Re: what is it i am expected to do.

[Prajnaparamita]

Once again, responding to things in no particular order because WEEEEEE RANDOM!!!!

1. On utilitarianism—I totally get where you’re coming from on feeling like from the perspective of the universe you’re better off not existing. I consider myself a utilitarian, and while I often fail in trying to live out my ethics fully in this world, its something I aspire to and well, I’ve got no small amount of guilt for feeling like I often don’t. It also doesn’t help that I was named after a family friend of ours (let’s call her Prajna Sr.) who is something like a secular Mother Teresa. Basically, she took her fancy Yale Medical School degree and went off and founded a hospital for the poorest of the poor in a third world country and lives simply in the community which she serves and she’s probably like, saved thousands of lives by now at least. Growing up in her shadow, looking up to her as my hero, I was often given the sense that I was to follow in her footsteps and do something major to change the world with my life. The early successes I had in my life really compounded that pressure, but when I and everything in my life fell apart, I realize that was really never going to happen. I’ve spent no little amount of time being ashamed of my existence, living a luxurious first world life, wasting resources we can ill afford to spend while our planet burns, doing nothing to give back. I’ve often expressed to those around me that for those reasons, it would be for the greater good of the universe if I didn’t exist, didn’t continue to be a waste in a world that’s already burning. Something my boyfriend has done in the past though to challenge that logic though is asking me to apply that logic to others, that is, if I could, would I sentence to death all my neighbors around me, also living comfortable American lives, using over their fair share of resources in our cushy, modern lives. And my response to that was no, because while from an outside perspective we might all appear to a drain on the good of the world, I’m not omniscient and I can’t know for sure about any of that. I don’t know which of my neighbors might be the one to tackle a shooter before they go on a killing spree, saving dozens of lives, or which kid of the couple in the Mcmansion down the block might grow up to be a scientist who makes a major breakthrough on the treatment of Alzheimer’s or something like that. Just as I cannot look and judge their lives unworthy because of the limited information and perspective I have, I cannot judge myself and know for sure what my future or potential is. I wonder if that might be of any help to you, to maybe try to look at yourself that way.

2. Some more thoughts re: anxiety and how people respond to you: I can see why they might get uncomfortable with you being slumped over a table, but not with you presenting yourself at your full height. Basically, walking around with your back tall and looking people straight in the eye is just what people expect others to do, especially men. Does it seem a bit intimidating and threatening, that body language to you? Well, I guess it kind is, but one of the things about our society is that men are kinda given a pass to be a bit intimidating, sometimes even expected to. Taking up space? That’s just kind of assumed that’s what you’ll do. While being slumped over, having your head down in a public space—that’s not considered normal, and so it makes people uncomfortable in a way they can’t quite put their finger on, but it just bothers them somehow. (Yes, people suck in the way that they’re afraid of whatever isn’t familiar. But its just a way we’re hardwired, if we don’t actively work to overcome it.) And on the topic of you seeming slightly off, do you think there’s a chance you keep on getting kicked out of places not because there’s anything inherently wrong or disgusting with you but rather that, well, to someone who isn’t familiar with anxiety, its like you appear to be, ummm… tweaking? I mean this is like totally no excuse for their shitty treatment of you, but can you imagine someone seeing you in a public place slumped over like you’re unconscious and assuming that you had just shot up? Or see you shaking, not making eye contact, looking jittery and stammering and think “Oh shit that dude’s on bath salts, any second now I bet he’s gonna bite my face off like that dude in Florida…” I remember that you’re from a shithole part of Texas, so I gotta imagine that you guys have your fair share of opioid abuse and addicts, right? Because of cases of public ODs, a lot of store managers in my area are super paranoid about people doing drugs/being on drugs in my area, and a lot of public bathrooms are shut down and the staff is on much higher alert to people they might perceive as druggies, and getting them off the premises. That doesn’t make it less shitty I know, but I wonder if this all might be a big misunderstanding and its really not your fault that the cops keep getting called.

3. DBT, or Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, is amazing and I’m so glad you’re interested in it! I’ve done DBT for about two years now, and it has made SUCH A HUGE DIFFERENCE in my life. DBT is often lead in a therapy group, but instead of what you’d often think of as therapy, with everyone going around and sharing sob stories of all the horrible shit they’ve been through, its kind of like a college class, expect for instead of being on linear algebra or Enlightenment philosophy, its on learning emotional regulation. You have a lecture on the topic of the day, which is often a specific coping skill or way of interacting with others or so on, as well as homework on said topic for you to do during the week, worksheets from this textbook you have, discussions in group of how you might use the skills you’ve learned or challenges you’ve faced in trying to apply them, and consultations on issues you’ve had come up in your life and how you might be able to apply what you’ve learned to them. It's a very practical, hands on kind of therapy, and I found it highly useful because most therapy was just too unstructured for me, I needed concrete skills and resources I could use, not someone just to sit there and listen. Its certainly not for everyone, but as it was specifically designed for people who feel themselves lurching from crisis to crisis and not knowing how to cope, I think it might be pretty useful for you specifically Atlach.

4. Nothing behind it expect niceness and honesty and the fact that as a femdom, I just want all good subby boys to be open and proud about what they want so they can find some sexy mistress to worship and serve! Because just in some kind of cosmic sense I like knowing that they’re getting their cute littles asses spanked, as even if I’m not the one doing it, the more happy kinky sex out there the better, I believe! Just from the perspective of the universe it's a net good, ya know? So yes, I don’t want any pretty submissive boys to be ashamed of their sexuality, its just a loss for us all. (Also, I’ve met submissive guys who are all kinds of fucked up about their desires and its just… sad. Because it means that they can’t honestly communicate about their desires, which causes shit like consent and safety to be all messed up, and its just no fun. For anyone involved.)

5. This really sucks, but I think a lot of the stigma about older male virgins is because the majority of those who identify with virginity as a key part of their identity and proclaim it loudly to the world are also, well… those who are also shouting loudly about raping and murdering bitches and sluts for denying them for so long. And I guess to some people online, when you’ve never encountered anyone who identifies as a virgin other than an incel, saying something like “FUCK YOU VIRGINS” might make sense, because well all you’ve ever heard from them is horrific abuse. It's a steaming pile of bullshit from all sides (because no wonder men wouldn’t “come out” about being sexually inexperienced when they’re gonna be lumped with that category) but I guess I can kind understand where it comes from. So… Do you think when you hear that kind of rhetoric you could reframe it as “Hey, fuck you men who make virginity the totality your identity in order to justify hurting and harassing women!” Because that’s what they really mean, its really not about you at all, its about the incels and MRAs of 4chan and shitty parts of reddit, who you also actively oppose and find disgusting. Does that make sense?

[Werel]

K, good, this is where I was coming from with that, just your initial jokey/(mocking?) response threw me.

Always the former, no offense intended.

Yeah, but... I'm not really sure how to deal with those people when simply leaving isn't an option, when arguing results in me being vilified and hated, or just generally how to deal with being surrounded by the constant messages of "YOU ARE WORTHLESS AND EVIL". and things like discussions about a neo nazi group or someting and first comment is always along the lines of "probably a bunch of pathetic beta incels too" "men do this because they're too worthless to get laid so they find something to validate themselves" consistently equating and tying virginity and social awkwardness and alienation with all of the worst possible evil.

Yeah, you're encountering a shitty stereotype that's very common and rarely called out, which doesn't make it true or fair. It can be severely uncomfortable to watch everyone around you perpetuate that kind of message, and have no one stand up to it because it's still a socially acceptable prejudice. (Not least because, like Prajna and jcorozza said, the most vocal and visible members of the older-male-virgin crew are just walking incel-MRA-MGTOW disasters.) But YEP:

And yes, I know, media not reality, but... I"m thinking about all the messages women talk about getting from media and thinking you proooobably understand the feeling of being flooded with messages better than i do, right?

It's a thing that many/most people have to learn to deal with, including women. You can figure out ways to put up filters, and think through those messages and dismantle them to some degree; it still sucks, and it's difficult to filter them out at times, but it's way better than believing you're a less valuable person because of your gender/race/sexual experience/religion/weight/haircut/whatever. But like I been saying, critical thinking is in order (e.g. YES, if someone unironically uses the phrase "beta male", feel free to remove a lot of weight from their opinions), and like Prajna said, you'd never deny other people's value for such cruel and superficial reasons, so don't do it to yourself.

I don't see where respectfulness and adaptability have come in, sorry?

Acknowledging that women know their own bodies and preferences better than you do (unlike dudes who insist they know better), and being able to pick up new skills quickly, are indicators of respectfulness and adaptability, respectively. Good qualities!

The issue is mainly that... some people are afraid of tornadoes or lightning destroying their house and killing them, I'm just really, really terrified of doxxing, swatting, public shaming, the idea of my email inbox being flooded with a thousand repetitions of "KILL YOURSELF YOU MISOGYNIST PIG" and similar things i've seen happen over and over again over... misunderstandings, Or completely fictional occurences (remember gamergate? wait, that's probably still going, isn't it...*) or just "for the lulz"(like in a lot of instances of swatting) and those things are so chaotic and unpredictable that... they really do seem like storms or earthquakes. only more difficult to predict. or reason with. No way of knowing who the wrong person is or what you might do to set them off, or how capable they might be of getting the public into a blood frenzy. and then the fear that i'd deserve it, of course.

That's a very understandable way of explaining it, and that makes sense the same way people get tied up in anxiety-knots over random, unpreventable disasters. Internet rage mobs are a little bit like tornadoes. However, they're also way less likely to happen to you than a woman, if that helps (even though it's fucking terrible as a fact), and those kind of people are extremely unlikely to go after you unless given a reason (I'm not saying there's ever a good reason to do any of that shit, but if you're truly terrified of getting doxxed/gang-harassed/whatever, it's relatively easy to just stay out of internet slapfights and lock down your online security). It sounds more like you're afraid that the real world will begin to echo the terrible things you say about yourself (if you're afraid you'd "deserve it"), and that somehow the most self-loathing shit you think will manifest itself corporeally and ruin your life. If I were you, I'd keep on thinking of doxxing-terror as an irrational fear like a phobia of tsunamis, or objects falling on you from the sky, or flesh-eating bacteria. All things are possible, but some things are just not probable. Honestly, you're more likely to get hit by a tornado.

You've all been so helpful and I don't really know how to give back but thank you so much everyone I have no idea how to thank you enough. I mean look at this shit I've gone from... that mess up there to actually having hope. I mean I still feel guilty for having hope for some reason but that's like dogs barking, in the mood i'm in right now.

That's really great, I'm so glad to hear some things people said have been of use!

[litterature]

Hey, AtlachNacha, I've been reading this thread and I have some scattered thoughts on feminism that I wanted to share with you. Sorry if this is all too out of topic - I just thought it might help you!

When I began transitioning I decided to cut out all the men in my life. I decided not to deal with men unless strictly necessary, and I turned to old-school lesbian/radical/materialist feminists for inspiration, or at least to the least overtly transmisogynistic amongst them. I generally don't trust men, think the way masculinity is enforced and reproduced is a total shitshow, and am convinced that the sex-gender system should be abolished altogether, which amongst many other things also means "abolish male socialisation".

The first thing I wanted to tell you is that most feminists are not like me. It's not just that most of them are straight (so they're open to flirting and other sexual interactions with men), it's that although many influential feminists have separatistic tendencies, lesbian feminism these days is actually a super old-school fringe faction. Even the other feminist lesbians I know criticise lesbian feminism as a bourgeois deviation that prevents cooperation with people of colour, the working classes, gay men, and other oppressed people! Other lesbian feminists consider me a male imposter and would take any chance to hurt me. And other feminists I know don't really get the sapphic thing so sometimes I find myself kinda stuck watching my tongue and even dealing with their boyfriends and male friends. also unrequited crushes

The second thing I wanted to tell you is that even someone like me doesn't necessarily hate you outright. I don't think you're a dodgy type. While I do think that men are encouraged by society to turn their virginity into entitled whining and potentially toxic practices, I actually have sympathy for you. I have sympathy for you because you're actively trying not to harbour any entitled resentment, and because a big part of patriarchy consists in turning society into a big fat meat market where your sexual value determines how you're going to circulate in the public sphere - and even if you're going to be allowed there at all. Of course, this basically affects women, and as a trans woman I know a bit about having your sexuality taken away from you in a dehumanising way that impacts all areas of your life other than sex. But men are expected to dispose of women in a way that is functional to the general reproductive economy, or that at least is built on and reproduces structural inequality. And, for a variety of reasons, certain kinds of men either are unable to properly perform that aspect of masculinity, or are kicked out from the mechanisms that make straight sex happen. So, while it's not my main concern as a feminist, I understand that those things are indirectly part of everything I fight against. I very personally hate the concept of virginity and all of the bullshit culture surrounding it with fiery passion, so why should you be scared of someone like me? Feminist spaces aren't the best place to discuss male issues, but other than that I don't really think most of us are going to go out of our way to hurt you, much less doxx you.

edit: that said, it's probably a good idea to stay clear of social networks because yeah, dogpiling and shitty behaviour abound

[jcorozza]

="Atlachnacha" There are still plenty of things where the phrasing doesn't use those terms and still clearly unambiguously states "anyone who is a virgin this long here are the reasons why that would happen they are all bad and so on also you are a bad person for expecting anyone would want you now and etcetera good day."

There are absolutely people who will say this. And they aren't all feminists. Frankly, I think in meatspace people are much less severe about these kinds of opinions, when then they get into certain online spaces and everything becomes very black and white. Regardless, their opinions on this are wrong and stupid. Some of my best friends are/were (okay, this part is jokey) virgins! Hell, my sister is much more experienced than I am, but most of the guys she's dated have been fairly inexperienced. Same with most of my friends. Honestly, my one boyfriend who was experienced was...kind of shitty at sex stuff because he was lazy and didn't put too much effort into what *I* might want, well, ever.

I mean, I'll practice my calm non-panicky non-all-caps apologies, but. I tend to see apologies just met with more anger, and the characterization of the misstep as an inherent part of the person, their intentions as irrelevant, and so on.

As long as you are listening to the other person explain why something was sexist/racist/Xist, then you're doing what you should be. If other people are still being mean about it, then you might just be in some toxic spaces. What feminist spaces have you been to? You may have just come across some more radical ones (or TERF-y ones) - not all feminist spaces are good. I tend to go more for feminist-friendly spaces that aren't necessarily *about* feminism (like DNL). They only tend to get hellish when things like Gamergate come up, because trollsplosions!

ughghghghg Truth about the primary care doctors there. I swear, I got prescribed something... depakote, i think it was called? And couldn't WALK. looked up more information and it's like... this is usually prescribed for either epilepsy or one of the close-to-last-resort drugs for mania or psychosis. what even. Why did he think this was a good idea.

I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT DBT IS TELL ME MORE!

Yup, Depakote is generally used for bipolar I/psychotic disorder. Didn't know that it was used for seizures as well, but looks like it is! But if you don't have any of those things (and even if you do!), it can go very very badly! I've known some psychiatrists (particularly in hospitals, since I work with a lot of folks coming from them) who play fast and loose with their diagnoses. They find one symptom that steers them in a direction, and they shoehorn everything else to fit into a specific, more easily defined diagnoses, and are very hesitant to take any new symptoms or information into account. Hopefully you have one that you get to work with long term (and bonus if they also work with your therapist, because that really helps!).

Prajna covered DBT pretty thoroughly. Mindfulness is also a big part, and works to help you focus on being in the moment. It can be helpful for people who get anxiety, racing thoughts, or moods that go up and down quickly (as can the emotional regulation stuff). It was initially used for suicidal folks who had Borderline symptoms, but they found it was helpful for a lot of mood, anxiety, and PTSD symptoms as well. While a lot of talk therapy can be very past/future focused, DBT is much more present-focused.

As far as finding more comfortable spaces...what is the "right" kind of weird in your area? What are some identities/groups that seem appealing? I've definitely experienced this - I'm nerdy, but not a gamer or big on comics, so a lot of nerd-groups don't find me nerdy enough. I like playing some sports, but not enough to fit most jock groups. And, frankly, my style is a bit all over the place. Sometimes it's nerdy or girly or vintage-y. Sometimes it's black and white and others it's super colorful. It can be fun to be a lot of different identities in one,m but it can make finding a "group" hard.

Also, I'd considered going for a PhD if I got a sword out of it!

[AtlachNacha]

I cannot judge myself and know for sure what my future or potential is. I wonder if that might be of any help to you, to maybe try to look at yourself that way.

IDK, the problem is mainly when the evidence seems to pile up and go "yep, this is pretty much mathematically impossible". ('this' here being a stand in for basically any positive change.)
But then also i guess the problem is not having any actual... 'leads'? systematic ways to work on something? and when I do finally get them it's like...

To ever actually be in a relationship it seems like I'd have to dedicate another 10 years of my life specifically to learning, specifically, the skill set of interacting with people in general, interacting with women in that specific way, and so on, just to be able to meet one person that i probably wouldn't be able to have a healthy relationship with because of my lack of experience. and 10 years from now i'll be even more behind everyone else in my age bracket in that way, and will have had to sacrifice other things to focus on this one thing specifically...

