April's Brain Journal

i can break down, for example, how various ways of trying to manipulate someone into forgiving you or talk about something they don't want to are manipulation, because there are very specific tools at work there that move specific parts of the conversation to do a thing, but things like 'what'cha doing there?' meaning 'i would like to join in' instead of 'i'm interested in hearing you explain what you're doing' boggles my fucking mind. i finally figured out what that means recently and i'm still like 'holy what the fuck was THAT what people were asking'

i also can't use tone to tell what people are saying if what they're saying doesn't seem to follow logically. i can hear tone, and sometimes use that to intuit different contextual meanings of words or phrase, but like. i have a hard time articulating exactly, especially right now, but it always feels like there is an iceberg of information i'm missing because the words themselves don't make sense, or seem to be at odds with the tone that's being used in ways that don't make sense.

this is also, i realize, why i'm generally--not always--much better at parsing tone through text. you have to use specific, visible techniques to communicate things, and those techniques are largely communicated in one easy-to-absorb type of communication, and therefore they have to be logical and have to have a purpose in some way.

i also just realized i'm screamingly uncomfortable with people who aren't skilled at communicating and making Sense through text, because by and large they are still expecting me to intuit what they're saying but can't actually communicate subtlety with the language tools available to them.

unfortunately they're hard to tell apart from the autistic people who talk that way through text because that's just... how they talk, they're pretty literal and say what they mean. i just have a flinch reaction anyway because allistic people who talk like that tend to get mad if you can't intuit what they mean based on clumsy, barebones chatspeak. :T

 

or, to put it another way: in my experience, for all they get accused of being ~hard to communicate with,~ a lot of autistic people i know are usually flexible as hell at learning new social codes and grammatical structures, because they have already had to learn how to learn! and i get anxious about allistic people who haven't had to learn a new 'language' and are Bad at It, because they tend to throw fits over you not being able to understand their garbled mess of a communication instead of understanding that it's on them.

 

useful term i've been trying to articulate for the past few days: the poe quotient, or, the point where it is no longer worth it to someone to try to distinguish your malice from your stupidity.

 

god, it still pisses me off that no one ever told me outright that things like asking you questions about yourself, what you're doing, how your day has been, etc, are usually done with the expectation that you ask back, unless it's super quick and casual. part of me keeps feeling like i would have noticed if i wasn't just spoiled and self-absorbed, and i try to remember to, but like..... if someone asks me a question it feels polite to answer! it's fucking impossible for me to internalize a response that doesn't follow logically from the sequence of the words themselves, at least with things like this. it's annoying as hell and low-key upsetting that i can't get stuff like this through my head even though i can dissect more advanced social interaction stuff. :C

 

i like this song because it's both a sick day and depression #mood

 

thought: is it lawful good or neutral good if you have the willingness and tendency to break or bend rules,

BUT you still strongly believe in the importance of rules, and the ones you're willing to break are simply ones you find

a) ineffective,

b) difficult to enforce,

c) not based in the needs of reality,

d) existing for their own sake instead of serving a necessary function,

or e) callous, predatory, or otherwise morally repugnant?

askingforafriend.png

 

Personally lawful good means that you have a strong, personal moral code that you will never break, and it doesn't always coincide with the laws of the land.

 

somewhat worrisome: it might be my imagination, but i think the hearing in my right ear is very slowly getting worse. i don't really make a habit of checking how it sounds with my other ear covered often--which i probably should--but i've been checking this morning and it feels like it's much harder to tell sounds apart and process them unless they're fairly percussive and uniform. i think? i snapped my fingers next to my ear a few times and i felt it more than heard it. might be a sleep dep thing though.

interestingly enough, though, low uniform background noise actually helps with telling sounds apart? it makes the sharper, clearer sounds that i use for context stand out more because there's less unintelligible junk data to try to process (which is junk because i can't understand it).

also i've been realizing more and more lately how much i rely on context to fill in audio blanks. there's a reason i'm good at reading blurrytext.

 

this just reminds me that i need to pick up asl again, though. already not a bad idea but especially in light of this.

 

hmm. so i'm noticing if there's any delay between 'i should do this creative thing' and 'in a position to immediately dive headlong into this creative thing' i immediately start building up a weird anxiety spiral of nervous anticipatory energy that then keeps me from working on the thing and makes itself worse and worse, and i'm not totally sure what causes it? i need to start finding a way to siphon it off, hmm.

