Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Solifuge]

I'm having a hard time putting this gently... but perhaps you can find a better way to point out how exceedingly egotistical it is to demand, before you'd ever consider a relationship with someone else, that they never find anything other than you pretty. Seriously... that's just insecure and silly.

Maybe try something like this:

"Look at this from my perspective. What your mother, and by extension you, are asking me to do is to never find anything but you pretty ever again. You know as well as I that this world is too full of beauty for that.

Consider it this way; do you think your sister is pretty? Do you think parrots are pretty? And does this mean you want to be in a relationship with your sister, or a parrot? There's a difference between recognizing someone as pretty, and wanting to be in a relationship with them. I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings, but try to understand what I meant."

Once she understands, ask if she's willing to see if things might work out, if it means potentially explaining things to her mother. If not, and she's not willing to put forth that effort... then she's probably better as a friend.

[Tiruin]

Eh, it's less the fact that she's jealous, and more about what her mom and friends think.

Wholly a misunderstanding from my PoV. While I see how they would, or could, rationalize that, you've to say what's your side of the story before assumptions take place.

Basically, what Solifuge said. Misunderstandings are bad things to let lie, and let live, without correction.

[Vector]

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.

[XXSockXX]

You're clearly overthinking this. Not everything gets better when you get older, but you'll learn a lot about who you are, who you want to be and what you want from life, the world and other people. You have so much time, some stuff will figure itself out, try not to worry so much.

[Sirus]

Blarg. Barely slept a wink last night. Instead kept tossing and turning, running through everything I've learned at school so far, and on the few times I actually drifted off I'd wake up maybe half an hour with one leg sticking straight out and wondering why I couldn't find the gearshift.

Gonna be a looooong day :/

[SalmonGod]

Bleh... jealousy pisses me off... don't understand it, and my tolerance for it has been completely eroded...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

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.

Well... that's kind of straddling the line between jealousy and envy.  Though it's relevant, because they both have similar emotional roots (insecurity) and can result in the same manner of confrontations in the right circumstances.  What I was referring to was the possessive kind of jealousy // "You BELONG to me and you're not allowed to even think about appreciating, caring for, or dedicating your energies to anybody but me, unless I give you unsolicited permission to do so."

[Descan]

People keep saying it like this girl is jealous of her sister. Japa keeps saying that's not it, though?

I think he could have said anything embarrassing in public like that and gotten the same reaction from her. Doesn't have to be about her sister being pretty?

"I embarrassed her in public."

"Oh she's just jealous!"

... Doesn't quite fit, does it?

[SalmonGod]

People keep saying it like this girl is jealous of her sister. Japa keeps saying that's not it, though?

I think he could have said anything embarrassing in public like that and gotten the same reaction from her. Doesn't have to be about her sister being pretty?

"I embarrassed her in public."

"Oh she's just jealous!"

... Doesn't quite fit, does it?

It sounded that way to me at first.  Then he corrected it.  Then the jealousy thing veered off into a non-Japa-related tangent.

[GlyphGryph]

Either way seems crazy to me.

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."

Dear god have I been here, right here. About halfway through University, I killed a lot of what had made me "me" at the time, and the emptiness afterwards as I tried to fill the holes back in was painful. But I realized it was only painful because I was avoiding real decisions and trying to make society decide for me and society don't give two shits. The person I was was... not that great, to be honest. A lot of the parts I killed were worth killing - they were parts of me that made me miserable, or unhappy, or just simply didn't work well. But ultimately I had to decide what "improving" meant, because society had no fucking clue - even without those parts, I was not "normal" and I was never going to be and trying to be was just going to be painful.

But I could be effective, on my own terms. The parts of me I killed were comfortable and I missed them, and I only killed them to be normal which was a mistake, but ultimately it was still the right thing to do, even if I did it for all the wrong reasons. The truth was, they were holding me back.

[Mrnocamera]

I am here to interrupt the things that make sense, for this annoucement:  My cat got run over by a asshole that got out and kicked it for "Gettin blood on ma fuckin tires."    Lets just say he left with a broken nose.

[Jopax]

Should have broken his windshield, and his car, and his legs.

[Mrnocamera]

I would of, but the construction crew left two days ago, so no bricks, pipes or convenient wooden planks.

[MaximumZero]

I would of, but the construction crew left two days ago, so no bricks, pipes or convenient wooden planks.

Simply continue with fists, elbows, and steel-toed boots, good ser.

[Vector]

I realize that I may seem like I'm overthinking it, but I'm thinking through things that have been plaguing me since the near-total personality rewrite of three years ago.  Has to be done, boring as it is.

[Sirus]

It's hot, humid, and I'm trapped in the back of a tractor cabin that does not have anywhere near adequate ventilation. This particular tractor is so old that "max AC" pretty much translates to "blow a little air around the cabin, best leave the windows down anyway". I'm drenched in sweat and I'm not even doing anything at the moment. Last time I finished actually driving I had to peel myself out of the leather seat.