Or the fact of being unable to write essays or do relatively basic math, which grays out college as a possibility as far as i can see unless i can get it recognized as a mental disability, but then money... and on that note "oh you can't work because you have panic attacks? bullshit you're completely able-bodied you can work just fine go get fired 20 more times for humiliating yourself in front of large numbers of customers by breaking down crying and unable to walk. no assistance for you, go, keep being a burden and not contributing to the bills or the cost of your healthcare."

So yeah I basically see the most likely outcome as me homeless and wandering and generally alone once my parents die, far as i can tell.

shithole part of Texas

This is a redundant construction, it should in all cases be shortened to "Texas", or "That shithole with the stupid hats". Elements of style will back me up on this. (it will probably not.) (please do not take offense if you are reading this and are a person who wears and enjoys cowboy hats, they are perfectly fine weapons against the vile rays of the sun, i am being hyperbolic due to my intense feelings of cultural alienation.) Though If you're talking about Austin or something I guess this doesn't apply, but we're not, here.

2. Some more thoughts re: anxiety and how people respond to you: I can see why they might get uncomfortable with you being slumped over a table, but not with you presenting yourself at your full height. Basically, walking around with your back tall and looking people straight in the eye is just what people expect others to do, especially men. Does it seem a bit intimidating and threatening, that body language to you? Well, I guess it kind is, but one of the things about our society is that men are kinda given a pass to be a bit intimidating, sometimes even expected to. Taking up space? That’s just kind of assumed that’s what you’ll do. While being slumped over, having your head down in a public space—that’s not considered normal, and so it makes people uncomfortable in a way they can’t quite put their finger on, but it just bothers them somehow. (Yes, people suck in the way that they’re afraid of whatever isn’t familiar. But its just a way we’re hardwired, if we don’t actively work to overcome it.)

There is truth here and it is frustrating on several levels partially due to a sort of cognitive dissonance... on one hand "men are expected to take up space and be big and loud and proud and MANLY" why no that's stupid i don't want to do that - but on the other hand, I also don't want anyone else being shamed if that's their actual personality, even if they make ME uncomfortable, because... well obvious reasons, I should think. but it's still annoying and intimidating and makes me uncomfortable. and then on the other hand (how many hands are we on now what species is this) i do want to be somewhat strong and resilient and defiant to the culture around me to a degree and those kind of go together and then more hands about arbitrary constructed expectations of gender and eughriudhgkfhg.

but it's also frustrating because in some of these instances i've been 1. overwhelmed by the fact that i am at a party full of wierd people in a weird place known for weird things and half the people here are stoned but still everyone refuses to talk to me even if introduced they still turn away from me and i have no way of knowing why, because i start out smiling and standing upright and doing everything i'm supposed to do (as far as i can tell) and gradually failing to have the will to maintain that, which leads to 2. realizing i'm just bothering people by trying to socialize, and so trying to stay out of everyone's way and NOT bother anyone because I can't leave yet so i'll just enjoy the music but oh, no, just existing, that also bothers people.

and also because both modes of body language sometimes get similar reactions, just one way gets me criticized for not doing the other.

I WAS exaggerating a bit about the 'slumped over'. more just head down a little. most everything still applies though.

Like, there's no way to work on that and improve because it's impossible to DIAGNOSE what precisely the problem even IS at point 1 what tiny subtlety there is in what i'm doing and how that causes things like that so often without being just... observed, and a therapist isn't going to be willing to do that, i'm not sure WHO would be both qualified and willing.

And on the topic of you seeming slightly off, do you think there’s a chance you keep on getting kicked out of places not because there’s anything inherently wrong or disgusting with you but rather that, well, to someone who isn’t familiar with anxiety, its like you appear to be, ummm… tweaking? I mean this is like totally no excuse for their shitty treatment of you, but can you imagine someone seeing you in a public place slumped over like you’re unconscious and assuming that you had just shot up? Or see you shaking, not making eye contact, looking jittery and stammering and think “Oh shit that dude’s on bath salts, any second now I bet he’s gonna bite my face off like that dude in Florida…” I remember that you’re from a shithole part of Texas, so I gotta imagine that you guys have your fair share of opioid abuse and addicts, right? Because of cases of public ODs, a lot of store managers in my area are super paranoid about people doing drugs/being on drugs in my area, and a lot of public bathrooms are shut down and the staff is on much higher alert to people they might perceive as druggies, and getting them off the premises. That doesn’t make it less shitty I know, but I wonder if this all might be a big misunderstanding and its really not your fault that the cops keep getting called.

It has been in the 100-degree range (or was at the time of the most recent incident). I would've thought heat exhaustion would be assumed before drug use, just by sheer statistical probablity. But people seem to looooove accusing other people of being junkies for some reason, so, yeah, you're probably right.

and I htink I may have mentioned before that I have been directly accused of being on drugs, so it wasn't really in any doubt, I think I tend to get met with "what did you take?" more than "are you having a panic attack/do you need an ambulance/are you okay" if I have a noticeable incident in public... The tone of the first phrase of course varies between accusatory and disapproving from a security guard or cop to "casual acceptance with hints of a balance of both compassion and careful risk assessment" around hippie-oids, a tone i find amusing after the fact for some reason.

but if my body language manifests my anxiety in a way that makes people fear for their safety, wouldn't that count as something inherently wrong or disgusting with me?

3. DBT, or Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, is amazing and I’m so glad you’re interested in it! I’ve done DBT for about two years now, and it has made SUCH A HUGE DIFFERENCE in my life. DBT is often lead in a therapy group, but instead of what you’d often think of as therapy, with everyone going around and sharing sob stories of all the horrible shit they’ve been through, its kind of like a college class, expect for instead of being on linear algebra or Enlightenment philosophy, its on learning emotional regulation. You have a lecture on the topic of the day, which is often a specific coping skill or way of interacting with others or so on, as well as homework on said topic for you to do during the week, worksheets from this textbook you have, discussions in group of how you might use the skills you’ve learned or challenges you’ve faced in trying to apply them, and consultations on issues you’ve had come up in your life and how you might be able to apply what you’ve learned to them. It's a very practical, hands on kind of therapy, and I found it highly useful because most therapy was just too unstructured for me, I needed concrete skills and resources I could use, not someone just to sit there and listen. Its certainly not for everyone, but as it was specifically designed for people who feel themselves lurching from crisis to crisis and not knowing how to cope, I think it might be pretty useful for you specifically Atlach.

Good god this sounds terrifying on so many levels and like it would end horribly which probably means I need to look into it.

This... this homework , is it the type of thing I'm going to get yelled at in front to the rest of the class for not doing well enough? Am I going to have to write essays and read them aloud? is it going to have drop cielings, fluorescent lights, 60s/70s architecture and brick and pipes that have been painted over with coats of white 50 times? Is there a chalkboard? Because... well let's just say I tend to have minor flashbacks and panic attacks when I vote.

god, there's another obstacle to college that i'd forgotten.

Euguuggghghghgh. A balance between the two would be more comfortable, but maybe comfortable isn't good, idk. I got frustrated with REBT for being too coldly logical/practical/insensitive ("just acknowledge that you're being stupid and you'll feel better")(and the getting yelled at, that wasn't really helpful) and occasionally get mildy frustrated with the psychodynamic guy for not giving me solid straight answers to "what do i do here". (then again that happened with the REBT too, somtimes.)

4. Nothing behind it expect niceness and honesty and the fact that as a femdom, I just want all good subby boys to be open and proud about what they want so they can find some sexy mistress to worship and serve! Because just in some kind of cosmic sense I like knowing that they’re getting their cute littles asses spanked, as even if I’m not the one doing it, the more happy kinky sex out there the better, I believe! Just from the perspective of the universe it's a net good, ya know? So yes, I don’t want any pretty submissive boys to be ashamed of their sexuality, its just a loss for us all.

There is nothing quite like having one of my weirdnesses accepted so wholly to this degree to get me curled up into a ball of warm comfortedness for a little while. thank you.

(Also, I’ve met submissive guys who are all kinds of fucked up about their desires and its just… sad. Because it means that they can’t honestly communicate about their desires, which causes shit like consent and safety to be all messed up, and its just no fun. For anyone involved.)

kink shaming and artificial gender norms should be abolished and their perpetuation punished by... idk, having one's haircut mocked for three hours or something. I'm in too good of a mood after that last bit to actually be properly vicious.

5. This really sucks, but I think a lot of the stigma about older male virgins is because the majority of those who identify with virginity as a key part of their identity and proclaim it loudly to the world are also, well… those who are also shouting loudly about raping and murdering bitches and sluts for denying them for so long. And I guess to some people online, when you’ve never encountered anyone who identifies as a virgin other than an incel, saying something like “FUCK YOU VIRGINS” might make sense, because well all you’ve ever heard from them is horrific abuse. It's a steaming pile of bullshit from all sides (because no wonder men wouldn’t “come out” about being sexually inexperienced when they’re gonna be lumped with that category) but I guess I can kind understand where it comes from. So… Do you think when you hear that kind of rhetoric you could reframe it as “Hey, fuck you men who make virginity the totality your identity in order to justify hurting and harassing women!” Because that’s what they really mean, its really not about you at all, its about the incels and MRAs of 4chan and shitty parts of reddit, who you also actively oppose and find disgusting. Does that make sense?

This works for the ones that are rage-y and vague, not so much for the calmly written out systematic takedowns that try to back themselves up with 'science', those have too much specificity to re-frame. but yes it will help in some instances.

Yeah, you're encountering a shitty stereotype that's very common and rarely called out, which doesn't make it true or fair. It can be severely uncomfortable to watch everyone around you perpetuate that kind of message, and have no one stand up to it because it's still a socially acceptable prejudice. (Not least because, like Prajna and jcorozza said, the most vocal and visible members of the older-male-virgin crew are just walking incel-MRA-MGTOW disasters.) But YEP:

I'm not really sure how it would go if I just replied to someone using virgin as an insult towards nazis or whatever with "c'mon, that's just an insult to virgins, what have I ever done to you? I want these assholes to shut up* just as much as you do..." or something.

Probably inbox flooded with rage from both sides.

It's a thing that many/most people have to learn to deal with, including women. You can figure out ways to put up filters, and think through those messages and dismantle them to some degree; it still sucks, and it's difficult to filter them out at times, but it's way better than believing you're a less valuable person because of your gender/race/sexual experience/religion/weight/haircut/whatever. But like I been saying, critical thinking is in order (e.g. YES, if someone unironically uses the phrase "beta male", feel free to remove a lot of weight from their opinions), and like Prajna said, you'd never deny other people's value for such cruel and superficial reasons, so don't do it to yourself.

Yeah, just having difficulty figuring out exact methodology of rejecting ideas I guess. like the "beta male" exclusion principle works, i just need more of those. specific fallacies to target.

otherwise, seems like someone shouts loud enough it just sticks, sometimes. especially if they have vague "studies." that aren't elaborated on enough to really tear down. Still not sure what makes me so susceptible to blatant demagoguery so often. (Think I vaguely remember reading about that being a particular documented psychological trait in certain demographics or whatever and there actually being data on it... Must ask doc.)

And mainly believing I'm a less valuable person comes from, as I alluded to before, according to most of what I'd heard of contemporary opinions on ethics, and utilitarianism more specifically*, and even more specifically people like Peter Singer, me... being technically a less valuable person, not being able to work and help out with bills let alone exist independently. Which would apparently mean I should die, because I don't have discernible potential to cause much of anything but unhappiness, from what can be seen. And if that's the majority thought, that's kind of hard to deal with, the idea of the majority of society wanting me dead, regardless of if i manage to not internalize it.

But maybe it's not the majority? I don't know. I don't have actual numbers (and there's not really a reliable way to get them, of course.) The reason I'm internalizing this in particular is probably just guilt over 1. being such an emotional and financial drain without making any discernible progress and 2. seemingly every approach/ask for number/ask on date/sometimes-so-much-as-hello interaction ending with the woman in question creeped the fuck out to the point of everyone she KNOWS shunning me, and me not being able to... not do that to people.

And i'm not sure why I have difficulty with facial expressions/body language and discerning whether someone's open to something or not if I'm not autistic in the least, and so the only explanation I can come up with is secret sociopath, and then i keep seeing people directly reinforce that. ("if you actually CARED about her feelings/saw her as a HUMAN BEING this wouldn't be hard for you" and it's like, well, i thought i did. i thought i'd been trying my hardest there.)

Acknowledging that women know their own bodies and preferences better than you do (unlike dudes who insist they know better),

Idk that just seems like baseline non-moronic but ok i'll take it.

(Like seriously guys you think the girls in your generation haven't been 'experimenting with themselves' as much as you have all this time? come on.)

That's a very understandable way of explaining it, and that makes sense the same way people get tied up in anxiety-knots over random, unpreventable disasters. Internet rage mobs are a little bit like tornadoes. However, they're also way less likely to happen to you than a woman, if that helps (even though it's fucking terrible as a fact),

...no, that doesn't help, that just makes me feel sick to my stomach and angry at the world and guilty for being self-absorbed all at once.

and those kind of people are extremely unlikely to go after you unless given a reason (I'm not saying there's ever a good reason to do any of that shit, but if you're truly terrified of getting doxxed/gang-harassed/whatever, it's relatively easy to just stay out of internet slapfights and lock down your online security).

See, part of the reason I mentioned gamergate is that it illustrates the fact that people will just make up/imagine a reason to go after someone, (and it keeps being demonstrated that there's no way to hide) even when there's nothing to prompt it beyond their own insane bloodlust. at all. and then act like they're the reasonable and sane ones and everyone against them is crazy. and the number of participants in the whole thing when it was really just completely psychotic in the very real literal clinical sense of the term is just... nothing makes sense, there's nothing there, no actual motive, it just happened. The only conclusion I can come to from that and other things like it (like how it's suddenly broadly socially acceptable to be a literal fucking nazi and the majority seems to be TAKING THEIR SIDE and defending their 'right to free speech' or whatever. as if that particular concept is supposed to make it ok for people to call for the oppression and death of massive numbers of innocents...) is that the majority of human beings really do just enjoy inflicting as much misery as possible.

which is another reason this place is SO WEIRD.

It sounds more like you're afraid that the real world will begin to echo the terrible things you say about yourself (if you're afraid you'd "deserve it"), and that somehow the most self-loathing shit you think will manifest itself corporeally and ruin your life. If I were you, I'd keep on thinking of doxxing-terror as an irrational fear like a phobia of tsunamis, or objects falling on you from the sky, or flesh-eating bacteria. All things are possible, but some things are just not probable. Honestly, you're more likely to get hit by a tornado.

I'm honestly not completely sure whether to read this as: "you're worrying too much it's alright calm down" or... "you're worrying about this because you have a guilty conscience and actually are a terrible person but I don't think telling you that would be productive to you eventually not being that/am too nice to say that." i mean, i'm guessing (hoping?) the first one? right?

And a lot of my self loathing already does manifest corporeally, remember? or rather originate externally. or...chicken and egg, i guess.

That's really great, I'm so glad to hear some things people said have been of use!

I really hate not being in a position to help anyone else in kind, though.

doesn't feel quite right.

Hey, AtlachNacha, I've been reading this thread and I have some scattered thoughts on feminism that I wanted to share with you. Sorry if this is all too out of topic - I just thought it might help you!

"Scattered thoughts", you say. "out of topic", you say. LOOK AROUND YOU! ALL IS CHAOS HERE! *maniacal laughter, lightning strikes, theremin music*

*clears throat* but seriously there's not really a specific topic anymore, not that i can see. there may once have been rails but we(or rather I, probably to an audience of raised eyebrows) have long since left them behind, fire away.

When I began transitioning I decided to cut out all the men in my life. I decided not to deal with men unless strictly necessary, and I turned to old-school lesbian/radical/materialist feminists for inspiration, or at least to the least overtly transmisogynistic amongst them. I generally don't trust men, think the way masculinity is enforced and reproduced is a total shitshow, and am convinced that the sex-gender system should be abolished altogether, which amongst many other things also means "abolish male socialisation".

The first thing I wanted to tell you is that most feminists are not like me. It's not just that most of them are straight (so they're open to flirting and other sexual interactions with men), it's that although many influential feminists have separatistic tendencies, lesbian feminism these days is actually a super old-school fringe faction. Even the other feminist lesbians I know criticise lesbian feminism as a bourgeois deviation that prevents cooperation with people of colour, the working classes, gay men, and other oppressed people! Other lesbian feminists consider me a male imposter and would take any chance to hurt me. And other feminists I know don't really get the sapphic thing so sometimes I find myself kinda stuck watching my tongue and even dealing with their boyfriends and male friends. also unrequited crushes

This all sounds incredibly frustrating and nightmarish to navigate and experience, I'm not really sure what to say, i'm sorry, a lot of what you've mentioned is completely alien to me. I have some more reading to do I think...


