Are any of you pathologically secretive? Very, to an extent that has done obvious harm to my life and relationships.
have problems with feeling excessive amounts of shame? Not in the least. I'm not sure I actually experience shame, in addition to a number of normal human reactions/experiences.
I tried to expand on these points in more detail, but the aforementioned secrecy is preventing it. Its a constant priority since childhood to conceal my presence and actions from others. I'm also incapable of trusting other people at anything beyond the most superficial level so avoiding them entirely is much easier than constantly having to independently investigate and verify every little thing they say or do. This also includes hiding any traces of existence that I can: moving quietly, not distrubing the world arround me, drawing no attention to myself or my actions. I'm only capable of relaxing when I know with confidence I'm alone and can't be ambushed suddenly. So paranoia I guess, not shame.
All of this being said I'm incredibly happy and live what I consider a very privledged life. I'm almost 50 and have been with my wife for 30 years. She's helped a lot in ways she doesn't fully understand. I WFH and live in a very rural area (closest city of any meaningful size is about 2.5 hours away.) I can go multiple days in a row only ever encountering my wife. She sometimes expresses she wishes she could do more things for me like what some people call acts of service? I think. Like household chores. I won't let her (or anyone) do my laundry, prepare my food, or really any of the day to day tasks of being alive. I do all the shopping, bank/finance stuff etc. I make more than enough that she doesn't have to work so this tends to leave her with not much to do. She has her own issues that make it very hard for her to maintain regimented employment and in on SSI. Once a week she makes dinner for us both, though I have to watch the entire process or I can't eat it. We sleep in the same bed (her's) most nights but I do have to maintain a separate bedroom/office for when I'm overwhelmed by her presence, maybe 1-3 times a month. I'm fine with her entering this room but she knows not to touch anything and she understands if I move something from outside this room to inside of it to leave it alone. I'm very fortunate that I've a lifestyle that accomodates my issues and especially for my wife. Its worth mentioning she has her own mental health issues just as impactful as mine but of a significantly different nature. Our disorders "fit" together very nicely and its something we both noticed right away.
I am perfectly capable of going out and navigating society, interacting with people etc. Its not social anxiety at all. In fact I don't really expereience any forms of anxiety very much. Its more of a positive compulsion if that makes sense, not motivated by fear or anxiety. I can and do manage to be around and interacting with people just fine, but I prefer formal relationships with clear expectations of the workplace or similar situations. I can't interact with society just fine to achieve my goals, I simply consider solitude superior in almost every way, and just easier to live my life. People cause way more problems than they solve.
Unstructured socializing has 0 appeal and if I manage to make an attempt I usually bail out and go home pretty fast.
charlesf
14d ago
Concurring with this. Every time I've ever encountered a QR code in an email its been a printout image that was scanned/copied to an email and sent out. At the other end of this spectrum are web links in printed materials, with instructions to click here, with the typo red-squiggle line included on the printout.
charlesf
14d ago
The colleagues I've spoken with and I are generally pretty hostile to any processes that require a phone (like two step authentication)
Two factor identification is one of the best security features that most "normies" will interact with and should never be discouraged. For many people their current smart phone is the most secure electronic device they've ever possesed, assuming they maintain physical possesion of it, and this will be true of their next phone as well. I've worked with fraud vicitms who've combined lost millions of dollars that could have been prevented by simple 2FA on their bank and work accounts, in addition to their Amazon, Apple etc accounts. Many businesses have had enough of 'voluntary' 2FA and have begun to enforce it. People that don't have smart phones can even get a call to a land line where a robot speaks the 2FA code to them. There is a lot to dislike about the crappy techno future we've seemed to wind up in, using your phone to 2FA actively protects you from much of it rather than being part of it.
charlesf
24d ago
I think if you have the sort of communication environment where your partner (I'm assuming a women, and that you the reader are a man) feels comfortable enough to tell you anything/everything, this will eventually come up, generally in the first year or so. I'm probably not a great person to answer this as I've been with my wife since we were teenagers, about 30 years now.
It did come up with her way back then; we'd both had a handful of less-then-serious highschool relationships, neither were virgins. I'd had a lot more actual sex than she had despite my count of unique partners only being 1 higher as I was pretty active with my HS girlfriends and she actually struggled to get her HS boyfriends to actually have sex with her. I grew up in a large metro and she grew up on a farm in a rural part of the same state probably had a lot to do with the different experiences. If she'd gone to my HS she'd probably have been more experienced than me simply due to more opportunity.
I get the impression that our (romantic) lifestyle is likely pretty unpopular on this board, so the only additional detail I'll add is that we've both slept with way more people after getting married than before, usually the same people, always together.
Part-time wiki editor, I know enough to quickly identify and avoid problem areas and stick mostly to dry, non-CW stuff. That being said, always check the Talk page, including its archives. It can sometimes be hard to locate the links to the archives if the one of the pages "guardians" is especially good with the system and knows how to obscure them. This is generally done by archving a Talk page that is no where close to the size that would actually require it to keep the page tidy, in order to push inconvenient comments and topics off the "front" talk page and bury it behind hard to find links. If you know what the URL format for archived pages it though you can just manually edit the URL. I've found a few articles where this is the only way to see them too. The reason to do this is two fold, first you have to establish if a page has 'guardians': personally motivated editors with a dog in the fight who use their familiarity with the processes and rules of wikipedia to maintain a partisan/biased presentation in the main article and crush anyone who tries to correct their deceptions. Its usually only one person but can be a team on some higher profile articles (the Mao article is a good example of a team of guardians). Once you have confirmed that a page is camped out by a "power-editor", the next step is see what they are hiding. Page reverts, suspicious locking, agressive archiving, high levels of vitriol to basic questions about the article are all good signs. Its very hard to actually delete things forever on wikipedia, so they have to hide and obscure the history of the article as best they can. See what they are hiding to see what is missing from the article. Once you get fluent with reading Talk pages and version histories, its one of the more entertaining parts of wikipedia imo, though it does real harm to the quality of their obstensible 'mission'.
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