- Joined
- Mar 15, 2005
- Messages
- 3,650
- Age
- 50
- Location
- Delawhere?
- Nation Banner
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- Third Job
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- Quetzalcoatl
- Linkshell
- PhoenixPimps
- FFXIV
- Raesvelg Helheim
And it's irritating.
I'm being entirely serious, by the way.
It's not fear that someone is going to hurt me, or something bad is going to happen, or anything like that. As a general rule, I find most people utterly non-threatening; I chose Galka for a reason, damnit. And as for something bad happening, well, there are literally thousands of ways the world (or at least the part of it I'm currently occupying) could be destroyed in the next 60 seconds, and with most of them it would all be over before I knew anything had even happened.
The anxiety I feel walking down a dark alley in the middle of the night is relatively mild compared to the anxiety that I feel attending a class for the first time.
The fuck if I know why.
Objectively, I can say that I find most social situations moderately confusing; there is a game being played, and I don't know the rules. I can guess some of them by observing others, decide what the winning moves are, or are not, but it's... artificial.
I suppose ultimately this is the root of the whole "You People Make No Damn Sense" thread that has occasionally wound its way through these scribblings.
I can gain an intellectual understanding of people as individuals, but in groups they're... scary.
And since, despite what I may occasionally long for, you're pretty much stuck with people in groups if you want to make your way through life without living in solitary confinement, I'm afraid pretty much all the time.
Getting to the root of why occupied the majority of my life for the better part of a decade.
Ultimately, I came up with a theory. It's not complete by any stretch of the imagination, but so far it's held up to a reasonable amount of internal scrutiny.
I started with the question: "Why am I afraid?" The answer wasn't terribly difficult to discern, but woefully incomplete; I'm afraid something will go wrong.
Now, what might go wrong?
Am I afraid of getting laughed at? Not really, as it turns out. As a general rule, if I do something worthy of hilarity, I'm usually the first one to laugh, and the last one to stop. So that had to get ruled out.
Am I afraid of violence? As mentioned previously, not really; I have little experience with what it's like to not have the upper hand, frankly. Most people are a lot smaller than me, after all, and I'm surprisingly quick for my bulk. Now, I've got a terrible fear of crippling injury, but I suspect that most of us do on some level. I'm not sure I could bear being blind, or paralyzed, but I ultimately had to put that fear in perspective; the possibility of it ever actually happening is so damn slim that it couldn't lie at the root of the issue.
Am I afraid of confrontation? That's more likely than being afraid of violence, after all; people fight verbally all the damn time. Here I hit a snag, because I couldn't answer it quickly. I'm not afraid of debate; in fact, it's quite the opposite. I love to debate.
As I think is patently obvious on this site.
In high school I once debated against literally every other person in the class. And while they wouldn't admit that I won in the end, they also couldn't say that I was wrong.
So, civilized confrontation holds no anxiety for me.
Ah, but what about uncivilized confrontation?
Here was the snag.
How do I react when someone transcends the boundaries of what I consider proper behavior?
I didn't know.
And that was what is often referred to as the moment of clarity.
Because it wasn't true.
I did know how I react.
I react the same way I reacted before I developed my phobia.
With violence.
See, I fought a lot when I was a kid. Get in my face, and violence was bound to ensue. But as I got older, that response became increasingly inappropriate.
Pushing the kid out of the window because he stole your blocks stops being funny after preschool. And after you move out of a one-story building.
The problem, of course, was that it was stuck in the loop. The initial response to a challenge is violence, and violence is not an appropriate response.
My fear was of getting caught without a valid response to a social challenge. And at that point, a lot of the other puzzle pieces fell into place too.
I have trouble following authority because that, frankly, is subordinating yourself to someone else. A challenge that is preemptively declined, and every time someone barks an order at me, my immediate response is to tear their head off. Literally, not figuratively. At the same time, I don't like being in charge, because you'll inevitably face challenges to your authority, and the same situation occurs; challenge, urge to decapitate, failure of response programming.
So, ultimately the answer to the question was clear.
What am I afraid of?
Me.
I am the author of my own misfortune. As, I suspect, are most people with mild mental illness; at some point, they encountered a situation that they were not properly programmed to respond to, and the result was faulty programming on their part.
So I figured all this out years ago.
What I've yet to figure out is what, if anything, I can do about it. Other than give in to the urge and see where that takes me. Except that I know where it takes me.
Prison.
If I'm lucky.
The revelation that knowing what was wrong did not give me the slightest idea of what to do about it was... vexing.
Mostly, I just like to be left alone. I don't like drunks; they're unpredictable, they cross the boundaries of what I consider proper behavior at the drop of a hat, and for the most part they smell unpleasant. I don't like people who are hyped up on group emotion for pretty much the exact same set of reasons. I don't like working within hierarchies for the aforementioned reasons.
To be honest, I've had an extremely difficult time figuring out something that I could do. A job where I can work alone, with no one in charge of me, and in charge of no one. Preferably indoors, because I have vicious seasonal allergies, lol.
My current career path, such as it is, may not be sustainable. Kids at least don't trigger my urge to dismember, for some reason. But the rest of the hierarchy may give me fits; education is not a profession where you can work towards your own ends, after all.
I suppose we'll find out.
The ideal job would be author. And while I'm frankly rather good at writing descriptive text, and telling stories...
I suck at dialogue. I especially suck at the framing text for dialogue. I've been writing a book for giggles in my spare time, and while I've got some 20,000 words down, almost none of it is dialogue, because I can't figure out how I want to write it lol. I know how the story goes, more or less. It would actually be three books long, and the rough ideas for all three have been plotted out already.