But.. some of this gives me something to go off of to explain some of the things I've actually been referring to... Some of you seem to think I've been going into feminist spaces and doing the "but MEN!" thing, or asking 101 questions, or whatnot, but... no. Part of the fear is observing the reaction to (seemingly?) good-faith 101 questions, but there's also the whole thing of watching giant schisms happen and feminists who disagree on a particular issue accusing each other of not being feminists, actually having been secret MRAs the whole time, secretly being neckbearded trilby-wearing men living in their mother's basements, or bronies or whatever other stereotype (what's wrong with bronies? why is that an insult? My friends have made me watch a few episodes and in those there were like... two male characters who even had lines, it seems weird it would become synonymous with hating women. More like the exact kind of thing mras tend to whine about.) and otherwise being there to undermine feminism as a whole, or different groups threatening violence against each other and accusing each other of being tools of the patriarchy in some way or something, or things like groups or individuals that think prostitution should be legal immediately being accused of being okay with child sex slaves as if that's a natural extrapolation at all.

I want to more actively be an ally but even before you get to my natural anxiety it's a bit frightening if i keep getting the impression that even the main core seems so prone to hatred and violence and borderline-mccarthyist paranoia against EACHOTHER, So i'm not sure how i keep ending up in this corner of it, but I'd like to... y'know... not. It seems like it's becoming more widespread since trump elected, i'm seeing it on facebook and among just people in my immediate area more and more, everyone is just so damned angry and i understand why and they should be (maybe not at each other though? maybe more at the literal nazis walking around in broad daylight waving third reich flags without shame, that seems like a good target.) but i also cannot deal with it i do not have the strength. not right now. I want to show up at protests and things but i can't handle feeling afraid of altogether: the opponents, the police, and the side i'm actually ON. i'm just too weak. right now at least.

you're actively trying not to harbour any entitled resentment,

Yeah, there really has to be a better way to do that than self flagellating until i'm a puddle of self loathing about to dissolve and soak into the ground though, honestly.

and because a big part of patriarchy consists in turning society into a big fat meat market where your sexual value determines how you're going to circulate in the public sphere - and even if you're going to be allowed there at all. Of course, this basically affects women, and as a trans woman I know a bit about having your sexuality taken away from you in a dehumanising way that impacts all areas of your life other than sex. But men are expected to dispose of women in a way that is functional to the general reproductive economy, or that at least is built on and reproduces structural inequality. And, for a variety of reasons, certain kinds of men either are unable to properly perform that aspect of masculinity, or are kicked out from the mechanisms that make straight sex happen. So, while it's not my main concern as a feminist, I understand that those things are indirectly part of everything I fight against. I very personally hate the concept of virginity and all of the bullshit culture surrounding it with fiery passion,

God, "meat market" is a really good phrase to express just how utterly disgusting the whole setup is... we are fairly in sync as far as mutual hatred and disgust of these things goes, I believe. (the phrase "sexual market value" makes me want to vomit.)

Also keep saying things like "part of everything i fight against" and "I hate ___ and all the bullshit surrounding it with a fiery passion" because it makes you sound badass and it's a little bit inspiring. No sarcasm.

so why should you be scared of someone like me?

Because people are unpredictable balls of chaos and millions of unknown quantities all bundled up into something that might hug you or stab you or ignore you entirely and you have no way of knowing which until it happens?

Also because I might misstep and say something hurtful unintentionally, and even if someone doesn't respond beyond a polite correction, the massive panic-adrenaline spike through the heart isn't exactly pleasant. Which is more a fear of myself in relation to others.

and regardless of demographic there's always the possibility of just randomly being stabbed.

probability doesn't actually mean much to me in case you hadn't noticed.

edit: that said, it's probably a good idea to stay clear of social networks because yeah, dogpiling and shitty behaviour abound

No way to do that, i'm afraid, without facebook it'd be near-complete isolation. And i'm still holding out a little hope of trying to find a band (on stage with an instrument is one of the things I can manage, at least have in the past. stage fright is so far below the background radiation of my normal levels of anxiety that it means nothing, and if I'm up there playing something I've rehearsed, there's no uncertainty or fear to be had: I'm doing exactly what i'm supposed to do, no more, no less. what i am for. i mean, if i had to speak or sing though...) And that's pretty much not going to happen without online networking.
I do need to trim my followed list down though.

There are absolutely people who will say this.  And they aren't all feminists.

Oh, absolutely, not even most of them, I think. That may have gotten muddled, sorry if I implied otherwise. Everything's sorta wonky right now.

I mean I AM on drugs. (drugs which probably need to be adjusted.)

Frankly, I think in meatspace people are much less severe about these kinds of opinions,

Not in my observation/experience! But then the whole issue is lack of experience isn't it

Some of my best friends are/were (okay, this part is jokey) virgins!

Not sure I get the joke? Unless you're going for the "some of my best friends are black!" but that doesn't quite seem to fit...

Hell, my sister is much more experienced than I am, but most of the guys she's dated have been fairly inexperienced.  Same with most of my friends.

yay reinforcing examples. i cannot reflexively argue with real world examples.

Honestly, my one boyfriend who was experienced was...kind of shitty at sex stuff because he was lazy and didn't put too much effort into what *I* might want, well, ever.  

how... did he get so experienced? o.O One would expect a reputation to follow... Like a shadow, looming! A DARK CLOUUUUDDDD! *peal of thunder*

Why do I keep feeling the urge to do that?

What feminist spaces have you been to?  You may have just come across some more radical ones (or TERF-y ones) - not all feminist spaces are good.

I don't know anymore, I tried to put them out of my mind years ago and apparently succeeded in repressing everything but the actual damaging aspects of the memories. I'll see if I can dig them back up, if that's wanted. (I'd rather not.) I mean, other than random facebook/reddit stuff and random internet links and blogs. oh and captain awkward, where someone with similar issues to some of mine was absolutely eviscerated for asking for advice, but the type of things i've mentioned otherwise don't really seem to happen.

but that's basically what i'm assuming/saying this whole time is i've ended up in the wrong places. can someone give me good links?

Ironically (in the context of what you said, anyway) Emilie Autumn (last i heard) is usually described as radfem, and so naturally a lot of her fanbase as well, but I've had nothing but positive interactions at her shows... but that's, y'know, different combination of subcultural contexts, most of which i'm more familiar and comfortable with, and have a different dynamic. plus the whole atmosphere of nearly familial community and unity she's gone to great lengths to encourage among her fanbase. (we're all her 'plague rats' after all, explicitly regardless of gender. or muffins, or cupcakes, or on one occasion just 'baked goods'. Suspect she was drunk for that last one.)

Yup, Depakote is generally used for bipolar I/psychotic disorder.  Didn't know that it was used for seizures as well, but looks like it is!  But if you don't have any of those things (and even if you do!), it can go very very badly!  I've known some psychiatrists (particularly in hospitals, since I work with a lot of folks coming from them) who play fast and loose with their diagnoses.  They find one symptom that steers them in a direction, and they shoehorn everything else to fit into a specific, more easily defined diagnoses, and are very hesitant to take any new symptoms or information into account.  Hopefully you have one that you get to work with long term (and bonus if they also work with your therapist, because that really helps!).  

...I understand if this is not something you want to answer because identifiability, but otherwise, i'm curious: what do you do?

The 'working with the therapist' part seems like an utter impossibility. Every time I need test results or any tiny bit of data transferred between them I have to physically show up at each one's office, and a records building, all of which takes appointments and so... literal weeks, for any data to be shared unless It's something small enough that I can directly act as messenger between them by word of mouth. It still baffles me that I'm not allowed to have a copy of MY OWN medical records without them being faxed from the records building to the doctor in question, or make copies once I've obtained them that way to give to whatever doctor i need to...

Prajna covered DBT pretty thoroughly.  Mindfulness is also a big part, and works to help you focus on being in the moment.  It can be helpful for people who get anxiety, racing thoughts, or moods that go up and down quickly (as can the emotional regulation stuff).  It was initially used for suicidal folks who had Borderline  symptoms, but they found it was helpful for a lot of mood, anxiety, and PTSD symptoms as well. While a lot of talk therapy can be very past/future focused, DBT is much more present-focused.  

OK, my google-fu keeps failing me here. or my reading comprehension. what does mindfulness mean in this context? any definition i find is either vague to the point of meaninglessness or... new age-y to the point of contextual-non-applicability. or both.

As far as finding more comfortable spaces...what is the "right" kind of weird in your area?  What are some identities/groups that seem appealing?  I've definitely experienced this - I'm nerdy, but not a gamer or big on comics, so a lot of nerd-groups don't find me nerdy enough.  I like playing some sports, but not enough to fit most jock groups.  And, frankly, my style is a bit all over the place.  Sometimes it's nerdy or girly or vintage-y.  Sometimes it's black and white and others it's super colorful.  It can be fun to be a lot of different identities in one,m but it can make finding a "group" hard.

UGH, i don't even KNOW what the 'right' kind of weird is in most of this place. everything seems alien to some degree.

And... yeah my eclectic collection of tastes and knowledge bases is one of the things that I worry might alienate people sometimes, like, i don't really know anyone who's into early baroque music/classical music in general, and flamenco, and industrial dance, and 80s goth and deathrock, and various kinds of metal, and plays multiple musical instruments, and insists on fingerpicking everything up to and including death metal, like a weirdo, and has the knowledge i have of acoustics and violin bridge tuning and tuned circuit resonance and formal wear, and wears a suit and tie everwhere and... yeah. not likely to meet someone with all or most of that in common. i'm kind of a mess i guess. This all... probably limits my dating pool even more, doesn't it? like i said, potentially alienating. like just a lot of the fanbases of those musical styles... kinda seem to hate each other, the likelihood of overlap is... slim. I mean, not impossible, J-rock can sometimes combine ALL of those genres mentioned to a degree... (maybe not all at once but still) (actually probably all of them at once in some example somewhere all of those things are Big In Japan)
and some of the subcultural styles i'm into have been almost entirely pronounced dead.
ueghigjkfh.

there's a small group of more laid back fellow classical musicians that i've met recently that I seem to get along with alright so far. might be a path to eventual small concerts if i can get my repertoire up to standard and oh god something else i keep forgetting to work on.

there's another club with a goth night now. several nights, actually. just as far away as the other one.

Transportation is basically the limitation, there. and getting the willpower up to message people.

Also, I'd considered going for a PhD if I got a sword out of it!

http://www.helsinki.fi/filtdkpromootio2010/_Y5I6059.JPG

yesssssss.

there's a whole ceremonial thing to the hat and sword too, they have to be worn or carried or set on a table with the emblem facing a certain way or what have you depending on the event and it's all so deliciously overcomplicated. I love things like that for some reason.


alright. I probably fucked up somewhere in here and i'm probably going to have to apologize for it tomorrow. but i haven't caught it yet and am too tired to make ANOTHER 20 passes looking for it, so... i'll try to see if i can get to sleep through the unending chorus of "youfuckedupyoufuckedupyoufuckedupyoufuckedupyoufuckedup"

i will just leave everyone with this awesomeness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IP0YrMKZhkM

Also sorry my messages are borderline unreadable due to miscellaneous chaos at this point. Thank you for listening to my insane rambling. it'll be a while before i can get into psychiatrist again to get my drugs turned down/up/sideways/rotated along a fifth dimensional axis while being translated along a sixth dimensional line/ or whatever needs be. but i am trying harder to focus until then. it doesn't seem to be working.

aaand something possessed me to go back to captain awkward and now am reminded again of what a terrible person i am and what a horrible impact i clearly have on every woman i know.

thank you for being surreally patient with me even though i am scum.

ok i think my meds are wearing off now time to just hit send.

friend just made me remember one thing. seemingly a lot of people are vocally afraid i'm a rapist or at least a creeper... but people who've actually been victims of that tend to be oddly comfortable with me. i'd forgotten that particular anomaly since it hasn't come up in so long. maybe adds another dimension.

anyway. panic attack. drained. tired.

can't stop adding.

shut up and hit send damnit.

[Enail]

To ever actually be in a relationship it seems like I'd have to dedicate another 10 years of my life specifically to learning, specifically, the skill set of interacting with people in general, interacting with women in that specific way, and so on, just to be able to meet one person that i probably wouldn't be able to have a healthy relationship with because of my lack of experience. and 10 years from now i'll be even more behind everyone else in my age bracket in that way, and will have had to sacrifice other things to focus on this one thing specifically...

Nah, this isn't how people work. Yeah, there's some aspects of relationshipping and social interaction that are easier when you've got some of the other skills down, but it's not like a skill tree where you can't progress to this skill without that skill, or you can't date without reaching level 20 in friendshipping first. And since it's not a skill tree, you don't actually know what skills you might need to learn - maybe there's one or two key things that are giving you trouble, and once you get past those, you'll be able to pick up the rest as you go along. You don't have to have everything mastered to be able to be a good friend or date or partner.

And don't forget that the people you see as ahead of you are not necessarily constantly progressing in social skills at a consistent rate. I think many (or maybe even most) people learn a lot of social skills when they're a kid to young adult, and then don't really improve all that much after that. If they keep the same friend group for a long time, they might not be learning new friending skills, frex. Maybe they improve at a few things that their job or hobby pushes them to try that they're not too comfortable with, or maybe they get some practice trying to make smalltalk at some peoples' weddings, or they get to know someone who's got a flirty style of talking and get better at flirting by bantering with them, but for the most part, it's pretty likely they're not doing the same kind of intense learning that they might have done when they were teenagers.

Or the fact of being unable to write essays or do relatively basic math, which grays out college as a possibility as far as i can see unless i can get it recognized as a mental disability, but then money... and on that note "oh you can't work because you have panic attacks? bullshit you're completely able-bodied you can work just fine go get fired 20 more times for humiliating yourself in front of large numbers of customers by breaking down crying and unable to walk. no assistance for you, go, keep being a burden and not contributing to the bills or the cost of your healthcare."

So yeah I basically see the most likely outcome as me homeless and wandering and generally alone once my parents die, far as i can tell.

That's a scary thing to be envisioning. It does sound like maybe the essays and math stuff might be disability territory, so that's an avenue to look into if you want to give a go at college. There are also fields of study that don't depend much on math or essay-writing - music sounds like it would be a natural for you.

It sounds like the anxiety is a pretty significant barrier to working, and since you've been in treatment for a good while you should have a medical record to back you up on that, so hopefully you will be able to access social assistance if you need it. But you might also want to look into work options that would be more manageable for you. Again, your musical ability sounds like a significant specialized skill you could turn to money-making at some point; even if you're not able to do performance or teaching-type things at this point, maybe there's something more in the composition or analysis realm you could do. You might also explore work that doesn't have a customer service element, or even work that's done from home, freelance or otherwise.

There is truth here and it is frustrating on several levels partially due to a sort of cognitive dissonance... on one hand "men are expected to take up space and be big and loud and proud and MANLY" why no that's stupid i don't want to do that - but on the other hand, I also don't want anyone else being shamed if that's their actual personality, even if they make ME uncomfortable, because... well obvious reasons, I should think. but it's still annoying and intimidating and makes me uncomfortable. and then on the other hand (how many hands are we on now what species is this) i do want to be somewhat strong and resilient and defiant to the culture around me to a degree and those kind of go together and then more hands about arbitrary constructed expectations of gender and eughriudhgkfhg.

There's ways of being strong and resilient that aren't loud-and-proud and/or MANLY. It can be tough to find role models, both because our culture doesn't always recognize those kinds of strength and because it's just quieter and less obvious, but they're out there!

Like, there's no way to work on that and improve because it's impossible to DIAGNOSE what precisely the problem even IS at point 1 what tiny subtlety there is in what i'm doing and how that causes things like that so often without being just... observed, and a therapist isn't going to be willing to do that, i'm not sure WHO would be both qualified and willing.

Have you ever tried group therapy of any sort? I don't think they're very likely to involve just observing and telling you about the subtleties of your body language or anything, but it seems like that can be an environment that's social, and possibly even about working on social skills, but in a way that's a bit guided and supported and less likely to allow the kinds of upsetting reactions you've experienced? I realize it'd probably be a pretty high-anxiety thing for you to do, but maybe worth looking into?

Yeah, you're encountering a shitty stereotype that's very common and rarely called out, which doesn't make it true or fair. It can be severely uncomfortable to watch everyone around you perpetuate that kind of message, and have no one stand up to it because it's still a socially acceptable prejudice. (Not least because, like Prajna and jcorozza said, the most vocal and visible members of the older-male-virgin crew are just walking incel-MRA-MGTOW disasters.) But YEP:

I'm not really sure how it would go if I just replied to someone using virgin as an insult towards nazis or whatever with "c'mon, that's just an insult to virgins, what have I ever done to you? I want these assholes to shut up* just as much as you do..." or something.

Probably inbox flooded with rage from both sides.

This sounds like an awesome response to me! I'm sure it takes a lot of courage, but I've found that that kind of lighthearted "hey, that's me you're talking about" works well for similar kinds of stereotyping.