 

me, unwrapping and eating a footlong on a crowded bus while safely balancing a reusable shopping bag, a suitcase, a rolling freezer bag, a full backpack, a purse, and a full cup of coffee: get on my fuckin level scrubs

 

me: suddenly remembers that time i saw a meta post comparing strickler to snape, unfavorably

me: violent full-body twitching down to my very soul

 

at first glance they look like very superficially similar archetypes but they are not remotely the same, holy shit, for one thing strickler is not only a survivor of violent, dehumanizing abuse but he is still surviving it, he is STILL a good and caring teacher at least directly to the children he's responsible for,

(except for the abuse-ingrained cognitive dissonance that they will all die if he gets what (he thinks) will help him escape from it, which is Horrifying even if it is implied he's deluding himself that he can protect the ones he likes)

when he does finally take off the gloves and go full gloating, dangerous antagonist toward jim, who he's been trying to save at risk to himself, it's because jim has both shown he's willing to slaughter changelings and explicitly said he'd do the same to strickler if he could get away with it, and also because he was deliberately pushed into a position where jim would murder him if he didn't neutralize him one way or another, and his behavior from episode 11 onward is 'WOW FUCK YOU FOR INSTANTLY DECIDING I'M NOT A PERSON BECAUSE YOU FOUND OUT I WAS MUTILATED AND ABUSED,' just. the list goes on!

strickler is still a fucked up dude who does godawful, inexcusable shit--what he does to angor alone is absolutely disgusting--but he is not snape, snape is fucking slime who thinks he's allowed to abuse harry and other children because he helped murder his mother for not fucking him after he called her slurs, fuck you with all my heart strickler is not snape

 

Spoiler

Spoiler: That One Friend, rowan don't look i guess

tfw you talk with someone you don't know super well yet but are making friends with about stuff involving your ocs/canon characters you play as, and it gets onto topics that might be a lead-in to kink shit you're both into, that seem very much like kink shit

but it might not be! and you don't know if they would be comfortable with that kind of standing with you or anyone else at all, and you neither want to make them uncomfortable by making it clear their oc stuff is Your Kink nor do you want to be enjoying it as kink stuff if they intend it to be sfw, because Gross

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

 

Spoiler

Spoiler: more of same

okay i think i know how to proceed now, bless bmp for real

 

Spoiler: meds recordkeeping

saw psych yesterday, lamotrigine has been working great so far; bumped up to 200mg daily this morning, let's see how it goes.

 

......anyone with ocd wanna weigh in on this? if anyone feels like it it'd be appreciated, i have.... very little idea exactly what ocd is supposed to feel like in day to day life

Spoiler: mobile screenshots

 

Spoiler

Spoiler: That One Friend, rowan beware

me: makes aroace friend whom i have weird goopey Feelings about, which are pretty rare for me to feel in that specific flavor

me: is Pretty Sure i would not on some level want to be romantic or sexual with them at all, thought about it out of curiosity/to decide whether to try to cut it off and it was Weird and Uncomfortable

me: really really likes and is attracted to the idea of having characters of ours interact and have emotional involvement and impact on each other/sensual, emotionally raw, mostly nonsexual kink stuff, meanwhile feels kind of ????????? about the idea of shipping said ocs romantically or mashin their bits on each other

me: constantly has to fight the urge to overshare shit about myself because i Want Them to know it

also me: constantly feels the need to HAVE I MENTIONED I LIKE GIRLS TODAY I REALLY LIKE GIRLS when talking to them about basically anything

????????????? is this like some manifestation of Gay Best Friend or something

 

Spoiler: more of same

like, i definitely did not and don't have the same ??????? Vague Discomfort about the idea of being romantic or sexual with rowan right from the moment i first realized i had a crush, and i very decidedly enjoy shipping our characters and having them get down and dirty, so i'm Fairly Certain This Is Not That

but also it feels very, very different from most of what i consider Friend And Cool Person Feels, and even when we are awkward and probably grate on each other we seem to be decent at slowly picking up the steps and having the goodwill to grok each other in good faith so far, and getting that we Talk and Act Differently and missteps are misunderstandings in the process of earnestly wanting to get to know each other, which is way more than i can say for 90% of my friendships or interactions with people in general

just

???????????????????

 

Spoiler: more of same

like, they still fuckin annoy me and hurt my feelings sometimes without meaning to, and i'm pretty sure i do the same for them, but i feel like we're kind of slowly getting to the point where we realize it's happening and take steps to be less hurtful about it/don't take it personally, depending on how douchey it is