kontextmaschine:

Maybe? At the Portland SSC meetup afterparty I def. noticed distinct gaits and intonations and aesthetic sensibilities that reminded me of 60s SFF, so that is a thing. And to compensate for the flat feet I’m somewhat conscious of where my feet are going, mostly I just make more spins and pivots than most

Like, I have considered the possibility that I’m very high-functioning autistic, which might account for some of what comes off as coldness, like how as a child life insurance commercials threw me cause I couldn’t see the fundamental point cause from the perspective of the dead, the “my loved ones go on to be well-taken care of” and “they go on to ruin and penury” scenarios were completely indistinguishable. (Maybe the genderweird stuff too.)

I do want to point out though that in Catholic Mass every week we heard stories about this smartass kid who talked back to the authorities and told people to abandon their families and love the people that hurt them and accept death and he was held up as a role model.

That’s one thing in my head about the “Charisma Mode” of recent “fluffy” (as vs. “crystalline” or “dirty”) hypomanic episodes. When people accuse me of lacking “empathy” I’m a little offended – I have feelings, I can recognize them in other people and model what it would be like to feel them myself, but it’s volitional, I have empathetic continence.

But the thing where I was drawing energy from other people’s emotions and able to draw people into alignment with my own? Like, maybe that’s the woo they’ve been calling “empathy” and in my years I just developed a particularly thorough synthetic theory of mind!

If it happens again, next time I’ll try to expose myself to people being hurt and see if that affects me and whether I can choose between empathizing with the hurt or the hurter