And mainly believing I'm a less valuable person comes from, as I alluded to before, according to most of what I'd heard of contemporary opinions on ethics, and utilitarianism more specifically*, and even more specifically people like Peter Singer, me... being technically a less valuable person, not being able to work and help out with bills let alone exist independently. Which would apparently mean I should die, because I don't have discernible potential to cause much of anything but unhappiness, from what can be seen. And if that's the majority thought, that's kind of hard to deal with, the idea of the majority of society wanting me dead, regardless of if i manage to not internalize it.

But maybe it's not the majority? I don't know. I don't have actual numbers (and there's not really a reliable way to get them, of course.)

I have so much rage and hatred for this kind of belief. I'm sorry that you're in a place where that kind of thinking is so loud and has so much power, whether it's the majority or not, but maybe it'd help to remember that the US is a bit of an outlier in how strong and prevalent that mindset is? Pretty much every other wealthy country with the infrastructure to support it believes that everyone should have access to healthcare, whether they make money or not, or live independently or not, which I think is a reasonably good indicator that the majority probably doesn't believe in that kind of utilitarianism?

And i'm not sure why I have difficulty with facial expressions/body language and discerning whether someone's open to something or not if I'm not autistic in the least, and so the only explanation I can come up with is secret sociopath, and then i keep seeing people directly reinforce that. ("if you actually CARED about her feelings/saw her as a HUMAN BEING this wouldn't be hard for you" and it's like, well, i thought i did. i thought i'd been trying my hardest there.)

They say many sociopaths are actually pretty skilled at social interaction and non-verbal communication, so I don't think that makes much sense to conclude. And anyway, even if you were a secret sociopath, which I don't think is the case, the fact that you work hard to try not to cause harm to other people says much more about whether you are a good person than your capacity for empathy does. People can be extremely empathetic and still be cruel or hurtful, the reverse is also true.

But.. some of this gives me something to go off of to explain some of the things I've actually been referring to... Some of you seem to think I've been going into feminist spaces and doing the "but MEN!" thing, or asking 101 questions, or whatnot, but... no. Part of the fear is observing the reaction to (seemingly?) good-faith 101 questions, but there's also the whole thing of watching giant schisms happen and feminists who disagree on a particular issue accusing each other of not being feminists, actually having been secret MRAs the whole time, secretly being neckbearded trilby-wearing men living in their mother's basements, or bronies or whatever other stereotype (what's wrong with bronies? why is that an insult? My friends have made me watch a few episodes and in those there were like... two male characters who even had lines, it seems weird it would become synonymous with hating women. More like the exact kind of thing mras tend to whine about.) and otherwise being there to undermine feminism as a whole, or different groups threatening violence against each other and accusing each other of being tools of the patriarchy in some way or something, or things like groups or individuals that think prostitution should be legal immediately being accused of being okay with child sex slaves as if that's a natural extrapolation at all.

I want to more actively be an ally but even before you get to my natural anxiety it's a bit frightening if i keep getting the impression that even the main core seems so prone to hatred and violence and borderline-mccarthyist paranoia against EACHOTHER, So i'm not sure how i keep ending up in this corner of it, but I'd like to... y'know... not. It seems like it's becoming more widespread since trump elected, i'm seeing it on facebook and among just people in my immediate area more and more, everyone is just so damned angry and i understand why and they should be (maybe not at each other though? maybe more at the literal nazis walking around in broad daylight waving third reich flags without shame, that seems like a good target.) but i also cannot deal with it i do not have the strength. not right now. I want to show up at protests and things but i can't handle feeling afraid of altogether: the opponents, the police, and the side i'm actually ON. i'm just too weak. right now at least.

I've noticed this tendency as well, and I can definitely see why you'd be scared of it. There are spaces where I'd be a little scared to talk politics with people who are ostentably on "my side" too.  But I don't think it's the majority of people or of feminists or of the left in general, it's just the louder, more extreme people reinforcing each other and making it hard for other people to have nuanced conversations and thoughtful disagreements (plus the fact that some spaces/discussions are more for in-group venting or for people who agree on a given premise than for thoughtful disagreement). There are lots of pockets that aren't like that.

Ironically (in the context of what you said, anyway) Emilie Autumn (last i heard) is usually described as radfem, and so naturally a lot of her fanbase as well, but I've had nothing but positive interactions at her shows... but that's, y'know, different combination of subcultural contexts, most of which i'm more familiar and comfortable with, and have a different dynamic. plus the whole atmosphere of nearly familial community and unity she's gone to great lengths to encourage among her fanbase. (we're all her 'plague rats' after all, explicitly regardless of gender. or muffins, or cupcakes, or on one occasion just 'baked goods'. Suspect she was drunk for that last one.)

Oh, interesting. Can I ask how you feel about her song "Fight Like a Girl"? It seems like exactly the kind of "feminist rage" that you find so distressing, no?

And... yeah my eclectic collection of tastes and knowledge bases is one of the things that I worry might alienate people sometimes, like, i don't really know anyone who's into early baroque music/classical music in general, and flamenco, and industrial dance, and 80s goth and deathrock, and various kinds of metal, and plays multiple musical instruments, and insists on fingerpicking everything up to and including death metal, like a weirdo, and has the knowledge i have of acoustics and violin bridge tuning and tuned circuit resonance and formal wear, and wears a suit and tie everwhere and... yeah. not likely to meet someone with all or most of that in common. i'm kind of a mess i guess. This all... probably limits my dating pool even more, doesn't it? like i said, potentially alienating. like just a lot of the fanbases of those musical styles... kinda seem to hate each other, the likelihood of overlap is... slim. I mean, not impossible, J-rock can sometimes combine ALL of those genres mentioned to a degree... (maybe not all at once but still) (actually probably all of them at once in some example somewhere all of those things are Big In Japan)
and some of the subcultural styles i'm into have been almost entirely pronounced dead.
ueghigjkfh.

This sounds completely awesome! Not having a distinct grouping makes them harder to find, but that could definitely appeal to other eclectic people!

[Prajnaparamita]

Atlach, really? You’re going to bring Peter Singer into this? Peter Fucking Singer? Oooooh no boy, no you don’t. You don’t bring my philosophical husbando into your jerkbrain narrative, nope nuh-uh not at all.

I want you to read the first chapter of Practical Ethics. Right now. You know the one, the one where Singer makes the argument for why prestigious university professors and janitors should be paid the same exact amount of salary and given the same level of respect? (For those of you who haven’t read it, basically its that we aren’t paying people for their merit or intelligence or hard work, we’re paying people for the circumstances of their birth, their families and the opportunities, or lack thereof, that they were set up with in life. i.e. all factors beyond their control, that they personally had no influence over) You know, if you didn’t know any better, you’d think he was advancing the idea of a socialist state, where all are considered equal, recognized not by the abilities they had from birth, or the privilege of their background, but their intrinsic nature as a fellow sentient being deserving of moral consideration. (Which, you know, makes sense because he was a Marx scholar before he got into ethics.)

Listen, you can have jerkbrain thoughts about how your life is worthless and you bring nothing but badness and you’re better off not existing, blah blah blah… I’m not going to dispute that you have those, and they feel very real for you. But damn dude, don’t slander utilitarianism’s good name (okay, crappy name, but that’s mostly because its wildly misunderstood) in an attempt to justify your depressive thinking. I won’t allow it. If you keep it up I’ll like, aggressively eat tofu at you while canvassing on the right to access physician assisted suicide and holding complex thoughts about infanticide and the inherently flawed existence of nation-states.

Will respond to the rest of this later. The former philosophy major just couldn’t let that one go lol

[Enail]

If you keep it up I’ll like, aggressively eat tofu at you while canvassing on the right to access physician assisted suicide and holding complex thoughts about infanticide and the inherently flawed existence of nation-states.

[Werel]

Nah, this isn't how people work. Yeah, there's some aspects of relationshipping and social interaction that are easier when you've got some of the other skills down, but it's not like a skill tree where you can't progress to this skill without that skill, or you can't date without reaching level 20 in friendshipping first.

YES! Please reread this 20 times and absorb it (the xp generated will get you to level 2 in the socialization skill tree )

It sounds like the anxiety is a pretty significant barrier to working, and since you've been in treatment for a good while you should have a medical record to back you up on that, so hopefully you will be able to access social assistance if you need it.

Yep, I know a dude in your part of Texas who has anxiety which, impressionistically through the internet, is not nearly as bad as yours, and he's been on disability for it for like a decade. So that's an option, if you can afford the diagnostic visits and paperwork. Having a little bit of independent income that way might free you up to do some training or professional development that would open paths to work-at-home or freelance jobs, or less public-facing work, if that's what sets off your anxiety most.

This is a redundant construction, it should in all cases be shortened to "Texas", or "That shithole with the stupid hats". Elements of style will back me up on this. (it will probably not.) (please do not take offense if you are reading this and are a person who wears and enjoys cowboy hats, they are perfectly fine weapons against the vile rays of the sun, i am being hyperbolic due to my intense feelings of cultural alienation.) Though If you're talking about Austin or something I guess this doesn't apply, but we're not, here.

Just some sympathy fistbumps here. I spent three months living in smalltown Texas recently, and while there are people and things there which I love, the cultural atmosphere was suffocating even to someone who's from another part of the south. I usually go crazy if I stay in the house all day, but I found myself holing up and dreading even going to the store or the gas station because... it's hard to put a finger on, but I know what you mean. Like a low-burn background radiation that makes me uneasy. There are other weirdos suffocating there, but I know how tough it is to find them, because they tend to hole up too. That's a rough kind of alienation, sorry it's not feasible for you to get out of there at the moment.

but if my body language manifests my anxiety in a way that makes people fear for their safety, wouldn't that count as something inherently wrong or disgusting with me?

Nope. Counts as a disadvantage you have. It's not "inherently wrong" to have a handicap (in the golf-game sense, not the disability sense), just unlucky.

Body language is unfortunately one of those things it's basically impossible to help with via text. IME you can learn more about someone from ten seconds of visual data of them walking and talking than most other things; there could be any number of things going on with your physical presentation that might make people antsy for reasons they might have trouble verbalizing. The suggestion that group therapy might provide a supportive venue for feedback on how you physically move through the world is a good one.

I'm not really sure how it would go if I just replied to someone using virgin as an insult towards nazis or whatever with "c'mon, that's just an insult to virgins, what have I ever done to you? I want these assholes to shut up* just as much as you do..." or something.

I agree, that sounds like a pretty spot-on response to that, if you were willing to risk some jerk being a jerk at you about it. EXACTLY what Enail said: "hey, that's me/my spouse/my best friend/my mom/my mentor/my son you're talking about" can go a long way towards gently shutting down hateful stereotypes without having to get aggro about it. Humanize that shit.

But maybe it's not the majority? I don't know.

Yeah no bro I'll let Prajna handle that one but a) you're misconstruing utilitarianism and b) FUCK NO that's not the majority. Both in a good way (like Enail said, most developed countries aren't so stupidly bootstraps-plutocratic) and in a bad way (beef every meal ain't utilitarian).

2. seemingly every approach/ask for number/ask on date/sometimes-so-much-as-hello interaction ending with the woman in question creeped the fuck out to the point of everyone she KNOWS shunning me, and me not being able to... not do that to people.

Not to call your experiences into question, but how many times has this actually happened? It seems a lot of dudes carry this narrative of ask girl on date -> endless public shaming and ostracism, but... it just seems difficult to imagine. I was the president of a tabletop roleplaying club in college, dude. I've had to be the diplomatic face of "That Guy is making all the girls feel weird and he needs to go" a number of times. But it was never because That Guy asked them out, or tried to socialize with them in any regular way. It was for crazy shit, like unwanted and excessive touching of women's hair, or hanging out outside their dorm room uninvited. So... I dunno, maybe my experiences are totally unlike yours, but how often has a respectful social interaction actually led to "everyone a woman knows" shunning you? How much of it is "I was never friends with these people, none of them really knew me or had any reason to talk to me, and we never had interactions after or before I talked to this lady"?

I'm honestly not completely sure whether to read this as: "you're worrying too much it's alright calm down" or... "you're worrying about this because you have a guilty conscience and actually are a terrible person but I don't think telling you that would be productive to you eventually not being that/am too nice to say that." i mean, i'm guessing (hoping?) the first one? right?

Whoa, jeez, you've got a heck of a jerkbrain there, I can't even find a way to read that statement to mean the latter thing. Yes, of course I meant the first one.

I really hate not being in a position to help anyone else in kind, though.

doesn't feel quite right.

but i also cannot deal with it i do not have the strength. not right now. I want to show up at protests and things but i can't handle feeling afraid of altogether: the opponents, the police, and the side i'm actually ON. i'm just too weak. right now at least.

Reminder:

And... yeah my eclectic collection of tastes and knowledge bases is one of the things that I worry might alienate people sometimes

You may be selling yourself short by looking for people whose tastes overlap really closely with yours -- you're not likely to ever find anybody who is into exactly the same assortment of stuff as you, but you can definitely find people who share the underlying values and tastes (or some of them, at least). If you like flamenco and early baroque because it's technically intricate, you can look for people who appreciate technical intricacy in music. If you like 80s goth for the spooky romantic cyberdespair aesthetic, you can find people who have that same general aesthetic but express it differently. The impulse to limit yourself to the exact same subculture(s) is a thing that makes perfect sense when you're coming from a place that shares none of your cultural leanings, but even in big weirdo cities you're unlikely to find anybody who's into exactly the same shit -- the more important thing is finding people who share your style of appreciating things, and who respect your tastes even if they don't exactly share them. Classical musicians sound like a good place to start (not least because there's huuuuuge overlap between classical dudes and metal dudes)!

[AtlachNacha]

Atlach, really? You’re going to bring Peter Singer into this? Peter Fucking Singer? Oooooh no boy, no you don’t. You don’t bring my philosophical husbando into your jerkbrain narrative, nope nuh-uh not at all.

I want you to read the first chapter of Practical Ethics. Right now. You know the one, the one where Singer makes the argument for why prestigious university professors and janitors should be paid the same exact amount of salary and given the same level of respect? (For those of you who haven’t read it, basically its that we aren’t paying people for their merit or intelligence or hard work, we’re paying people for the circumstances of their birth, their families and the opportunities, or lack thereof, that they were set up with in life. i.e. all factors beyond their control, that they personally had no influence over) You know, if you didn’t know any better, you’d think he was advancing the idea of a socialist state, where all are considered equal, recognized not by the abilities they had from birth, or the privilege of their background, but their intrinsic nature as a fellow sentient being deserving of moral consideration. (Which, you know, makes sense because he was a Marx scholar before he got into ethics.)

Listen, you can have jerkbrain thoughts about how your life is worthless and you bring nothing but badness and you’re better off not existing, blah blah blah… I’m not going to dispute that you have those, and they feel very real for you. But damn dude, don’t slander utilitarianism’s good name (okay, crappy name, but that’s mostly because its wildly misunderstood) in an attempt to justify your depressive thinking. I won’t allow it. If you keep it up I’ll like, aggressively eat tofu at you while canvassing on the right to access physician assisted suicide and holding complex thoughts about infanticide and the inherently flawed existence of nation-states.

Will respond to the rest of this later. The former philosophy major just couldn’t let that one go lol

okayoky listen i'm goign to reply to this first so i can possibly avoid an angryier responselater but i can't really type straighy when i've gott fear-adrenalleine going so it might not lbelegible

no i don't kow the one all i know about singer is

all i'v'e read is that he supports infanticide and euthanasia in particular of disabled children andi googled that quick to confirm it when i read about it and saw quotes about that sort of thing regarding disability and the child being a drain on the parents or something and disabled people protesting and calling for his resignation alll i really know beyond that is people talking about the interpretation of utilitatarianism i've been referring to mention him i haven't actually read his books just quotes which i now realise were probably cherry-picked ok so please i'm sorry if i failed my critical-thinking/research/philosophical knowledge rolls i wasn't trying to slander anything

and i wasn't tryingt o justify my depressive thinking i was talking about things i'd read or heard said that had an effect on me

yes i know it's incredibly stupid to just go by what i'd heard withotu reading into more detail than a quick google search

also hey, here's the thing i fucked up and had to apologize for i wasn't just being irrationally fearful it was there all along

[jcorozza]

Not sure I get the joke? Unless you're going for the "some of my best friends are black!" but that doesn't quite seem to fit...

The joke part was the "were virgins"...because we all were, at one point! Not to mention, not everyone agrees on what constitutes losing one's virginity, anyway.

but that's basically what i'm assuming/saying this whole time is i've ended up in the wrong places. can someone give me good links?

Reallllllly depends what it is you're looking for. I mean, generally stay away from Tumblr, but are you looking for sites that are about feminism/theory, or just that have feminist audiences? While you may have been asking good-faith questions, or observing them, it's possible that responses got filtered through your jerkbrain, and seemed more harsh than they were. Granted, some feminists are just crappy people, or can knee jerk to good-faith questions due to dealing with *so many* bad faith ones (feminist sites seem to be rampant with trolls for whatever definition of troll you use). I get the impression that in day to day life, you have interpreted some neutral or mildly critical responses from those around you as significantly more negative than the were, and I wouldn't be surprised if this would be true online as well.

...I understand if this is not something you want to answer because identifiability, but otherwise, i'm curious: what do you do?

