Bleh... jealousy pisses me off... don't understand it, and my tolerance for it has been completely eroded...
I am a ridiculously jealous person. I admit it. Jealousy is probably my biggest character flaw.
The reason why I'm jealous is because I have a sense of self-worth that pretty much never improves. I have no idea why people like me (I'm not fishing for compliments), because I can't see myself externally enough to see myself as likeable. Or unlikeable. My perception of myself is based on what other people say and do, and there's been a lot of pretending-to-be-nice-but-actually-using-me and plain rank cruelty in my life. And then there's the people who treat me like I'm practically a messianic figure, which is ridiculous because I am
insanely jealous.
So I simultaneously feel a sense of smug self-satisfaction and I remember that I'm a freak who ruins everyone's day and everyone's fun. Dealing with this makes me panic, it makes me exhausted, it makes me want to disappear to somewhere where no one can perceive me but I can, I dunno, publish a book or a paper once in a while that will only be attached to my name after I'm dead, at which point everyone will understand that I am a great genius and a credit to humanity, because all they will have is the papers and my immaculately ordered house and not how I come off in person.
And then I remember that by that metric, I will have pretty much failed being a human being by everyone's standards, because I will have lived in cowardice. So it loops back from being a power fantasy to being a nightmare. Just like pretty much everything I want for myself and recognize as the sign of someone psychologically unhealthy.
Hearing people compliment other people--people I know and have observed, so we all know how they come off in the real world--puts a big fat underline to all of the above. So I get jealous. I don't get jealous of authors or translators or whatever, random competent people on the internet. I get jealous of the people who aren't torn in half like this.
Because the truth is, I feel like I'm pretty okay. Personally. I work pretty hard, maybe not hard enough. I'm creative. Sometimes I'm brilliant. I'm nice to people. And I like being spectrumish, because goddammit, I just like it. I like my nearly eidetic memory, and I like that I drive myself hard, and I like that I'm obsessive about getting all the details right. I like being 19 when I learned conversation and 22 when I really learned about generosity. I like taking life slow and enjoying things other people take for granted when I learn them at full emotional maturity, rather than age 3. And if I didn't know it was "wrong," I'd even like my muted emotional affect and weird body language.
I
like it. I like having secrets. I like being incomprehensible. I like my bizarre sense of humor, and my wordplay, and that I make a huge number of stealth jokes and just let people think I'm insane. I like that I'm hugely overenthusiastic about things a lot of people don't care about. I like that I don't learn general body language rules--I learn tells for specific people I care for, and then I can read their emotions better than anyone else on the planet. And they learn to read me in the same way. We're isolated equals.
But I'm scared that this isn't enough for anyone to really meet me and love me, or see me as their buddy for doing fun things. I like me, but I kind of have to. And I've spent my entire life in a war against myself. Against my facial expressions, against my instincts, against my being really, truly known. Really. A war. Society said "hop" and I turned my strength against myself. I eradicated a lot of things that made me myself and filled them in with nothing, because no one told me what I was supposed to do, other than "be less weird."
I resent that this was well and truly necessary, and I resent that so little of me is left over. Almost nothing. There's almost nothing left. And as for my jealousy--I've always known it wasn't about the other person, so I don't blame them, and I try not to let it show. But it's that reminder: there's so little of me left to say good things about. There's so little left to care for.