balioc:

So here’s a question:

How much does any form of, uh, “identity-change euphoria” boil down to the joy of “I asked a bunch of people to do a weird thing for my sake and they actually did it instead of laughing at me or ignoring me?”  How much does it boil down to the joy of “turns out that I am actually capable of wreaking noticeable large-scale changes in my own life?” 

…I can theorize and speculate, but there’s a lot of relevant introspective knowledge here to which I have no access. 

Religious conversion is often treated as a joyous rebirth and gender transition as a second puberty and even things like midlife crisis personality changes and new partners “make you feel like a kid again”, and I suspect part of that is the later-in-life experience of suddenly having a new friend group to do everything with, or at least forum friends to post with, getting deeper in to each others’ lives all the way