The 'working with the therapist' part seems like an utter impossibility. Every time I need test results or any tiny bit of data transferred between them I have to physically show up at each one's office, and a records building, all of which takes appointments and so... literal weeks, for any data to be shared unless It's something small enough that I can directly act as messenger between them by word of mouth. It still baffles me that I'm not allowed to have a copy of MY OWN medical records without them being faxed from the records building to the doctor in question, or make copies once I've obtained them that way to give to whatever doctor i need to...

I do intakes for a partial care program, and a lot of our clients ("consumers", we're supposed to all them, but I hate that) come straight from hospitals. Perhaps they just take really bad notes, but I'll see paperwork all the time from them with like, one symptom, and they they base a diagnosis off it. I also worked in residential mental healthcare, where I used to visit some of our folks in the hospital as well. They were often known to load people up with medication so that they were "stable enough" and then send them out.

A lot of places have an in-house psychiatrist where there are therapists - it definitely makes things easier. That is super annoying about the medical records - I don't know why they wouldn't let you have your own, or be doing the legwork to transfer it, not making you do it? That seems silly.

OK, my google-fu keeps failing me here. or my reading comprehension. what does mindfulness mean in this context? any definition i find is either vague to the point of meaninglessness or... new age-y to the point of contextual-non-applicability. or both.

I haven't done a ton of mindfullness myself. Some of it is like meditation, or deep breathing exercises. My therapist sent me this one (I haven't gotten around to watching it, because I personally don't like deep breathing/meditation much from what I've tried, but she highly recommended it)

A lot of it has to do with experiencing all your senses in the moment. A popular mindfulness exercise is eating a raisin or M&M and then thinking about the taste, touch, smell, sound, etc. that you are experiencing as it happens.

I also second Enail's advice regarding group therapy. You basically have a captive audience of people who are there to give you feedback about how they perceive you. They are also generally not as biased as friends/family can be.

And... yeah my eclectic collection of tastes and knowledge bases is one of the things that I worry might alienate people sometimes

Sometimes you have to pick just a main interest, or the one that fits your personality best, and hang out with those types. I like a lot of things - writing/reading, board games, animals, jewelry-making, volleyball, sewing, reading about political issues...but I will never find a group that likes all of those. I haven't found most sporty/crafty groups to be quite my people, but I made a lot of friends at my board game meetup. For whatever reason, that was a good fit for me.

[jcorozza]

Sorry, I just have to add that your response right above mine to Prajna is pretty telling. From her joke at the end about eating tofu, etc., it reads to me that she is not genuinely mad at you and isn't saying that you "fucked up". She's trying to point out where your interpretation of something was clouded by your jerkbrain, but also kept it playful.

[Enail]

Atlach, it's okay! Whether it's that the stuff you've been reading isn't doing Singer's opinions justice or whether they or you disagree with Prajna on interpretations (I haven't read him or anything about him, so I can't comment ), it's not a disaster! She'll read what you said and explain why she disagrees with that view and you'll think about what she said and either come to see her point or you'll continue to disagree, and then the conversation will move on and you'll continue treating each other in a reasonable manner. At worst, she might eat tofu at you  

This is okay, and this does not sound like a conversation that's going to get scarily heated to me (and that's something I pay attention to, being a mod and all). When you're feeling a little less adrenaline-y, maybe give her post a reread; can you see her tone is pretty lighthearted rather than angry?

[Werel]

Yeah, not to dogpile (but dogpiling on "hey chill out it's fine" seems positive, actually), but that was clearly a playful-faux-chiding post, not a "grr I'm angry" post, at least how I read it! And yep, mods have their gotmad-spideysenses on high alert at all times, so we would notice if you were actually pissing people off.

It's okay! People can say "no I disagree" to something you say, and that is totally fine and doesn't mean you're in trouble! It might be helpful to remind yourself of that fact when your jerkbrain starts seeing innocuous interactions as conflict.

[AtlachNacha]

UGh no it just keeps getting worse this is one of the ways I drive people off not being able to take a joke and then panicking about panicking in a recursive feedback loop no no no.

Ok. I'm sorry for the overreaction, Prajna. Just the phrasing sounded harsher than it was meant, apparently? Even with the tofu comment.

I seem to have difficulty with that kind of aggressively phrased humor.

I... Think I did a better job reigning in the panic a little bit on this one? Slightly better? It didn't degenerate into all caps at least.

Also not doing the research IS a fuck-up though, c'mon.

I am going to go pace until the adrenaline stops burning. Will reply to other things... later.

[Enail]

Much more reigned-in! I hope you feel less panicked soon.

[Prajnaparamita]

Uhhh, yeah, okay. Not that anyone really cares, because this is about as far out as it goes from the actual topic of this thread, but Peter Singer's opinion on infanticide is that it is morally permissible in some, very limited cases, specifically anencephalic fetuses. (Anacephaly is a rare condition when the brain and a whole bunch of the head doesn't form, only the brain stem, and generally, the infant will either be stillborn or only live a few days or weeks at most. Don't google it if you can, there's some pretty horrific images of what it looks like.) Basically what he's saying is that there are these very specific cases where we would be willing to support painlessly ending an infant's life when they have no chance of survival and ending their suffering there, and it happens already, around the globe in these cases of infants born permanently brain dead. And given that it happens, we need to discuss it, have open guidelines on where and when we're willing to end life, based on ethical principles and thought out reasoning, not just the opinion of whoever is shouting loudest in the room. Now a lot of disability rights activists are super pissed about this, because in their opinion whether or not infanticide is ever justifiable is something that should never be up for discussion, ever, and its a slippery slope talking about it at all to mass acceptance of rounding up adult disabled people and sending them to concentration camps and all that. (Peter Singer gets called a Nazi. A lot. Which is funny because he's actually Jewish, and his grandfather died in the camps, but whatever.)

Anyway, I wouldn't bring up this segue into utilitarian perspectives on medical ethics, except the fact that Singer actually relates in an interesting way to your fear of internet harassment campaigns. Singer is wildly hated by people who have never read a word of his works because there's been a massive smear campaign by those who are opposed to him even trying to have conversations on controversial topics who have cherry picked and misquoted him to an insane extent. In fact, one of my philosophy professors, who collaborated with him on some papers, described him as the philosopher most likely to be murdered or gunned down. (He has been physically attacked when giving talks before.)

And yet. His works still reach millions, he still inspires people to look critically at the ethics we've been given without question, to recognize the needs of all sentient beings and give equal consideration to their suffering, to make changes in their lives like going vegan or deciding that they'd rather spend their income on life-saving charitable programs rather than luxury items, to advance public policy around dignity and choice in cases of terminal illness, to create governments that recognize us all as citizens of the world. Atlach, we are not defined by those who hate us the most and what they say, we are more than what others might slander us with. And for fuck's sake, read the first chapter of Practical Ethics. You can get the second addition pretty cheap from basically any used book store, and as an added bonus, it has my husbando on the cover with a full on Jewfro and giant pornstache (this was the eighties, yo!) solemnly gazing out over the New York skyline. Its pretty epic.

[AtlachNacha]

Nah, this isn't how people work. Yeah, there's some aspects of relationshipping and social interaction that are easier when you've got some of the other skills down, but it's not like a skill tree where you can't progress to this skill without that skill, or you can't date without reaching level 20 in friendshipping first. And since it's not a skill tree, you don't actually know what skills you might need to learn - maybe there's one or two key things that are giving you trouble, and once you get past those, you'll be able to pick up the rest as you go along. You don't have to have everything mastered to be able to be a good friend or date or partner.

And don't forget that the people you see as ahead of you are not necessarily constantly progressing in social skills at a consistent rate. I think many (or maybe even most) people learn a lot of social skills when they're a kid to young adult, and then don't really improve all that much after that. If they keep the same friend group for a long time, they might not be learning new friending skills, frex. Maybe they improve at a few things that their job or hobby pushes them to try that they're not too comfortable with, or maybe they get some practice trying to make smalltalk at some peoples' weddings, or they get to know someone who's got a flirty style of talking and get better at flirting by bantering with them, but for the most part, it's pretty likely they're not doing the same kind of intense learning that they might have done when they were teenagers.

I need to at least be capable of empathy. which i am not. i need to be able to read people's facial expressions and body language to know whether or not it is okay to approach them/talk to them/flirt with them/etc.and be able to manage my own body language and facial expressions to the point that I don't cause people to literally flee my presence. i cannot. these are things i was supposed to learn at highschool age. i did not. i have tried to improve them. i cannot.

there is no way for me being in a relationship to happen, nor should it happen; for this reason and others. i don't know why i thought it would be a good idea.

That's a scary thing to be envisioning. It does sound like maybe the essays and math stuff might be disability territory, so that's an avenue to look into if you want to give a go at college. There are also fields of study that don't depend much on math or essay-writing - music sounds like it would be a natural for you.

It sounds like the anxiety is a pretty significant barrier to working, and since you've been in treatment for a good while you should have a medical record to back you up on that, so hopefully you will be able to access social assistance if you need it. But you might also want to look into work options that would be more manageable for you. Again, your musical ability sounds like a significant specialized skill you could turn to money-making at some point; even if you're not able to do performance or teaching-type things at this point, maybe there's something more in the composition or analysis realm you could do. You might also explore work that doesn't have a customer service element, or even work that's done from home, freelance or otherwise.  

It was explained to me by the doctorss that did my neuropsych eval that i do not qualify for any kind of assistance. (and also the math thing is 100% confirmed disability, paperwork confirming it.) one example was provided of another person with schizophrenia so severe they could not function or survive without constantly being tended to by someone, because they were experiencing more hallucination and delusion than reality. they did not qualify for anything. I have checked the criteria. I do not qualify. they seemed to find the idea that i would qualify frustratingly absurd.

the market for guitar teachers is fairly saturated. I have yet to finish a single composition. I have no idea what you mean by analysis, even though i probably should.

I absolutely am able to perform, I just rarely have the opportunity because... finding a band to play with requires socialization, and open mic nights require transportation.

if anyone could give specific examples of work that could be done in isolation, without a college education, without directly interacting with customers, where i wouldn't get fired for not being able to stand occasionally, that would be helpful. that sounds like an absurd list of criteria though.

Have you ever tried group therapy of any sort? I don't think they're very likely to involve just observing and telling you about the subtleties of your body language or anything, but it seems like that can be an environment that's social, and possibly even about working on social skills, but in a way that's a bit guided and supported and less likely to allow the kinds of upsetting reactions you've experienced? I realize it'd probably be a pretty high-anxiety thing for you to do, but maybe worth looking into?

this is a good idea. this was suggested by the analyst also. the problem is, as usual: accepting new clients? takes insurance? takes MY insurance? otherwise affordable? actually relevant to my issues? accepts my age bracket/other demographic criteria? isn't a christian yoga porn addiction/pray the gay away support group? (seriously these are disturbingly common)

*sigh* took a while to find my current therapist, will find one of these eventually.

This sounds like an awesome response to me! I'm sure it takes a lot of courage, but I've found that that kind of lighthearted "hey, that's me you're talking about" works well for similar kinds of stereotyping.

maybe a throwaway reddit account with a disposable email and try it out. see what happens.

I have so much rage and hatred for this kind of belief. I'm sorry that you're in a place where that kind of thinking is so loud and has so much power, whether it's the majority or not, but maybe it'd help to remember that the US is a bit of an outlier in how strong and prevalent that mindset is? Pretty much every other wealthy country with the infrastructure to support it believes that everyone should have access to healthcare, whether they make money or not, or live independently or not, which I think is a reasonably good indicator that the majority probably doesn't believe in that kind of utilitarianism?

Majority in this country or just this state seem to. i also hear europeans complaining about it and being annoyed about their taxes going to support people who aren't worth it or whatever. no escaping it.

They say many sociopaths are actually pretty skilled at social interaction and non-verbal communication, so I don't think that makes much sense to conclude. And anyway, even if you were a secret sociopath, which I don't think is the case, the fact that you work hard to try not to cause harm to other people says much more about whether you are a good person than your capacity for empathy does. People can be extremely empathetic and still be cruel or hurtful, the reverse is also true.  

yeah. apd doesn't fit. narcissism might. either way i'm a monster who causes emotional harm to people just by being in their lives/present in public, so what does the exact diagnosis matter

I've noticed this tendency as well, and I can definitely see why you'd be scared of it. There are spaces where I'd be a little scared to talk politics with people who are ostentably on "my side" too.  But I don't think it's the majority of people or of feminists or of the left in general, it's just the louder, more extreme people reinforcing each other and making it hard for other people to have nuanced conversations and thoughtful disagreements (plus the fact that some spaces/discussions are more for in-group venting or for people who agree on a given premise than for thoughtful disagreement). There are lots of pockets that aren't like that.

it's good to know i'm not completely imagining things...

as for pockets that aren't like that... links?

Oh, interesting. Can I ask how you feel about her song "Fight Like a Girl"? It seems like exactly the kind of "feminist rage" that you find so distressing, no?

...not really? the "revenge on the world or at least 49% of the people in it" is clearly hyperbolic, (as far as implying "all men everywhere") especially when taken with the later "even if you're only a boy you can fight like a girl", it's pretty clearly just a more lyrically interesting way of saying 'men', with the hyperbole adding a bit of extra emotional force to it.

aside from which she's talking about a violent uprising in reaction to... oppression, rape, abuse, and general horrible shit, and the way those are perpetuated and exacerbated by society as a whole, and generally people being made to suffer and die horribly and unnecessarily... whereas the thing i find distressing is death threats or accusations of being a rape apologist and misogynist in response to disagreements over whether an episode of a tv show is an example of rape culture, or more seriously whether prostitution should be legalized or pornography banned, which are complex topics with multiple facets that people are going to disagree on without it necessarily being because they are secret mras who hate all women everywhere.

one of these things is an entirely understandable and predictable response (if someone is literally trying to harm or kill you or other people in your group the inclination to try to harm or kill them right back is not unreasonable). The other is not predictable, and i, at least, do not fully understand it, beyond the person maaaybe having some prior trauma that makes them quick to anger on the subject? (if someone disagrees with your political/philosophical opinion the inclination to threaten to kill them... seems rather unreasonable, in most cases?)

so not even close to the kind of thing i find distressing. that song is sometimes a bit comforting, in fact, in a "i'm not the only one this burn-it-all-down angry about shit" kind of way. though my anger tends to be more specifically towards police issues - both brutality/militarization and their treatment of victims. a 15 year old girl should not, after going through something horrible and traumatizing, under any fucking circumstances then be told that she 'clearly wanted it'. there's no conceivable mental gymnastic justification. 15. but no, then they told her she was making it up and stood in the corner making fun of her. just. what the fuck is it with this place? and then the shit they pulled with my ex... and my friends wonder why i get so angry about police bullshit... just.. never come to texas. it's a fucking evil place.

Tangent. sorry. the point is... it's the (seemingly?) disproportionate, unpredictable anger that i find frightening, or otherwise the things i fear i might slip up and accidentally provoke. neither of which are represented in that song.

This sounds completely awesome! Not having a distinct grouping makes them harder to find, but that could definitely appeal to other eclectic people!

If I could find any, or rather, get to them. transportation again. which costs money.

Wait what sounds completely awesome?

YES! Please reread this 20 times and absorb it (the xp generated will get you to level 2 in the socialization skill tree )

wait, why did nobody tell me xp farming forum posts was a viable strategy before, this changes everything, i hope they don't patch this

Yep, I know a dude in your part of Texas who has anxiety which, impressionistically through the internet, is not nearly as bad as yours, and he's been on disability for it for like a decade. So that's an option, if you can afford the diagnostic visits and paperwork.

...what. how? i've HAD the diagnostic visits and have paperwork with little bar graphs and data on every aspect of my personality and all my diagnoses and... well, see above, the doctors that did all that told me i couldn't get disability.

Just some sympathy fistbumps here. I spent three months living in smalltown Texas recently, and while there are people and things there which I love, the cultural atmosphere was suffocating even to someone who's from another part of the south. I usually go crazy if I stay in the house all day, but I found myself holing up and dreading even going to the store or the gas station because... it's hard to put a finger on, but I know what you mean. Like a low-burn background radiation that makes me uneasy. There are other weirdos suffocating there, but I know how tough it is to find them, because they tend to hole up too. That's a rough kind of alienation, sorry it's not feasible for you to get out of there at the moment.

I think what you're describing sounds less like the cultural atmosphere and more like the actual literal atmosphere. this fucking heat and humidity...

but seriously, yeah, there's this thin veneer of super-friendliness and actual culture and it's bullshit. the whole place is bullshit. Except for Austin, apparently. fucking RAZORCANDI lives in Austin now, I have no idea what possessed her to make that move - why a goth would move from actual honest to god transylvania to texas.

Nope. Counts as a disadvantage you have. It's not "inherently wrong" to have a handicap (in the golf-game sense, not the disability sense), just unlucky.

no. impacts other people negatively more than it does me. not acceptable. should have dealt with it by now. haven't made progress. not acceptable. not a handicap in the golf-game sense.

only accurate golf comparison i can see is repeatedly accidentally running into people with the cart/accidentally hitting people in the head with the club.

