On this thread a lot of people not only suggested but explicitly said I was bragging to an extend that they felt it had become the main topic of the thread. As I feel I have brought that thread enough off-topic as is, I decided to make a new thread trying to explain myself, which, of course, takes a lot more talking about myself and a lot more stuff that can be seen as bragging, but, sure. Anyway, let me explain myself here. I know I am not a social person. I'm an ununderstabebly introverted autist with social anxiety and OCPD* and I will probably never understand social interactions to the extend most people do intuitively: let's just say that people saying "You should just be more social" to me is like saying "You should just walk" to a legless person. (Yes, Krysyy, I'm still angry about that… I know.)** Social skills have always been a main worry of mine, making me anxious. I, for more than a year, refused to talk with friends at all because I was afraid I might insult them or say something I did not intent to when I was 9 or 10, and did just that again two or three years after that when the girl I had then been going out with for a few weeks got for me ununderstadebly angry about stuff she thought I had indirectly said about her. For the reference: She is autistic too, it is that bad. As a teacher once said to my mom: compared with me Sheldon from the big bang theory is a pretty social and normal dude. I feel like I have grown since then, but, in real life, I am still known to be socially “different”. My friends have nowadays gotten used to me just not understanding everything, some even refusing to correct me when I am doing something that is socially “wrong” “Because it is so cute with how hard you try”, which I both like and feel insulted by. I have also, in the last two years, started learning how to do small talk, which is why I currently tent to “pass” as a somewhat social (meaning normally autistic) person for the first five or ten minutes of a random conversation. So, why do I care about bragging so much? Well… It has always been a pitfall of mine, to both sides. If you want some more context, my introduction thread might also help. Here is the short version: In the Dutch education system, at around your 12th, you make a lot of tests that all combine into a score of 500 to 550 where about every 40 mistakes you make is one point less, the average score is around 525. It determines a lot about what kind of education you can go to the next year. Why is that important? Well… On the “basisschool” I was considered to not be intelligent, which is why I bragged quite a lot, and no one cared, because I was an averagely intelligent person pretending to be slightly more than average, “Everybody does that” I made those tests and did basically all of them without mistakes. A week of testing and roughly 2500 questions. I only made 3 mistakes in total. That is a 1/10 000 score. I got psychically tested after that and it turned out I was, in fact, terribly dyslectic and compensating that with intelligence, resulting in, in fact, not 1/10 000 but more close to 1/ 500 000 score on IQ and the like. Why oh why, you might ask, was all that bragging such important to explain why you don’t want to be seen as someone who brags a lot? Well: I went from being “average” to being “wow” basically overnight. That was not good for my ego, or, it was, but not in the right way. Here is something I still don’t understand from that period: Why is it socially more accepteble to be average and lie about your accomplishments to appear smarter, even if people find out you’re lying, than to be way above average and simply state them, even when you play them down to make it seem less? After about half a year of being a probably unstadeble show-off, being like that got some backlash. After that, I simply tried to appear average again. Jet, that didn’t work either. Most people liked it, sure, socially, it worked great, but once people started believing it, it didn’t work so well for me. That mainly is because, in my free time, I like to do mathematics and read about philosophy. I nowadays read scientific papers for fun in my free time. As I got better at pretending to be modestly intelligent, some people thought I was lying about my hobbies, because they believed I was only average*** That wasn’t good for me either, as, though it for some reason is more socially acceptable,**** I want to be taken seriously. These days, that is a trade-off I have to make all the time when talking with people who don’t know me. Do I want to be considered social-ish, taken seriously, or something in between. I cannot, as it seems, be both completely. Sometimes why I want to be takes seriously is practically, on the thread that was the source of this, I simply stated that I have a good education on the subject, because, as you can understand, I did not go to a normal school. The reason I stated my education was because I choose to be less socially acceptable and taken seriously, over being more socially acceptable and considered some random dude who’s just speculating and randomly calling in sources to appear smarter. The less active I get on EMC, the less people know me, the more I’m going to have to do this, sadly. Jet that is not the only reason I want to be taken seriously: it also is because I am who I am and I like reading Wittgenstein and I like doing maths and I like doing all these nerdy and “pretentious” things, though even liking that is socially unacceptable, let alone talking about it. If you have read most of the stuff I have said about myself you probably know I have struggled with depression for a while; and that I have developed quite a lot of self-hatred. The philosophy-maths part honestly is the only thing I have sustained to like about myself through all that. *All officially tested, as explained later **to the bystander, indeed, that is part of what is going on between me and her: She has insulted me harshly a few times about my inability to be social, and I insulted her a few times on her capabilities to do anything, as I have the tendency to say exactly what I think, even if that might be insulting, which I know is wrong. ***Because I have had to learn every social skill I have, I kind of know how to play theatre, or, anyway, better as you would probably expect from someone who is socially incapable. I even played in a somewhat professional musical when I was 15. ****It turns out acting as if you are around my intelligence becomes less acceptable the more true it tends to get. Okay, Let’s go back to that thread. I think that, after all this, you can probably see why it’s hard for me to not take this as an insult: I try so hard to be social and then someone appears from the darkness and sais all my worst nightmares have come true and I appear to be the terrible person I sometimes think I am. I almost cried when I read this the first time, and the same counts for this: I like to think I can handle critique, and I do still think I can, but only when people understand how hard it is for me. That “Perhaps” from the later post resonated in my head until more than an hour after I had first read it, just as passive aggressive as the whole post sounds to me. If you have any concrete feedback on stuff I do in a way that socially is not the best, sure, let me know, but please know I alredey try.
I'm not sure if swanky is the right word here, but I do understand what you're trying to say and where you're coming from. When I saw those posts on that thread which, by the way to all of you reading, was a suggestion thread, not a debate thread about someones intelligence or supposed narcisism, I knew that it would upset you, I debated saying something, but I didn't want to mess it up further. I do understand where Krysyy and others were coming from, however I do feel like you explained yourself very well and maybe people should have adjusted expectations accordingly. I'm sorry you had to deal with all this, hmu if you want to talk.
