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I wish...
12 years ago
General
...I could go back in time, and tell myself not to bring up that memory. To spare the embarrassment and alienation.
My eldest sister gave me a big hug and told me repeatedly that it wasn't my fault. She didn't believe for a second that my memory was false. My dad suggested that maybe the memory was real after all, but bringing it caused embarrassment to another, or maybe the other person had just forgotten about it. Another possibility was my memory could have actually happened, but it incorrectly remembered a subtly sarcastic comment as sincerity. I'd really, really like to accept these things, if it would turn out they are actually true.
But all in all, it really sucks having all this caring and good will...and being so clumsy. Something that occurred to me only at least a day later, was the possibility that even if the memory was true, it could have not been in good taste to bring up anyway. But day-late hypotheses don't help anyone.
No, the fact of the matter is, no matter how hard I try to meet the demands of other people, I simply don't have the social instinct to reliably plan my social judgments in real time. And when I feel forced to stop and think about it, I stop doing anything else for too long as I badly juggle mental social variables. Humans have social instincts precisely because it is beneficial, and using cognitive thought processes to emulate these instincts is much slower, less accurate and more draining.
My dad reminded me, that the people who know and love me tend to accept me, quirks and all. They know I'm always going to be a savant with critically impaired social skills. They are slow to annoy, fast to forgive, and almost never leave me feeling mortified over some faux pas I never saw coming and maybe not have even realized happened. They try to help me socially, and I study and try to keep useful mental notes. But sometimes it seems like I am inevitably going to offend - badly - when I least expected it.
In my most recent situation, I may have bitten off more than I can chew, socially. I actually tried harder than I had in any situation in a long time. But most of the time I was surrounded by easily annoyed people. I considered it something of an honorable challenge, and I persevered. But in retrospect, I was actually subjecting myself to enormous daily pressures that I couldn't indefinitely sustain without bumps. I was going to slip up, one way or another, at least periodically, and then one of those misjudgments was going to make someone so angry that I would bear real consequences for it.
Or so the life-savvy cynical narrative goes. Truth was I was in the same situation I'm usually in - I don't necessarily know what I'm doing, or what to do next, or what's going to happen. I'm a passenger of each dynamically-unfolding situation. When you have poor social instincts, you improvise nonstop, and can't afford to constantly second-guess every little judgment. To try to give as much active consideration as people demand from me, is a particular cognitive marathon that's a perfect recipe for nervous breakdown.
My eldest sister gave me a big hug and told me repeatedly that it wasn't my fault. She didn't believe for a second that my memory was false. My dad suggested that maybe the memory was real after all, but bringing it caused embarrassment to another, or maybe the other person had just forgotten about it. Another possibility was my memory could have actually happened, but it incorrectly remembered a subtly sarcastic comment as sincerity. I'd really, really like to accept these things, if it would turn out they are actually true.
But all in all, it really sucks having all this caring and good will...and being so clumsy. Something that occurred to me only at least a day later, was the possibility that even if the memory was true, it could have not been in good taste to bring up anyway. But day-late hypotheses don't help anyone.
No, the fact of the matter is, no matter how hard I try to meet the demands of other people, I simply don't have the social instinct to reliably plan my social judgments in real time. And when I feel forced to stop and think about it, I stop doing anything else for too long as I badly juggle mental social variables. Humans have social instincts precisely because it is beneficial, and using cognitive thought processes to emulate these instincts is much slower, less accurate and more draining.
My dad reminded me, that the people who know and love me tend to accept me, quirks and all. They know I'm always going to be a savant with critically impaired social skills. They are slow to annoy, fast to forgive, and almost never leave me feeling mortified over some faux pas I never saw coming and maybe not have even realized happened. They try to help me socially, and I study and try to keep useful mental notes. But sometimes it seems like I am inevitably going to offend - badly - when I least expected it.
In my most recent situation, I may have bitten off more than I can chew, socially. I actually tried harder than I had in any situation in a long time. But most of the time I was surrounded by easily annoyed people. I considered it something of an honorable challenge, and I persevered. But in retrospect, I was actually subjecting myself to enormous daily pressures that I couldn't indefinitely sustain without bumps. I was going to slip up, one way or another, at least periodically, and then one of those misjudgments was going to make someone so angry that I would bear real consequences for it.
Or so the life-savvy cynical narrative goes. Truth was I was in the same situation I'm usually in - I don't necessarily know what I'm doing, or what to do next, or what's going to happen. I'm a passenger of each dynamically-unfolding situation. When you have poor social instincts, you improvise nonstop, and can't afford to constantly second-guess every little judgment. To try to give as much active consideration as people demand from me, is a particular cognitive marathon that's a perfect recipe for nervous breakdown.
But stop beating yourself up over it. Whether the memory was false or not, you made an honest suggestion. It was up to him to accept it or turn it down, and there was no rational reason to get upset over it. Lots of people share stuff for free, especially long after their initial release has passed.
The game "Freespace 2" was declared public domain/open source by the company that created it years before, allowing people to use the engine to do their own things, or create their own campaigns, or completely rewrite the game as, for example, a Battlestar Galactica game.
If someone is offended by an honest suggestion of something commonly occurring, that isn't your fault. It's theirs.
And I'll tell you a secret.
A LOT of us don't always really know what we're doing, socially or otherwise. Wing it and hope for the best. :)