IME you can learn more about someone from ten seconds of visual data of them walking and talking than most other things; there could be any number of things going on with your physical presentation that might make people antsy for reasons they might have trouble verbalizing.

they have no trouble verbalizing it at all. what they learn in those ten seconds is that i am a monster.

stupidly bootstraps-plutocratic

I like this turn of phrase.

Not to call your experiences into question, but how many times has this actually happened? It seems a lot of dudes carry this narrative of ask girl on date -> endless public shaming and ostracism, but... it just seems difficult to imagine. I was the president of a tabletop roleplaying club in college, dude. I've had to be the diplomatic face of "That Guy is making all the girls feel weird and he needs to go" a number of times. But it was never because That Guy asked them out, or tried to socialize with them in any regular way. It was for crazy shit, like unwanted and excessive touching of women's hair, or hanging out outside their dorm room uninvited. So... I dunno, maybe my experiences are totally unlike yours, but how often has a respectful social interaction actually led to "everyone a woman knows" shunning you? How much of it is "I was never friends with these people, none of them really knew me or had any reason to talk to me, and we never had interactions after or before I talked to this lady"?

Dunno about how many. i'll think about it.

I was under the impression asking someone out/flirting with them if they weren't interested was considered in the realm of unacceptable and disrespectful.

I've definitely, multiple times, ended up with rumors spreading about how i was supposedly stalking a girl, or when highschool aged, that i was actually almost 30 and just trying to creep on high school girls (ironically the guy who actually fit this description was beloved by all.) or something. sometimes without any interaction like that. once after being part of a group of friends for years and then asking one of them out, sometimes after knowing people for years without any expression of romantic/sexual interest (or indeed any to express) and then suddenly... rumor. evil. shun. without anything to prompt it. or sometimes i just never know why multiple people just ghosted me. or why the entire clientele of a bar now refuses to speak to me, or...

but this is kind of a mashup of multiple issues, one of the other ones being things like... women in public fast-walking away from me with their shoulders hunched up looking over their shoulder fearfully and then clinging close to other women, staring at me with a frightened look. this reaction to me saying hi. or being present. Like, there has to be a reason for that.

Whoa, jeez, you've got a heck of a jerkbrain there, I can't even find a way to read that statement to mean the latter thing. Yes, of course I meant the first one.

...really? it seems like an obvious possible interpretation to me. o.O okay. Sorry.

Reminder:

witty.

on the other end: "silence is violence"

what does that phrase imply about someone too afraid to speak?

(i tried to find a good picture of a cybergoth all masked up so i could post that and say 'now what' but it fell through. just pretend i was resourceful enough to be clever.)

And... yeah my eclectic collection of tastes and knowledge bases is one of the things that I worry might alienate people sometimes

You may be selling yourself short by looking for people whose tastes overlap really closely with yours -- you're not likely to ever find anybody who is into exactly the same assortment of stuff as you, but you can definitely find people who share the underlying values and tastes (or some of them, at least). If you like flamenco and early baroque because it's technically intricate, you can look for people who appreciate technical intricacy in music. If you like 80s goth for the spooky romantic cyberdespair aesthetic, you can find people who have that same general aesthetic but express it differently. The impulse to limit yourself to the exact same subculture(s) is a thing that makes perfect sense when you're coming from a place that shares none of your cultural leanings, but even in big weirdo cities you're unlikely to find anybody who's into exactly the same shit -- the more important thing is finding people who share your style of appreciating things, and who respect your tastes even if they don't exactly share them. Classical musicians sound like a good place to start (not least because there's huuuuuge overlap between classical dudes and metal dudes)!

No no no, not what I mean. I understand all that, its just that I'm aware people get weirded out by how broadly spread my tastes are, I guess because they can't seem to find a simple way to describe or understand me?,("that... guy... who's into... all of the things..." i can see it being frustrating, as someone who likes to categorize and sort cultural things...) even my friends have had this reaction. (I had to, believe it or not, make the point to them that they don't really have the authority to call me a poser if they themselves admitted they aren't really into goth subculture and find the whole thing weird. and also that nobody would really have that authority anyway. just because i'm occasionally cheerful and sometimes listen to swing music...)

as well as occasionally, i'll start talking about inductive coupling or phase cancellation or something and just... everybody will look at me like i'm an alien.

but are you looking for sites that are about feminism/theory, or just that have feminist audiences?

either. just need to counter the negative impressions and experiences with positive ones. whatever will accomplish that most efficiently.

I do intakes for a partial care program, and a lot of our clients ("consumers", we're supposed to all them, but I hate that) come straight from hospitals.  Perhaps they just take really bad notes, but I'll see paperwork all the time from them with like, one symptom, and they they base a diagnosis off it.  I also worked in residential mental healthcare, where I used to visit some of our folks in the hospital as well.  They were often known to load people up with medication so that they were "stable enough" and then send them out.

'consumers'? lolwut? but more seriously: the impression i've always gotten from people who work in psychiatric-related places is... they always seem exhausted and overwhelmed and overworked to the point of slight apathy. i've heard similar things from my father who used to work in a psych hospital...

That is super annoying about the medical records - I don't know why they wouldn't let you have your own, or be doing the legwork to transfer it, not making you do it? That seems silly.

asked my dad about this at one point(see above)... said they're required to go through that process and filter it through a licensed professional so they can censor anything they think would be detrimental for the patient to see. which explains why several pages were missing from when the analyst(wait is this the correct term or is it diagnostician i can't remember which) went over it with me to when i got a copy through getting them to fax it to my (previous) therapist. which itself required a bunch of extra signed paperwork sent back and forth between the two. can't remember if he said it was law or general policy or what.

I haven't done a ton of mindfullness myself.  Some of it is like meditation, or deep breathing exercises.  My therapist sent me this one (I haven't gotten around to watching it, because I personally don't like deep breathing/meditation much from what I've tried, but she highly recommended it)  

A lot of it has to do with experiencing all your senses in the moment.  A popular mindfulness exercise is eating a raisin or M&M and then thinking about the taste, touch, smell, sound, etc. that you are experiencing as it happens.

Yeah, still not quite getting the goal or mechanism or basic concept. o.o

Also quiet soothing meditation videos on youtube always make me antsy and uncomfortable. (except for asmr, but those are like... 99% beautiful women whispering positive affirmations and eating bananas, so...*) That video right there? no joke, terrifying. NO IDEA WHY.

(is it weird that my 'quiet place' isn't actually quiet? like the stereotype is a peaceful beach but mine is a basalt formation in the middle of the ocean with no other land in sight and nothing but storm all around me. that's what makes me feel safe and a little calmer, if i can remember and have the presence of mind to manage to get myself into it.)

*exaggerating. sometimes it's men eating the bananas. (ok and yes the banana thing is actually rare and yes i know it's not usually supposed to be inherently sexual or anything but i had to i'm sorry.)

I also second Enail's advice regarding group therapy.  You basically have a captive audience of people who are there to give you feedback about how they perceive you.  They are also generally not as biased as friends/family can be.

"captive audience".

why does that phrasing make me uncomfortable?

Sometimes you have to pick just a main interest, or the one that fits your personality best, and hang out with those types.  I like a lot of things - writing/reading, board games, animals, jewelry-making, volleyball, sewing, reading about political issues...but I will never find a group that likes all of those.   I haven't found most sporty/crafty groups to be quite my people, but I made a lot of friends at my board game meetup. For whatever reason, that was a good fit for me.

See above response^ not what I meant.

Board game nerds always seem pretty laid back.


i'm really not sure how i even feel right now. i suspect my medication has reached the inevitable point where it isn't working anymore because my heart has been pounding since this mo- jesus christ. yesterday morning, apparently, and i've been having trouble standing, and everthing feels completely hopeless again off and on. i don't even know.


p.s. no seriously what the hell is with rape victims so often being the only women immediately comfortable around me what does that even imply. just seems contradictory.

[Enail]

I need to at least be capable of empathy. which i am not. i need to be able to read people's facial expressions and body language to know whether or not it is okay to approach them/talk to them/flirt with them/etc.and be able to manage my own body language and facial expressions to the point that I don't cause people to literally flee my presence. i cannot. these are things i was supposed to learn at highschool age. i did not. i have tried to improve them. i cannot.

there is no way for me being in a relationship to happen, nor should it happen; for this reason and others. i don't know why i thought it would be a good idea.

Those things are super-useful, yes, and it can be incredibly tough having trouble with them. But a. being able to read non-verbal cues from other people is not the same as being capable of empathy. Empathy is ability to connect with other peoples' emotions, to be able to imagine yourself in their shoes, and you've said several things that suggest that you do indeed do that.

And b. people do manage to either learn to improve those skills or find work-arounds that help them connect with other people anyway. People on the autism spectrum often have difficulties with those things, so it's not so uncommon a difficulty. Perhaps looking for resources for social skills by/for autistic people or even just ways to think about those kind of challenges other than "it means I'm evil" would be useful for you.

It was explained to me by the doctorss that did my neuropsych eval that i do not qualify for any kind of assistance. (and also the math thing is 100% confirmed disability, paperwork confirming it.) one example was provided of another person with schizophrenia so severe they could not function or survive without constantly being tended to by someone, because they were experiencing more hallucination and delusion than reality. they did not qualify for anything. I have checked the criteria. I do not qualify. they seemed to find the idea that i would qualify frustratingly absurd.

That really sucks, I'm sorry. From my experiences with disability services, there's a lot of randomness and arbitrariness involved in access to resources, as well as unnecessary hoops to jump and obstacles to try and deter people from getting them (apparently where I am, their policy is to just auto-reject 100% of first-time applications, so only people who are willing and able and stubborn enough to apply multiple times are able to get approved   ). I'm not in the same system as you, but it's something that seems to be common with disability services in a lot of places, so I wonder if it wouldn't be worth trying to consult with a different doctor to see if their opinion would be different. I know that's not necessarily an easy thing to access either, but it's something that could make a lot of difference for you long-term, so it might be worth working towards. (Also, I find doctors often take you more seriously and treat you better when there's another person with you, so if you can, get someone else like a parent to go with you to the appointment)

the market for guitar teachers is fairly saturated. I have yet to finish a single composition. I have no idea what you mean by analysis, even though i probably should.

TBH, I think I had something in mind when I wrote it, but I have no idea what I meant now either  

if anyone could give specific examples of work that could be done in isolation, without a college education, without directly interacting with customers, where i wouldn't get fired for not being able to stand occasionally, that would be helpful. that sounds like an absurd list of criteria though.

A lot of freelance-style work can be done via distance, things like graphic design or web design. If there's anything in that realm that you might want to try, there are a variety of free self-study sites you could take a look at to pick up the basics, and then you could play around with creating some sample whatevers for your portfolio, even try putting them up on sites that sells those whatevers for royalties and see if that way of doing things works for you (and maybe even make a few dollars), and then you could progress further at your own pace. It's not always the easiest way to earn a full living, but it's a potential starting point that can build your sellable skills and experience.

this is a good idea. this was suggested by the analyst also. the problem is, as usual: accepting new clients? takes insurance? takes MY insurance? otherwise affordable? actually relevant to my issues? accepts my age bracket/other demographic criteria? isn't a christian yoga porn addiction/pray the gay away support group? (seriously these are disturbingly common)

*sigh* took a while to find my current therapist, will find one of these eventually.

I hear you. It sucks how incredibly hard it can be to access this stuff, let alone to find the right fit.

Majority in this country or just this state seem to. i also hear europeans complaining about it and being annoyed about their taxes going to support people who aren't worth it or whatever. no escaping it.

There are shitheads everywhere, but it's not everyone. And I think those voices are often louder than all the people who are thinking "shut up, you selfish asshole, you could need help someday yourself" at the loud ones, especially right now

yeah. apd doesn't fit. narcissism might. either way i'm a monster who causes emotional harm to people just by being in their lives/present in public, so what does the exact diagnosis matter

You're a person who cares a lot about not wanting to hurt people, who's trying to figure out why they get unintended reactions. That doesn't sound monster-like to me.

it's good to know i'm not completely imagining things...

as for pockets that aren't like that... links?

Sorry, I don't actually spend that much time on other specific sites with a good way of interacting so much as just weed my various feeds and follows carefully so that the people I see and interact with are decent and not so black-and-white and callout-oriented.

Oh, interesting. Can I ask how you feel about her song "Fight Like a Girl"? It seems like exactly the kind of "feminist rage" that you find so distressing, no?

...not really? the "revenge on the world or at least 49% of the people in it" is clearly hyperbolic, (as far as implying "all men everywhere") especially when taken with the later "even if you're only a boy you can fight like a girl", it's pretty clearly just a more lyrically interesting way of saying 'men', with the hyperbole adding a bit of extra emotional force to it.

aside from which she's talking about a violent uprising in reaction to... oppression, rape, abuse, and general horrible shit, and the way those are perpetuated and exacerbated by society as a whole, and generally people being made to suffer and die horribly and unnecessarily... whereas the thing i find distressing is death threats or accusations of being a rape apologist and misogynist in response to disagreements over whether an episode of a tv show is an example of rape culture, or more seriously whether prostitution should be legalized or pornography banned, which are complex topics with multiple facets that people are going to disagree on without it necessarily being because they are secret mras who hate all women everywhere.

one of these things is an entirely understandable and predictable response (if someone is literally trying to harm or kill you or other people in your group the inclination to try to harm or kill them right back is not unreasonable). The other is not predictable, and i, at least, do not fully understand it, beyond the person maaaybe having some prior trauma that makes them quick to anger on the subject? (if someone disagrees with your political/philosophical opinion the inclination to threaten to kill them... seems rather unreasonable, in most cases?)

OKay, this is interesting. I 100% agree with you that actual death threats are unacceptable and unreasonable responses to questions like whether pornography should be legalized/banned. I don't think there's any salvaging conversation with people who will make them, and I'd suggest using that as a "I don't need to take this person's judgements on board" flag the same way "beta male" is.

But some of the things that you've mentioned finding distressing (such as some Captain Awkward things you've mentioned upset you) are things that I read more like the way you seem to read that song; there's hyperbole in the statements, things that aren't literally intended to apply to every single man or to apply in the strongest possible interpretation, there's stuff that's quite strong because it's responding to strong terrible things that other people do but isn't trying to say that every person in the group in question is a perpetrator of the terrible things. I wonder if in a way the fact that the song is more extreme in a way makes it easier to read it as "this is a harsh reaction to something bad, it's not necessarily aimed at me or about me" and set it aside.

Frex,

example of the kind of statement I'm talking about that you may find distressing, plus my explanation of how I see it, please don't read this if you don't feel up to that right now:

<*snip*>Tangent. sorry. the point is... it's the (seemingly?) disproportionate, unpredictable anger that i find frightening, or otherwise the things i fear i might slip up and accidentally provoke. neither of which are represented in that song.

That second one sounds like it might be more applicable to the non-death-threaty kinds of writing I was talking about, yeah? Do you think it might help to distinguish between the ones that are "holy shit, death threats are not a proportionate or reasonable reaction to this, that's scary" and the ones that are "oh no, what if I screw up and do this thing they're saying is bad?" And then if it's the second one, maybe think about what they are saying will/should happen if someone does this thing - are they giving any specific consequences? Are those consequences disastrous? Or are they just saying "I don't like this and think it's harmful when people do it, so don't do it?" In which case that sounds like something that you might want to try and not do (if you agree with their point), but not beat yourself up for if you screw up sometimes.

Wait what sounds completely awesome?

Your range of interests. I'm not as into or knowledgeable about music as you are, so it wouldn't necessarily function as a conversation-starter if I met you, but I would definitely think it's cool!

no. impacts other people negatively more than it does me. not acceptable. should have dealt with it by now. haven't made progress. not acceptable. not a handicap in the golf-game sense.

It sounds like it affects you negatively to the point of dominating your life. I very much doubt that someone who feels uncomfortable or even a little scared because your body language was off or whatever is being affected so badly by this.

IME you can learn more about someone from ten seconds of visual data of them walking and talking than most other things; there could be any number of things going on with your physical presentation that might make people antsy for reasons they might have trouble verbalizing.

they have no trouble verbalizing it at all. what they learn in those ten seconds is that i am a monster.

I don't think it's possible to learn that in ten seconds, unless those ten seconds involve seeing you kick puppies or something.

witty.

on the other end: "silence is violence"

what does that phrase imply about someone too afraid to speak?

Witty catch-phrases aren't that great at giving a complex look at an issue. For example, someone who says silence is violence about homophobia is probably not trying to tell a teenager that they're committing the equivalent of gay-bashing by being too scared to tell their parents they're gay for fear they get kicked out, right? That's a fairly far extreme example, but I don't think most people would want to be conveying that it's right or helpful for others to put themselves at the point of panic attacks by speaking out. That's something pretty extreme that you're dealing with, and probably not covered under the general message. I think catch-phrases usually have to be taken with a grain of salt and a lot of judgement.

