulsions TO ME, then that's a different thing entirely.

Let's do some examples: If I complain about my weight, that's not the same as saying all fat people suck. What I'm really complaining about is the impact of weight on my own life, the negative effect on my social currency, my inability to find comfortable and attractive clothes, etc. I'm complaining about having to fight with doctors who think BMI gives them a free pass not to treat people, and also about genuine health problems I might struggle with. So my feeling about my own weight really has nothing to do with my feelings about other people's weight, I'm really reacting to my own personal discomfort, which is related to a whole complex of things, but none of those things is truly equivalent to complaining about fat people in general. Similarly, when I complain here about being stupid, I'm not assigning a moral quality to human stupidity, I'm really complaining about the effect of my personal stupidity on my own life. I do believe that there must be something cognitive or neurological going on with me so maybe I can't totally help what I'm like, but I find it impossible not to react to how my own stupidity makes it extremely hard to get through my day. It makes it scary to wake up in the morning. There are so many normal things that I either have to do over and over and over again, or that someone else actually has to do FOR me, which is humiliating and makes me feel hopeless (even though I'm glad for the help because what would I do without it?). Sometimes my life feels like fucking Groundhog Day, it feels like I'm achieving a fraction of what a normal person does in a lifetime, because everything takes me so many tries or is impossible to ever get past. I feel sorry for other people who go through the same stuff, but to me, that's totally separate from how I feel about myself. I hate myself NOT because I am a certain kind of person or because I did something that is objectively a sin, but because I, personally, am the reason I'm suffering and failing. This is not at all abstract or generalizing, it's something I'm forced to deal with, materially, every day. It's just too much to ask, for me to pity myself every single time I fuck myself over yet again. What can I say, I'm not a saint!

So I hope that sort of addresses your question! One of the reasons I get so upset when someone tries to make excuses for my behavior, or suggests that I am just exaggerating because I'm down on myself, is that if I can't have honesty about what goes on with me, then I can't ever get clarity about WHY this stuff is going on. If I agree to the premise that the 25 bad, destructive things I did today were "just because" I was distracted, or flustered, or overworked, or it was an innocent mistake, or it was someone else's fault, or it was a random coincidence, or an act of god, or I just need to learn the right way, or I just need to try harder, or I just have to have a better attitude, et al ad nauseum--that is, if I accept excuses instead of acknowledging a persistent pattern, then I might not ever get to the point of having a useful, explanatory diagnosis like ADHD or autism or...whatever is specifically going on with me. And I mean whatever happens, I WILL always try harder to improve myself, even if sometimes that feels like not learning from history. But it's becoming kind of obvious that a lot of the arguments I have with people could probably be cut off at the pass if I had a note from a doctor that said SEE? I'M REALLY JUST LIKE-THIS. I don't know what I'm going to do about that, with the Adderall shortage and what I'm told is the difficulty of getting an adult autism diagnosis. And like I'd hate to test for autism (or whatever) and have it come back ambiguous, it might make me feel like I'm "just fucking stupid" and I don't have a real problem, and it could also be problematic for these conversations I keep having with people who think I'm basically imagining the whole thing and just being "hard on myself". But I don't know, I think diagnosis may become a bigger focus for me in 2024.

Anyway. Thanks for reading this monstrosity if you did, and thanks for being thoughtful about my depression posting. It's refreshing.