I know where I want to go, I know how it starts, I know how it ends. I have the format down, and at this point, it should be relatively straightforward... except for the aforementioned difficulty with dialogue.
The scripting is gonna be murder. Or cause murder. One of those.
I'm being entirely serious, by the way.
It's not fear that someone is going to hurt me, or something bad is going to happen, or anything like that. As a general rule, I find most people utterly non-threatening; I chose Galka for a reason, damnit. And as for something bad happening, well, there are literally thousands of ways the world (or at least the part of it I'm currently occupying) could be destroyed in the next 60 seconds, and with most of them it would all be over before I knew anything had even happened.
The anxiety I feel walking down a dark alley in the middle of the night is relatively mild compared to the anxiety that I feel attending a class for the first time.
The fuck if I know why.
Objectively, I can say that I find most social situations moderately confusing; there is a game being played, and I don't know the rules. I can guess some of them by observing others, decide what the winning moves are, or are not, but it's... artificial.
I suppose ultimately this is the root of the whole "You People Make No Damn Sense" thread that has occasionally wound its way through these scribblings.
I can gain an intellectual understanding of people as individuals, but in groups they're... scary.
And since, despite what I may occasionally long for, you're pretty much stuck with people in groups if you want to make your way through life without living in solitary confinement, I'm afraid pretty much all the time.
Getting to the root of why occupied the majority of my life for the better part of a decade.
Ultimately, I came up with a theory. It's not complete by any stretch of the imagination, but so far it's held up to a reasonable amount of internal scrutiny.
I started with the question: "Why am I afraid?" The answer wasn't terribly difficult to discern, but woefully incomplete; I'm afraid something will go wrong.
Now, what might go wrong?
Am I afraid of getting laughed at? Not really, as it turns out. As a general rule, if I do something worthy of hilarity, I'm usually the first one to laugh, and the last one to stop. So that had to get ruled out.
Am I afraid of violence? As mentioned previously, not really; I have little experience with what it's like to not have the upper hand, frankly. Most people are a lot smaller than me, after all, and I'm surprisingly quick for my bulk. Now, I've got a terrible fear of crippling injury, but I suspect that most of us do on some level. I'm not sure I could bear being blind, or paralyzed, but I ultimately had to put that fear in perspective; the possibility of it ever actually happening is so damn slim that it couldn't lie at the root of the issue.
Am I afraid of confrontation? That's more likely than being afraid of violence, after all; people fight verbally all the damn time. Here I hit a snag, because I couldn't answer it quickly. I'm not afraid of debate; in fact, it's quite the opposite. I love to debate.
As I think is patently obvious on this site.
In high school I once debated against literally every other person in the class. And while they wouldn't admit that I won in the end, they also couldn't say that I was wrong.
So, civilized confrontation holds no anxiety for me.
Ah, but what about uncivilized confrontation?
Here was the snag.
How do I react when someone transcends the boundaries of what I consider proper behavior?
I didn't know.
And that was what is often referred to as the moment of clarity.
Because it wasn't true.
I did know how I react.
I react the same way I reacted before I developed my phobia.
With violence.
See, I fought a lot when I was a kid. Get in my face, and violence was bound to ensue. But as I got older, that response became increasingly inappropriate.
Pushing the kid out of the window because he stole your blocks stops being funny after preschool. And after you move out of a one-story building.
The problem, of course, was that it was stuck in the loop. The initial response to a challenge is violence, and violence is not an appropriate response.
My fear was of getting caught without a valid response to a social challenge. And at that point, a lot of the other puzzle pieces fell into place too.
I have trouble following authority because that, frankly, is subordinating yourself to someone else. A challenge that is preemptively declined, and every time someone barks an order at me, my immediate response is to tear their head off. Literally, not figuratively. At the same time, I don't like being in charge, because you'll inevitably face challenges to your authority, and the same situation occurs; challenge, urge to decapitate, failure of response programming.
So, ultimately the answer to the question was clear.
What am I afraid of?
Me.
I am the author of my own misfortune. As, I suspect, are most people with mild mental illness; at some point, they encountered a situation that they were not properly programmed to respond to, and the result was faulty programming on their part.
So I figured all this out years ago.
What I've yet to figure out is what, if anything, I can do about it. Other than give in to the urge and see where that takes me. Except that I know where it takes me.
Prison.
If I'm lucky.
The revelation that knowing what was wrong did not give me the slightest idea of what to do about it was... vexing.
Mostly, I just like to be left alone. I don't like drunks; they're unpredictable, they cross the boundaries of what I consider proper behavior at the drop of a hat, and for the most part they smell unpleasant. I don't like people who are hyped up on group emotion for pretty much the exact same set of reasons. I don't like working within hierarchies for the aforementioned reasons.
To be honest, I've had an extremely difficult time figuring out something that I could do. A job where I can work alone, with no one in charge of me, and in charge of no one. Preferably indoors, because I have vicious seasonal allergies, lol.
My current career path, such as it is, may not be sustainable. Kids at least don't trigger my urge to dismember, for some reason. But the rest of the hierarchy may give me fits; education is not a profession where you can work towards your own ends, after all.
I suppose we'll find out.
The ideal job would be author. And while I'm frankly rather good at writing descriptive text, and telling stories...
I suck at dialogue. I especially suck at the framing text for dialogue. I've been writing a book for giggles in my spare time, and while I've got some 20,000 words down, almost none of it is dialogue, because I can't figure out how I want to write it lol. I know how the story goes, more or less. It would actually be three books long, and the rough ideas for all three have been plotted out already.
I know where I want to go, I know how it starts, I know how it ends. I have the format down, and at this point, it should be relatively straightforward... except for the aforementioned difficulty with dialogue.
The scripting is gonna be murder. Or cause murder. One of those.