(i tried to find a good picture of a cybergoth all masked up so i could post that and say 'now what' but it fell through. just pretend i was resourceful enough to be clever.)

as well as occasionally, i'll start talking about inductive coupling or phase cancellation or something and just... everybody will look at me like i'm an alien.

If you did that, I might look at you in a way that felt like I thought you were an alien, but it would actually be that I didn't understand and was wondering if I'd look like an idiot for not knowing because I think musical knowledge is cool.  

I also second Enail's advice regarding group therapy.  You basically have a captive audience of people who are there to give you feedback about how they perceive you.  They are also generally not as biased as friends/family can be.

"captive audience".

why does that phrasing make me uncomfortable?

Maybe it sounds like we're trapped here and aren't freely responding of our own choice? That's not the case (I haven't figured out yet how to trap people in my diabolical interweb yet ), but it's a potential reading of the phrase.

p.s. no seriously what the hell is with rape victims so often being the only women immediately comfortable around me what does that even imply. just seems contradictory.

This is wild speculation, but the first possibility it brings to mind is that you're not actually giving off scary threat cues that people who are on high-alert for that might respond to, but rather cues that you're scared of being perceived as creepy and vulnerable to attacks disguised as the attacker fearing for their safety? It's an unfortunate thing, but abusers, manipulators and bullies can be quite good at using the language of anti-abuse and anti-bullying to their own ends. I don't know if that's what's going on, but it's one possibility.

[Werel]

I need to at least be capable of empathy. which i am not. i need to be able to read people's facial expressions and body language to know whether or not it is okay to approach them/talk to them/flirt with them/etc.and be able to manage my own body language and facial expressions to the point that I don't cause people to literally flee my presence. i cannot. these are things i was supposed to learn at highschool age. i did not. i have tried to improve them. i cannot.

I think it might be important to distinguish between empathy and the ability to read people. There's the kind of empathy that could be called "social perceptiveness", where it's easy and intuitive to gauge how people are feeling or how they might respond to certain things-- okay, you describe yourself as lacking that. But there's also the kind of empathy that could be called "compassion", where you understand what pain is like and don't want to cause it for others. It seems like you've got that, and that's the more important one when it comes to behaving ethically and kindly.

yeah. apd doesn't fit. narcissism might. either way i'm a monster who causes emotional harm to people just by being in their lives/present in public, so what does the exact diagnosis matter

I think you may really, really, really overestimate the "emotional harm" you cause to strangers by just being around. You have as much right to just exist in public as anyone else-- even if it's your demeanor that makes people flinchy, it's not you doing something to them. People have to deal with all kinds of uncomfortable or potentially unnerving things every day. I get flinchy when e.g. an angry drunk homeless dude starts shouting at the train stop, because I am concerned that he may begin shouting at me, or throw something at someone, or run out into traffic, or whatever. At the same time, it doesn't mean he's done me emotional harm (I'm likely to forget all about it within a few minutes), and it certainly doesn't mean he's a monster for being out in public. People can deal with your existence; they're not so fragile that just seeing someone who strikes them as weird will do them actual emotional harm. (If they are, that's a thing they need to work on.) Plus, I'm pretty sure your demeanor is likely to be less concerning to bystanders than an angry drunk homeless dude's, so if people can deal with that, they can deal with you.

I was under the impression asking someone out/flirting with them if they weren't interested was considered in the realm of unacceptable and disrespectful.

Is this one of those cases where you're taking a much more narrowly-intended piece of advice and overextending it? It's a bad move to approach someone who's clearly not interested in interaction of any kind (headphones, alone at night, reading, etc.). It's not disrespectful to approach someone if they seem otherwise open to interacting with humans. That's the only way to know whether or not they're interested in having further interactions with you. Uhh, let's see, you said firsthand reports were useful: I am not single, so I'm not interested in going on dates with strange dudes. However, I am not offended if a strange dude approaches me (in a respectful way, obviously, not "BITCH BRING THAT ASS"). Even though I start the interaction from a position of "not interested," I don't find it unacceptable or disrespectful that the dude took the time to ascertain that fact. It can even be a nice amiable interaction that everyone feels fine about.

Does that make sense? The message you're hearing is "don't bother people who are sending clear LEAVE ME ALONE" signals, not "don't approach anyone ever unless you already have concrete proof they're into you."

no. impacts other people negatively more than it does me. not acceptable. should have dealt with it by now. haven't made progress. not acceptable. not a handicap in the golf-game sense.

It sounds like it affects you negatively to the point of dominating your life. I very much doubt that someone who feels uncomfortable or even a little scared because your body language was off or whatever is being affected so badly by this.

Yes. Agree 10000% with this.

I've definitely, multiple times, ended up with rumors spreading about how i was supposedly stalking a girl, or when highschool aged, that i was actually almost 30 and just trying to creep on high school girls (ironically the guy who actually fit this description was beloved by all.) or something.

If most of these experiences were in a high school context, I would suggest not thinking of them as indicative of how adult life works. Teenagers can be cruel, vindictive, unpredictable little shits, but adults have a much harder time getting away with that kind of behavior (and are less inclined towards just making up harmful rumors because they're bored/you're the whipping boy/they're having a bad day).

but this is kind of a mashup of multiple issues, one of the other ones being things like... women in public fast-walking away from me with their shoulders hunched up looking over their shoulder fearfully and then clinging close to other women, staring at me with a frightened look. this reaction to me saying hi. or being present. Like, there has to be a reason for that.

I mean, I sometimes got reactions like that when I was younger and more visibly counterculture, from men and women alike. (Especially when I was in Texas. ) I found it pretty easy to ascribe to "lol some people have problems with weirdos" and not take it personally. Do you think you're having trouble shrugging it off in that way because of the gendered dimension? Do you find men don't have visibly adverse reactions to you, or do you just not notice it? It may be less "you're a creep in a gendered way" and more "you're wearing a skull-shaped bowtie in a largely evangelical neighborhood."

No no no, not what I mean. I understand all that, its just that I'm aware people get weirded out by how broadly spread my tastes are, I guess because they can't seem to find a simple way to describe or understand me?,("that... guy... who's into... all of the things..." i can see it being frustrating, as someone who likes to categorize and sort cultural things...) even my friends have had this reaction.

It's actually a pretty good thing to have inroads into a bunch of interests and subcultures, like jcorozza said-- you have more ways to connect with a wider variety of people. And people who're still hung up on clearly-bounded essentialist cultural categories need to hurry up and graduate high school, because nobody's 100% goth lunch table in the real world, pretty much everybody's got a mix of tastes that don't fit neatly into one category or another. That's a thing to celebrate, not be ashamed of.

Witty catch-phrases aren't that great at giving a complex look at an issue. For example, someone who says silence is violence about homophobia is probably not trying to tell a teenager that they're committing the equivalent of gay-bashing by being too scared to tell their parents they're gay for fear they get kicked out, right? That's a fairly far extreme example, but I don't think most people would want to be conveying that it's right or helpful for others to put themselves at the point of panic attacks by speaking out.

Right on point again! Rhyming platitudes aren't ineffable truth, and they don't apply equally to all situations. It sounds like you're in a place where speaking out in heated situations would do more harm to you than good, so getting yourself to a more stable and resilient mindset is a prerequisite for being able to stand up for stuff you believe in.

[AtlachNacha]

And b. people do manage to either learn to improve those skills or find work-arounds that help them connect with other people anyway. People on the autism spectrum often have difficulties with those things, so it's not so uncommon a difficulty. Perhaps looking for resources for social skills by/for autistic people or even just ways to think about those kind of challenges other than "it means I'm evil" would be useful for you.

Yes, other people find workarounds. People who are not me. People who have more problems and difficulties with it than me. The guys I know who are on the autism spectrum or also have anxiety or have more severe mental issues (like, schizophrenic for example) than I do have plenty of dating/romantic/sexual experience and do fine in most social situations. Why am I different? I keep being told, and by doctors, that I just don't WANT to get better, and that's really the only explanation that fits, I guess, even if it doesn't feel that way consciously. And if I don't want to get better at not making people fear they're about to be raped, then that makes me a pretty fucking terrible person.

But some of the things that you've mentioned finding distressing (such as some Captain Awkward things you've mentioned upset you) are things that I read more like the way you seem to read that song; there's hyperbole in the statements, things that aren't literally intended to apply to every single man or to apply in the strongest possible interpretation, there's stuff that's quite strong because it's responding to strong terrible things that other people do but isn't trying to say that every person in the group in question is a perpetrator of the terrible things. I wonder if in a way the fact that the song is more extreme in a way makes it easier to read it as "this is a harsh reaction to something bad, it's not necessarily aimed at me or about me" and set it aside.

Frex,

example of the kind of statement I'm talking about that you may find distressing, plus my explanation of how I see it, please don't read this if you don't feel up to that right now:

That example isn't something I'd read that way or find distressing. (Also the song kind of explicitly kills all the ambiguity on that last point with the "even if you're a boy" line)

I haven't been very specific about what upsets me about CA, very much, besides that one thing where they just... tore apart the guy asking for advice on dealing with his anxiety around women and not wanting to creep people out/come off as harassing, y'know, like the issues I have. and then the rest of the comments dogpiled on him and tore into him more and more.

other than that instance CA isn't usually an example where I read extreme things and am frightened, it's the specific, consistent contempt she shows for people like me, who both she and DNL refer to as 'missing stairs' despite linking to an article defining that as... an actual rapist that hasn't been dealt with yet, rather than just someone people think might be for no completely solid reason. She unambiguously and with nothing that would indicate hyperbole regularly suggests that people like me who accidentally make people uncomfortable in some undefined way should be completely shunned and and ostracized, characterized as evil, compares such people to actual potential rapists, and just generally if she were on this forum she would have torn me apart by now. Which is why it's so confusing that you keep saying positive things while being a vocal fan of someone who would almost certainly despise me. (and yes, I understand where she's coming from with that sort of thing re:safety and everything, that's why it hurts so much to read, because it's not really debatable. she's right. i AM scum.)

IME you can learn more about someone from ten seconds of visual data of them walking and talking than most other things; there could be any number of things going on with your physical presentation that might make people antsy for reasons they might have trouble verbalizing.

they have no trouble verbalizing it at all. what they learn in those ten seconds is that i am a monster.

I don't think it's possible to learn that in ten seconds, unless those ten seconds involve seeing you kick puppies or something.  

well i'm clearly unknowingly doing something that's equivalent in some way to puppy-kicking in that timeframe or a slightly larger one.

Witty catch-phrases aren't that great at giving a complex look at an issue. For example, someone who says silence is violence about homophobia is probably not trying to tell a teenager that they're committing the equivalent of gay-bashing by being too scared to tell their parents they're gay for fear they get kicked out, right? That's a fairly far extreme example, but I don't think most people would want to be conveying that it's right or helpful for others to put themselves at the point of panic attacks by speaking out. That's something pretty extreme that you're dealing with, and probably not covered under the general message. I think catch-phrases usually have to be taken with a grain of salt and a lot of judgement.

teenager in example is a victim.

i am a perpetrator. and a coward.

and i think most people would outright plainly state that it is right for me to just get over it and try to help even though it's uncomfortable for me. why the more force of will i put behind that thought of "get the fuck over it and stop panicking" the more debilitated i get until i can no longer move remains a mystery.

If you did that, I might look at you in a way that felt like I thought you were an alien, but it would actually be that I didn't understand and was wondering if I'd look like an idiot for not knowing because I think musical knowledge is cool.  

not musical, necessarily. mainly electrical with musical applications. inductive coupling involves electricity being transferred through open air via a magnetic field. tesla's field of lightbulbs, things like that. phase cancellation is harder to explain, but comes up in music more often than inductive coupling. it's part of why multiple instruments together (on the scale of an orchestral violin section, for example) sound so much different than they do on their own, and it's also used in guitar wiring... i'm not sure how to describe it concisely. two sine waves inverted perfectly from each other/delayed by a certain amount relative to each other and otherwise identical in frequency, amplitude, etc. would cancel each other out to zero, silence. but actual instuments other than synths almost never produce perfect sines, and their waveforms aren't perfectly synced, so partial cancellation results, but never complete zeroing out. so the sound is different when you have multiple instruments of one type bouncing off each other, especially if they're close together, or two pickups on a guitar with the wiring inverted, or something like that. also used to get rid of interference noise because the noise will almost always be identical and synced across pickups/microphones/cables/whatever so you can have one thing with inverted wiring that just picks up noise and cancels it out of another source.

aaaand you weren't actually asking me to explain, of course, but for some reason i felt compelled to and now i've typed it all out... i'll just leave it. whatever.

Maybe it sounds like we're trapped here and aren't freely responding of our own choice? That's not the case (I haven't figured out yet how to trap people in my diabolical interweb yet ), but it's a potential reading of the phrase.

the original quote was about group therapy though. it feels like i'd be inflicting myself on other people if i joined a therapy group. it feels like i'm inflicting myself on other people now, or when i go out in public, or exist. people can leave my presence, but they have no choice in my not being there at all to begin with. a therapy group seems more captive.

as for trapping people in your diabolical interweb, if you're interested in that, i hear there is a blood magic app you can download from the google play store. not available on apple devices, ironically.

This is wild speculation, but the first possibility it brings to mind is that you're not actually giving off scary threat cues that people who are on high-alert for that might respond to, but rather cues that you're scared of being perceived as creepy and vulnerable to attacks disguised as the attacker fearing for their safety? It's an unfortunate thing, but abusers, manipulators and bullies can be quite good at using the language of anti-abuse and anti-bullying to their own ends. I don't know if that's what's going on, but it's one possibility.

This is definitely something my ex did a lot. if i didn't admit i was cheating on her i was invalidating her/gaslighting her/something else. if i didn't maintain constant contact throughout the day i was neglecting her.

it feels like a cop-out to just blame it on everyone else being eeeeeeviiiiiiillllll though. i... can't really come up with an actual tally of how many times the more severe things happen but it seems too often to be likely.

I think you may really, really, really overestimate the "emotional harm" you cause to strangers by just being around. You have as much right to just exist in public as anyone else-- even if it's your demeanor that makes people flinchy, it's not you doing something to them. People have to deal with all kinds of uncomfortable or potentially unnerving things every day. I get flinchy when e.g. an angry drunk homeless dude starts shouting at the train stop, because I am concerned that he may begin shouting at me, or throw something at someone, or run out into traffic, or whatever. At the same time, it doesn't mean he's done me emotional harm (I'm likely to forget all about it within a few minutes), and it certainly doesn't mean he's a monster for being out in public. People can deal with your existence; they're not so fragile that just seeing someone who strikes them as weird will do them actual emotional harm. (If they are, that's a thing they need to work on.) Plus, I'm pretty sure your demeanor is likely to be less concerning to bystanders than an angry drunk homeless dude's, so if people can deal with that, they can deal with you.

It sounds like it affects you negatively to the point of dominating your life. I very much doubt that someone who feels uncomfortable or even a little scared because your body language was off or whatever is being affected so badly by this.

Ok let me reiterate that people tend to be afraid that I will rape them or am stalking them this is not mild discomfort i am causing this is serious fear. there has to be something really obvious that i keep fucking up for that to happen and there has to be something seriously wrong with me for me to not get what it is.

The message you're hearing is "don't bother people who are sending clear LEAVE ME ALONE" signals, not "don't approach anyone ever unless you already have concrete proof they're into you."

LEAVE ME ALONE signals can be communicated through body language/facial expression though, yes? and i have heard the last message many times as well. (without that layer of exaggeration, anyway)

and then theres the seeming complete impossibility of determining what is going on when somebody doesn't respond to an online message for a while, because sometimes people don't respond for a while and later criticize me for not making an effort to keep in touch and sometimes they don't respond for a while and i keep talking and they criticize me for not taking the hint. SO I CAN"T READ ANY SITUATIONS AT ALL yay

If most of these experiences were in a high school context, I would suggest not thinking of them as indicative of how adult life works. Teenagers can be cruel, vindictive, unpredictable little shits, but adults have a much harder time getting away with that kind of behavior (and are less inclined towards just making up harmful rumors because they're bored/you're the whipping boy/they're having a bad day).

and if they keep happening in adult life anyway? either way it's not because they're bored. it's because i did something to set off a red flag. i just don't know what it is.

I mean, I sometimes got reactions like that when I was younger and more visibly counterculture, from men and women alike. (Especially when I was in Texas. ) I found it pretty easy to ascribe to "lol some people have problems with weirdos" and not take it personally. Do you think you're having trouble shrugging it off in that way because of the gendered dimension? Do you find men don't have visibly adverse reactions to you, or do you just not notice it? It may be less "you're a creep in a gendered way" and more "you're wearing a skull-shaped bowtie in a largely evangelical neighborhood."

okay, but what if weirdos have a problem with me? I will absolutely take pride in freaking people out if it's because of how i dress. but that seems to be not the cause.

idk about men. maybe i just don't feel the same guilt around male reactions, i guess. mostly i just don't get the same kind of fear reactions.

i'm not sure how a skull shaped bowtie would work. it sounds difficult to tie. replace "largely evangelical neighborhood" with "book store frequented by (and sometimes employing) witches" and you'll have a more accurate picture of one of the incidents. replace with "random bar" or "coffee shop with attached art gallery" and you'll have a few others.

