I know you don't view people as things to operate and make use of, so why would you treat them that way in communication?
. . .
Moving right along. The interesting thing about compassion is that you can train yourself to display it in a basically natural manner--because as a matter of fact, it's way more useful to act compassionate than it is not to.
I can love some people, and it's easy to feel things for them. There are some situations I can empathize with. But most... I ask myself for an emotional response, and I get nothing. That is why I act so compassionate here and reply to a lot of posts with encouraging messages or compliments. Partially because people being sad and alone is a bad thing, and partially because I need the practice.
If that means taking time to organize your thoughts, or reaching out with some empathy to gauge your conversational partner's opinions and interests, go for it.
Allow me to make this clear.
When I think about the relationship between the kids and the trolls in Homestuck, what I see is two concentric squares.
When I think about unsweetened chocolate with soymilk, the first thing that comes to mind when describing the taste is that "it smells beige."
There are other concepts buried so deeply within my brain that I cannot describe them in normal language to any satisfaction; logical relationships that I would call "like folding handkerchiefs" or "rotated resonance structures" or "sunk" or "bell-like." Those are all different, distinct thoughts, by the way, and that doesn't even get into all of the ideas that are just coded in gestures, almost like a sort of mental sign language.
These are not difficulties that can be overcome with a few minutes to clear my thoughts. An adequate description with "normal" language would likely take me hours to puzzle out with paper and pencil, with numerous diagrams.
As for "reaching out with your empathy," you seem to not understand that I don't
have that privilege. I have enough empathy to try to figure out if some recent event is good or bad for someone, and make a basic attempt at acting correctly (sad or happy). That is it. Usually I don't succeed very well at the acting sad or happy part, other than saying "that is unfortunate" or "that is excellent." It's the best I can do on short notice.
Gauging reactions and interests?
. . . I wish. Maybe next year. I can do a little of the interest-gauging, but the reaction-gauging is not something I can do.
Maybe I'm just living a uniquely blessed and charmed existence, because that is exactly the case. I ask questions I wonder about, talk about things I actually have an interest in, and discuss things I feel are important.
Interests: French novels from 1830 through 1950. Mathematics, to a degree that my fellow math majors don't want to talk to me about it and think I'm kind of weird. Learning languages, mostly in terms of etymology. Napoleon. National anthems. Disease pathology. Progressivism. Cathedrals/Catholicism. Anime and manga (hate talking about this with most people, because I do not squee or ship). Philosophy, especially existentialism (also hate talking about this, because I can get more work done on my own and I get tired of explaining). Floriography. The semiotics of fashion. Airplanes. Literary analysis. Post-modernist literature. Mafia. John Adams. Piecing together social stuff. Arguing.
Where by "a bunch of factual data" I meant "obsessive cataloging of information with no idea as to why I'm interested in any of it."
Where by "factual data" I meant from the specific and varied interests above.
I know for a fact that you can talk about more than your major too, so limiting yourself that way makes no sense.
I didn't say "my major," I said "majors." Because the conversation you learn when you go to university goes like this:
A: Hi, my name is A.
B: [Fuck, why are they talking to me? Have I done something right?] Nice to meet you, A [smile a little, make eye contact]. I'm B. [Consider offering hand. Refrain. Maybe in a few months we'll have figured that out.]
A: So, B, what's your major?
B: I study Whateverology [smile more, try not to look threatening or stiff. Prepare for anticipated question].
A: Oh, Whateverology! I emotion Whateverology. That's really qualitative description.
B: Yeah, it's qualitative description, but I like it okay anyway. What are you in? [keep away from discussing Whateverology or why you like Whateverology at all costs, because discussion of emotion is still basically impossible]
A: I'm in...
B: Oh, ...! How do you like that? What sorts of stuff do you learn? [we are sure as hell talking about you for the next hour and a half, A, because there's no way I'm going to be doing most of the work here and risk being called a robot AGAIN]
And so on, and so forth. As you may have guessed, I am B in that conversation because I do not know how to be A. Also because my thoughts and social programs are written out, and I do not ever know what A is thinking.
I can talk about other things, but this is the only conversation I can have easily that looks like we're sharing. I'm starting to learn similar interest-sharing conversations now, but it's slow going.
If people aren't receptive to any of my interests, I can either listen to them talk about some of theirs, or if it's really bad just use pleasant stock conversation until I can get my leave on, and get on with looking for people who care.
I don't talk about my interests outside of the classroom because my interests also include "listening to the same song for 10 hours straight while trying to figure out if there's an interesting mathematical identity in tortilla flipping," so when asked about what I did yesterday it's usually safer to say "homework."
The part where you have people receptive to your interests in a degree even approaching yours, the part where you know how to ask questions to keep a conversation going, the part where you can say "just" use "pleasant" stock conversation if it's "really bad" (as opposed to when it's going really well) and leave to look for people who care (because you can tell who cares, and who doesn't) is basically the indication that our experiences are completely different.
The reason why my post was talking about "conversation" was because I was talking about "conversation," not about "chattiness." But whatever. That's okay, too.
Got to call you on this. You specifically used the words "chitchatty conversations", which implies talking about the weather or whatever, for the sole purpose of making empty words leave your mouth. Despite what you meant, I only know what you say. Also the snappiness there only hurts your ability to hold a conversation, but you know that already.
I meant conversations where the focus wasn't on me educating someone else, receiving education, or in discussing something with the goal of solving problems. For me, anything but that is empty and pretty much pointless, outside of some vague goal to have friends someday. My apologies for using my definitions rather than calibrating them to the accepted neurotypical standard. I've been slipping a lot recently.
I am snappy because I am extremely frustrated. I am upset because you can say things like "but you know that already" to undermine my point and delegitimize my difficulties. I am even more upset because I do not have an ability to explain things in such a way that you will read it and not feel insulted.
So I feel an obligation to shut up so that I won't cause insult yet again, but that results in hurt to me rather than hurt to someone else; and because I can afford a loss of mass face, because I am still currently weighting value(me) == value(not me), because I have judged that you can probably stand to have someone snip at you a little without getting to upset, and because I am tired of saying nothing just because I can't communicate, I'm posting anyway.
So in summary, her social problems are very likely not the same as your social problems, and going from zero to something in a couple years is really as herculean an effort as she says it is.
Vector, please correct me if I'm wrong about any of this.
Thank you. I do well enough a lot of days that I don't actually feel that something is wrong with me, but there is physical evidence from kindergarten that I had no idea
at all what an "angry face" looked like. I took an elementary exam on recognizing facial expressions two years-ish ago and scored below fifty percent. I'm guessing I could get 100% on the elementary one now pretty much automatically, but anything much more complicated than that and... no, not really.
So... yeah. I don't really know what to say otherwise, but thanks.
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9427237 times)