A difference between my social anxiety and other people’s social anxiety

I get the impression that other people have their feelings of  social exclusion/ unwantedness/ “no one likes me and that makes me a bad person”/ etc. triggered by comparing themselves to other people around them or to a mental standard they have for things like the Normal Amount of time to spend with friends, etc.

It doesn’t work like that for me, because most of the time, on a basic level, I don’t expect to be the same as other people. I don’t see other people doing things and assume that I’m supposed to be/I deserve to be doing them too. I can feel envious or lonely when I see other people having fun, because I do want to be doing what they’re doing, but I don’t have the aspect of… frustration? that I see in a lot of other people. The “Come on, I should already have that, why don’t I?” feeling.

Sometimes, that lack of comparison is really bad, but in this situation, it’s kind of a positive thing. It means that if I make one new friend, I don’t feel bad because I “should” have ten new friends. I can value my little baby steps of social interaction as positive things for me, without judging myself by an outside standard.

I can get very self-hating about specific situations where I messed up socially, but I don’t do that about my overall situation, at least.

Everything about this lentil soup is fine– the flavor is actually really nice– except that the lentils have the hulls on and they’re a weird texture.

I’m pretty sure I bought them because they were the only kind at that store, though, so I’m going to have to look somewhere else next time.

Also, instead of doing one giant batch of soup, I’m going to divide my next bag of lentils into half Indian lentil soup with ginger and turmeric, and half western lentil soup with carrots etc. (LEEKS I get to buy LEEKS. Maybe.)

What do you have in your mind when you’re looking for a word? When you have an idea, but you don’t have the word, what is the idea?

It’s larger than a sensation, because it’s probably more than one sensation. It’s not a single specific memory. It’s a collection of memories and snippets of memories that define a whole idea. It’s not as large as some memories could be, it’s not a whole long story, because it is small enough to be defined by a single word.

It’s a gem with each facet being a sensation or an abstracted characteristic.

Those things. I think in those things.

Went to bed late and woke up earlyish, spent the evening working, now thoroughly exhausted.

Ohhh here’s what I was going to post about:

Scissors and razors vs electric shavers/trimmers:

Sparkly thinks large metal blades are scarier, I think buzzy electric things are scarier. Personal preferences.

Sparkly is going to be away for the weekend again– ey’s taking Numbers Guy to visit eir mother.

Ey also got a big disappointment today, because eir bosses for eir internship don’t want em to come back for the fall semester– essentially, ey was fired, even though ey wasn’t being paid. It seems like, rather than eir immediate coworkers having anything against em, or there being any significant issues with the quality of eir work, it was mainly just a conflict of personality or expectations with eir supervisors (one of them more than the other.)

None of the reasons they gave really amount to a suddenly-firing-someone reason, and some of them are downright petty and passive-aggressive– e.g. apparently it’s okay for the real attorneys to wear jeans in the office when they’re not going to be in court, but interns should be too conscious of their precarious not-real-attorney status to ever wear anything less than a suit, and Sparkly should have somehow intuited this without being told, rather than following the norms set by eir coworkers, like anyone would normally expect to do. This was never important enough for eir supervisors to actually tell em this, yet it was important enough to bring up while firing em. Grr. As far as I’m concerned, “Here’s the main reason I’m firing you; also, here’s every little thing about you that ever annoyed me” is an extremely unprofessional way to handle that conversation.

Took a long walk. Expected to be physically tired, but not this mentally tired. Soles of feet hurt, of course. Both ankles hurt a little, but not nearly as much as they did an hour after the walk. Still not sure whether this is normal or not. I injure my joints a lot, but they bounce back really fast.

Why do I read explicit fic for fandoms I’m actually in?

(I wasn’t trying to! I just happen to have gotten into a fandom, which I like for completely unrelated reasons, which also keeps showing up in the tags I look through for explicit fic. So now when I go through those tags, I get to go “Oh GOD no why would you write that about those characters?” instead of just “Oh, that one isn’t for me.”)

Between Sparkly and Numbers Guy, I am apparently doomed to be the person who has the best executive function and least-fucked-up sleep schedule out of the household. (And re: executive function, that’s saying something.) Criticize whatever else about me you want to criticize, but I cook and I buy food and I clean things, on a not-completely-awful schedule.

Sometimes I selfishly wish that I could live with someone who was more on top of these things than I am, for a change, so I could follow their lead instead of always being the one to push.

Maybe I underestimate how much Sparkly’s job takes out of em.