The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Has anyone here toyed with the idea that they may be too weird to belong to any community?
So far as my personality goes, it's a mish-mash of everything, and it's spread so thin that I generally only have one narrow means of connection with any given person. Back in school for example, I had a reputation for being the quiet kid who'd chime in out of nowhere and tell a great joke. This won me enough reputation that people would invite me to hang out, and I'd have absolutely nothing to say because I couldn't relate to them on a fundamental level. Actually, in the 6th grade when I was placed in a Spanish class full of hispanics and blacks, that was the first time I felt that socializing at school was easy. Before long I was even making race jokes and had my whole table cracking up. I'm half-Anglo half-Italian genetically, but I can never socialize with other whites unless they're stupid. Yet even that fails once you get beyond jokes.
It's strange. I feel like a genetic experiment. I have all the emotions of a person, the same interests, the desire to contribute and belong. But it's like a machine where all the wires are hopelessly crossed. And I'm turning 27 so this is a pressing concern. A life of isolated achievement or idleness isn't necessarily a nightmare, but I'd dearly appreciate knowing what's going on and whether or not it's even necessary. Perhaps it's some strange childhood trauma, who knows? My uniqueness once seemed to be a blessing, but now it feels very much like a curse.
The way I choose to look at it is that you may never perfectly "fit in" with a given clique of people, but thanks to all the crossed wires you'll probably have something to contribute for a given group. It's probably not possible to actually be unique without being at least a bit weird, but it doesn't have to be crippling. The way I like to put it (having been repeatedly armchair diagnosed as autistic by randos at the bar, something I find irritating) is that there's a difference between being a bit of an autist (guilty as charged) and diagnosable as autistic (I doubt that.).
That said, truly kindred spirits (instead of "tolerable enough") have been hard to come by in my experience. I grew up in the middle of nowhere, was too much of a nerd to fit in with the redneck kids, my family situation could be summed up as "Hillbilly Elegy with the details scrambled and maybe a bit worse." (Something it took me too long to learn: When middle-class Millennials gather and complain about their families, they don’t actually want to hear about traumatic stuff. Dropping a nuke and insta-winning the dysfunctional family olympics makes you a party pooper. Likewise, women who want to hear about your mommy issues more than you want to talk about them usually have bad intentions.), and somewhere along the way the teachers decided that I was “talented and gifted”, I reformed from being “likely to wind up dead or in jail” to “reasonable success story who is gainfully employed and lacks a criminal record”, and “talented and gifted” wound up being my escape at 15.
The one place I really fit in was a residential high school aimed at “gifted” STEM students. Sure, I quickly learned that I don’t care much for math or science, but I was good enough to pass with Bs and history and English teachers need pets as well. The student body weren’t truly brilliant for the most part (nor was I), but they were comfortably above-average (smarter than state-school undergrads, at least) for the most part and many were sufficiently weirder than I was that I passed for normal by the standards of that place. Was it fun? Yes. Does isolating a bunch of weirdos into a boarding school for three years and indulging their proclivities help make them less weird? LMFAO no. Some years later my favorite English teacher told me that I was the smartest person she’d ever taught (confirmed by her kids, who were amused/relieved to discover that I liked drinking beer and bullshitting just like them; on a side note being raised by a teacher of gifted kids with an excessive regard for intelligence has to have been a trip. I hope she never told them that she adopted a Chinese and an Indian because she was afraid that the local pool of white kids up for adoption would turn out to be dumb white trash.). Why? I don’t know. I guess she’d never encountered someone who was literate and also mechanically-inclined.
I guess the way I would describe my life as an excessively-online weirdo is that I find myself living in a world where people rarely get my references (and TBF I barely watch TV or Movies/wasn’t into Star Wars, Star Trek, or Harry Potter so I don’t get theirs either). Read books? Too bad. No one’s ever heard of my favorite novelist (that would be Lionel Shriver); they’re too busy reading 50 Shades of whatever. Favorite band? No one I meet has heard of Dog Fashion Disco or The Dillinger Escape Plan. I could go on but it is what it is, and I at least like football and cars enough to have something less obscure or hoe scaring to talk about.
If you want a pro-tip to level up your social skills in a hurry and have the time to spare, get a side gig working the door or barbacking a night or few at a place where people you want to be around (or at least don’t despise) like to drink. Being an acquired taste (I’m probably guilty of that.) doesn’t preclude making friends, bar patrons are a captive audience, and you’ll be forced to at least LARP as a normal person. Every once in a while you might find someone actually interesting to talk to! You’re right about time being of the essence, though. I’m 34 and the place I live (an SEC college town, and it’s summer so it’s pretty dead right now) probably doesn’t help, but I presently find myself in an episode of “Do Millennials even leave their house anymore?” I go to the bars and pretty much everyone I run into are either undergraduates or old and half of my friend group moved somewhere else after covid (a mix of people getting shaken out of their complacent lives as overpaid service industry types by the shutdowns and the town getting annoyingly expensive to live in as out of state student money gentrifies the place relative to the crappy local white collar job market).
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