It's actually a pretty good thing to have inroads into a bunch of interests and subcultures, like jcorozza said-- you have more ways to connect with a wider variety of people. And people who're still hung up on clearly-bounded essentialist cultural categories need to hurry up and graduate high school, because nobody's 100% goth lunch table in the real world, pretty much everybody's got a mix of tastes that don't fit neatly into one category or another. That's a thing to celebrate, not be ashamed of.

Will suggest to my friends that they should perhaps pursue highschool diplomas and/or GEDs. what is a good way to phrase this without coming off as insulting? for another possible option, what is the most insulting possible way to phrase this?


i made the mistake of introducing myself to someone last night. it was her birthday. the "you're supposed to go up and say hi and say happy birthday" etiquette rule won out over the "this is a bad idea, it's her 18th and in public so already probably going to be creep central and you always come off creepy" instinct. i know her parents. i thought it would've been fine/would've been weirder if i didn't do the 'proper' thing. i was visibly weird and anxious talking to her, and barely coherent and stammering. i've almost certainly fucked up. her mother is probably going to actually kill me. hasn't said anything about it, but... i'm probably going to die. she is a very angry sort of woman. visions of her strangling me keep flashing through my head.

i can't sleep. everything aches. i can't interact calmly even with medication and alcohol. i can't function. keep replaying everything i said to anyone that night over and over again in my head overcome by shame. i'm afraid to go on facebook.

i don't know how to human.

[Enail]

Yes, other people find workarounds. People who are not me. People who have more problems and difficulties with it than me. The guys I know who are on the autism spectrum or also have anxiety or have more severe mental issues (like, schizophrenic for example) than I do have plenty of dating/romantic/sexual experience and do fine in most social situations. Why am I different? I keep being told, and by doctors, that I just don't WANT to get better, and that's really the only explanation that fits, I guess, even if it doesn't feel that way consciously. And if I don't want to get better at not making people fear they're about to be raped, then that makes me a pretty fucking terrible person.

That doesn't seem like a very likely explanation from what you've said here. Is it possible they were trying to get across something more along the lines of "x way of reacting to this issue being raised is a coping mechanism to avoid trying to deal with some aspect that feels overwhelmingly scary?" That's the only kind of thing along those lines I can envision that a non-terrible doctor would say that would be congruent with what you present here, at any rate.

I think it's difficult stuff, and it sounds like something about it is particularly difficult for you, and it sucks that you haven't been able to figure out why, but that doesn't mean that it must be because you're a terrible person.

That example isn't something I'd read that way or find distressing. (Also the song kind of explicitly kills all the ambiguity on that last point with the "even if you're a boy" line)

I haven't been very specific about what upsets me about CA, very much, besides that one thing where they just... tore apart the guy asking for advice on dealing with his anxiety around women and not wanting to creep people out/come off as harassing, y'know, like the issues I have. and then the rest of the comments dogpiled on him and tore into him more and more.

other than that instance CA isn't usually an example where I read extreme things and am frightened, it's the specific, consistent contempt she shows for people like me, who both she and DNL refer to as 'missing stairs' despite linking to an article defining that as... an actual rapist that hasn't been dealt with yet, rather than just someone people think might be for no completely solid reason. She unambiguously and with nothing that would indicate hyperbole regularly suggests that people like me who accidentally make people uncomfortable in some undefined way should be completely shunned and and ostracized, characterized as evil, compares such people to actual potential rapists, and just generally if she were on this forum she would have torn me apart by now. Which is why it's so confusing that you keep saying positive things while being a vocal fan of someone who would almost certainly despise me. (and yes, I understand where she's coming from with that sort of thing re:safety and everything, that's why it hurts so much to read, because it's not really debatable. she's right. i AM scum.)

Ah, sorry I was misunderstanding your reactions. I'm not sure whether or not my take on Captain Awkward's opinions are actually useful to you or if this is getting a little too far from your actual OP, so I'll put it under a cut.

Spoiler:

I don't think it's possible to learn that in ten seconds, unless those ten seconds involve seeing you kick puppies or something.  

well i'm clearly unknowingly doing something that's equivalent in some way to puppy-kicking in that timeframe or a slightly larger one.

I don't think that's clear at all

Witty catch-phrases aren't that great at giving a complex look at an issue. For example, someone who says silence is violence about homophobia is probably not trying to tell a teenager that they're committing the equivalent of gay-bashing by being too scared to tell their parents they're gay for fear they get kicked out, right? That's a fairly far extreme example, but I don't think most people would want to be conveying that it's right or helpful for others to put themselves at the point of panic attacks by speaking out. That's something pretty extreme that you're dealing with, and probably not covered under the general message. I think catch-phrases usually have to be taken with a grain of salt and a lot of judgement.

teenager in example is a victim.

i am a perpetrator. and a coward.

and i think most people would outright plainly state that it is right for me to just get over it and try to help even though it's uncomfortable for me. why the more force of will i put behind that thought of "get the fuck over it and stop panicking" the more debilitated i get until i can no longer move remains a mystery.

Okay, the teenager wasn't a good parallel. Maybe a teenager who's straight but fears homophobic reactions if they speak out against homophobia; if they were worried about being made fun of a little, I think a lot of people would say they should get over it and try to speak out anyway, but if they were worried their parents would assume they were gay and kick them out or send them for conversion therapy, I think people would be more understanding.  'Uncomfortable' and 'debilitated' are pretty far apart on the scale of seriousness. Pushing oneself a little can be a very good thing, but pushing oneself beyond the level you can manage is generally not.

not musical, necessarily. mainly electrical with musical applications. inductive coupling involves electricity being transferred through open air via a magnetic field. tesla's field of lightbulbs, things like that. phase cancellation is harder to explain, but comes up in music more often than inductive coupling. it's part of why multiple instruments together (on the scale of an orchestral violin section, for example) sound so much different than they do on their own, and it's also used in guitar wiring... i'm not sure how to describe it concisely. two sine waves inverted perfectly from each other/delayed by a certain amount relative to each other and otherwise identical in frequency, amplitude, etc. would cancel each other out to zero, silence. but actual instuments other than synths almost never produce perfect sines, and their waveforms aren't perfectly synced, so partial cancellation results, but never complete zeroing out. so the sound is different when you have multiple instruments of one type bouncing off each other, especially if they're close together, or two pickups on a guitar with the wiring inverted, or something like that. also used to get rid of interference noise because the noise will almost always be identical and synced across pickups/microphones/cables/whatever so you can have one thing with inverted wiring that just picks up noise and cancels it out of another source.

aaaand you weren't actually asking me to explain, of course, but for some reason i felt compelled to and now i've typed it all out... i'll just leave it. whatever.

Extremely interesting, thank you!

the original quote was about group therapy though. it feels like i'd be inflicting myself on other people if i joined a therapy group. it feels like i'm inflicting myself on other people now, or when i go out in public, or exist. people can leave my presence, but they have no choice in my not being there at all to begin with. a therapy group seems more captive.

Oops, sorry. But a therapy group is by design a place where people are meant to interact with a certain range of other people; if the person in charge felt that you weren't within the appropriate range, they wouldn't have you join the group to begin with, and the facilitator is there in part to make sure that all presences within the group are contributing and challenging other members in appropriate ways, right? So your presence would be part of what the group is supposed to be.

as for trapping people in your diabolical interweb, if you're interested in that, i hear there is a blood magic app you can download from the google play store. not available on apple devices, ironically.

...brb, just gotta go downloading a totally unrelated app that is definitely nothing to do with blood magic

it feels like a cop-out to just blame it on everyone else being eeeeeeviiiiiiillllll though. i... can't really come up with an actual tally of how many times the more severe things happen but it seems too often to be likely.

I don't think I really have the information to say one way or another, and I'm not even sure you do either, that's just what comes to mind.

i made the mistake of introducing myself to someone last night. it was her birthday. the "you're supposed to go up and say hi and say happy birthday" etiquette rule won out over the "this is a bad idea, it's her 18th and in public so already probably going to be creep central and you always come off creepy" instinct. i know her parents. i thought it would've been fine/would've been weirder if i didn't do the 'proper' thing. i was visibly weird and anxious talking to her, and barely coherent and stammering. i've almost certainly fucked up. her mother is probably going to actually kill me. hasn't said anything about it, but... i'm probably going to die. she is a very angry sort of woman. visions of her strangling me keep flashing through my head.

Going up and introducing yourself to someone whose parents you know, in a public place, is a totally acceptable thing to do, even if you come off as weird and nervous! Strangling someone for awkwardly introducing themselves to your daughter is a totally unacceptable, beyond extreme thing to do. Unless she's not just an angry sort of woman but someone who is actually known for assaulting people unprovoked, that doesn't sound like a likely result.

i can't sleep. everything aches. i can't interact calmly even with medication and alcohol. i can't function. keep replaying everything i said to anyone that night over and over again in my head overcome by shame. i'm afraid to go on facebook.

i don't know how to human.

Being nervous and awkward is part of humaning.

[Prajnaparamita]

the original quote was about group therapy though. it feels like i'd be inflicting myself on other people if i joined a therapy group. it feels like i'm inflicting myself on other people now, or when i go out in public, or exist. people can leave my presence, but they have no choice in my not being there at all to begin with. a therapy group seems more captive.

Oops, sorry. But a therapy group is by design a place where people are meant to interact with a certain range of other people; if the person in charge felt that you weren't within the appropriate range, they wouldn't have you join the group to begin with, and the facilitator is there in part to make sure that all presences within the group are contributing and challenging other members in appropriate ways, right? So your presence would be part of what the group is supposed to be.

Just to jump in on this, as someone who has actually been in a therapy group for, hmmm, I think two years now, getting over discomfort is a HUGE part of what goes on in therapy groups. Here, let me give an example...

When I first started in the group I was in, everyone had like, the most severe social anxiety you could imagine. We would sit around in total silence for the group leader to enter the room, not making eye contact. And in fact, not only did we not make eye contact, nobody even looked in the same direction as anyone else, so there wasn't even a chance of anyone making eye contact. It was like clockwork, each person stared at one of the four walls, and if those were taken, the floor, and then the last person stared up at the ceiling. If you so happened to turn your head so that you were looking at the same wall as someone else, they would change their gaze to a different wall or ceiling or floor, and so would everyone else. That's how awkward everyone was, we couldn't even look in the same direction as someone else. Its kind of adorable, in a pitiful sort of way now that its over, but damn it was painful for all of us being so fearful of each other.

(Eventually I decided after a few months that it was bullshit and started bringing food every group session and insisting on starting up conversation, and things are a lot better now)

If you end up going to a therapy group, I promise you, you won't even be close to the most nervous/awkward/shy person there. And if people are uncomfortable, well 1. They're probably uncomfortable because they're also really afraid of people and saying the wrong thing and messing up in front of strangers and that everyone is going to hate them, that's why they're there, duh and 2. That discomfort, just like the discomfort of my fellow group members at even looking in the same direction as someone is what they're there to learn to deal with.

Does that help at all?

[KMR]

why the more force of will i put behind that thought of "get the fuck over it and stop panicking" the more debilitated i get until i can no longer move remains a mystery.

Oh hey, I can kind of answer this question. The short answer is: because emotions don't work that way. Emotional control isn't as simple as exerting some willpower to suddenly change the way you're feeling. I mean, yes, we can exert some control over our emotions, but it's more a long-term process of processing our feelings and then re-building habits of how we react to things than it is a single conscious impulse that we can apply in the moment.

What's more, thoughts like, "I shouldn't be feeling this way, stop it!" often just make the negative emotion WORSE rather than better. It's like the famous example where if someone says, "Don't think about polar bears" all you can suddenly think about is polar bears. By constantly repeating to yourself to stop feeling a certain way, all you do is fixate on that thought, which reinforces that negative emotion and makes it harder to move past it. You're also blaming yourself for feeling that way, as well as blaming yourself for not being able to somehow will yourself to get over it; that's a vicious cycle that's only going to make everything worse. What you actually want to do instead is acknowledge and accept that you're feeling the way you are, recognizing that you have a reason for feeling that way even if it may seem irrational. Then you can start working on managing the emotions in a healthy way rather than attempting to suppress them. This is actually a component of the mindfulness therapy that jcorozza mentioned and may be worth looking into.

I'll give you an example from my own life. I have some issues with anxiety (not severe but not completely inconsequential either), and when certain social situations trigger it, I tend to start crying. And it used to be that when I would get this way, I would start thinking thoughts like, "Why are you crying, there's no reason to be upset over this. Stop it!" and "Everyone's looking at you thinking there's something wrong with you, you can't be crying in public like this." Shockingly enough, these thoughts did not magically make the crying stop. I was still upset about whatever it was that made me cry, and now I was also angry at myself for crying and not being able to stop. But once I realized the connection between my crying and anxiety (which I didn't come to realize until just a few years ago, and it was like a huge epiphany for me), I understood that crying was my habitual way of responding to very uncomfortable situations, and because I had been doing this all my life, it wasn't something that was going to go away anytime soon. So I started to approach those moments differently, telling myself that this was just how I happen to react, it's not something I can just change about myself, but I need to stop beating myself up over it. And once I accepted the reaction, I was able to redirect my thoughts away from "stop feeling this way" and towards more productive lines of reasoning like "what can I do to help myself feel better?"

[Werel]

I think other folks have beautifully covered a lot of important points about group therapy, emotional regulation, and Captain Awkward, but a couple other thoughts:

This is definitely something my ex did a lot. if i didn't admit i was cheating on her i was invalidating her/gaslighting her/something else. if i didn't maintain constant contact throughout the day i was neglecting her.

it feels like a cop-out to just blame it on everyone else being eeeeeeviiiiiiillllll though.

What you're describing isn't unjustly deflecting blame onto your ex-- if that's how she treated you, she was really being extremely shitty to you. It's not a cop-out to consider behavior like that as being somebody else being, if not eeeeeeeviiillll, cruel and selfish. There's nothing wrong with saying "hey, this person's behavior was unacceptable"-- it can be a good thing, if it helps you gather concrete examples of how not to be.

Ok let me reiterate that people tend to be afraid that I will rape them or am stalking them this is not mild discomfort i am causing this is serious fear. there has to be something really obvious that i keep fucking up for that to happen and there has to be something seriously wrong with me for me to not get what it is.

Do you remember the words in which you were told this? Is this something people told you, or something you inferred? It's really good to do everything you can to not cause this kind of fear in others, but this is just such an extreme statement that I'm still having a lot of trouble imagining situations where it would occur. Is this a thing strangers said to you? Acquaintances?

The message you're hearing is "don't bother people who are sending clear LEAVE ME ALONE" signals, not "don't approach anyone ever unless you already have concrete proof they're into you."

LEAVE ME ALONE signals can be communicated through body language/facial expression though, yes? and i have heard the last message many times as well. (without that layer of exaggeration, anyway)

Yeah, but you can do your due diligence by learning the most unmistakable LEAVE ME ALONE signals. They are pretty unambiguous! They include having on headphones, reading a book, walking somewhere alone at night, and ignoring/rebuffing people who talk to you.

The latter statement ("don't hit on anyone ever") is really only something I've ever heard from men in your position, i.e. those who are very worried about being creeps. I don't actually think I've ever heard a woman say that no men should ever approach women (with the caveat that of course my lived experience is limited and surely some women have said that, but it's not common). If nothing else, could you acknowledge it as a fringe position that doesn't necessarily need to have a direct impact on your choices?

...brb, just gotta go downloading a totally unrelated app that is definitely nothing to do with blood magic

Brb same

and if they keep happening in adult life anyway? either way it's not because they're bored. it's because i did something to set off a red flag. i just don't know what it is.

okay, but what if weirdos have a problem with me? I will absolutely take pride in freaking people out if it's because of how i dress. but that seems to be not the cause.

Then there's probably something going on with your body language, which is impossible to help with via text, sorry! But like folks are saying, group therapy and/or a one-on-one therapist may be able to help with that; is it something you've ever brought up with your current therapist?

idk about men. maybe i just don't feel the same guilt around male reactions, i guess. mostly i just don't get the same kind of fear reactions.

That might be something to bring up to your therapist, if you think he might have any insights - why so many of your fears center around reactions from women only. (It's not surprising to see less visible fear reactions from men, between their lower likelihood of being sexually assaulted and their being socialized to not show fear, but if you're doing something to unnerve people in general and this is leading to social isolation that hurts you, it's worth taking male reactions into account too.)

Going up and introducing yourself to someone whose parents you know, in a public place, is a totally acceptable thing to do, even if you come off as weird and nervous! Strangling someone for awkwardly introducing themselves to your daughter is a totally unacceptable, beyond extreme thing to do. Unless she's not just an angry sort of woman but someone who is actually known for assaulting people unprovoked, that doesn't sound like a likely result.

Seconded to infinity! You did the polite thing; if you're at someone's birthday party, it's generally good practice to tell them "hi, happy birthday." And even if you were awkward about it, that's well within the parameters of normal experience. Flubbing interactions is a core part of humaning.

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