But one last time to reassure the worriers: even without treatment, things have been on a steady slope back to normal for a year now. There’s been some up-and-down on a day-to-day level but even week-to-week I am constantly better than I was.
To some degree I suspect that many of the more abstract-level changes are less “the previous conditions MADE me one way and these ones make me another” than “that was the way I had formed and maintained my personality, under influences including those conditions” and that got wiped out, which means I had/got to reform my personality as a fully intellectually aware adult, which is a rare chance that I think means I’ve come out of this far ahead. The anxiety stuff alone is ba-huge, and all the stuff with reading/receiving/projecting emotions comes after having developed an intellectual understanding of and substitute skills to socially function in its absence, so suddenly developing that on top, with none of the damage or sidetracking I might have undergone if I had grown up with that as my major interface with the world
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