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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2911 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 16, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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This is my hole pathology! It was made for me!

I don't want to waste space or hijack the thread by describing my experiences here, but suffice to say it's bad, to the point more or less exactly this tendency estranged me from my family (whose likely absent scrutiny I cannot bear, I can barely even talk about videogames with my sister) and blew up my last LD situationship where I repeatedly failed to respond accordingly to a woman bluntly and overtly hornyposting at me over an extended period.

It really fucks with my life at this point and is definitely not worth the 'upsides' if there ever were any, and I wish with all my heart to ditch this retarded habit, but so far little progress has been made. Internalizing that barely anyone cares about your 'inner life' hasn't helped, especially since like @faceh below I am actually the sort of person who Nootices and keeps track of off-key moments in other people. Alcohol helps with shame/cringe in the moment, but has no lasting effect, and increasing alcoholism has also increased the amount of alcohol needed to achieve the salutary effect. Sharing small things with friends unfortunately requires friends, which I have, but not the "kind"(?) I feel comfortable exposing my power level to. Even in waifutech-related communities (which I initially joined explicitly as an attempt to fight this stupid reflex), as an anon/pseudonymous poster under a totally separate identity, I find it extremely hard to just put my metaphorical balls on the table by shitpoasting in threads or posting explicit coomer shit (even though I suspect I am virtually a saint compared to the median denizen). Hell, writing this post has taken several shots, with me literally forcing myself to pick the phone back up (which I am suddenly very interested in laying down and doing something else) and continue writing.

I've been attempting to do "exposure therapy" by putting myself out there, on Halloween I showed up to the office in a (literal) robe and wizard hat with a tarot deck to do readings with. It was kind of a success even, I expected to play it as an ironic bit but normies people actually took it completely straight without batting an eye, and were even delighted that the ever-reclusive Rayon who never wore anything other than a plain black shirt has a quirky side after all. I don't feel any different (and mumble noncommittally whenever this is brought up) but I guess this is the kind of thing you just have to keep doing.

Next step is posting something embarrassing online but for now this post will do I suppose. I commend you for writing this and giving me the excuse to blogpost leech off of it, I thought of asking more or less this question myself sometime back, but could never actually sit down and commit it to keyboard. My condolences, couldn't have been easy.

Needing liquid courage to reveal anything about yourself is no way to live.

I'm pretty sure that exposure therapy is not the best way to go either, because you'll be exposing yourself in different ways than the exact nature at the core of your issue.

You need to get at the root of it. It's usually something unresolved, unspoken. It may be totally hidden from your conscious life and yet it controls your internal and external behavior. The influences that you can't even see are the most powerful ones.

It's usually something unresolved, unspoken. It may be totally hidden from your conscious life and yet it controls your internal and external behavior.

Like what, some [happening] I've never been able to get over with? Can't really conceptualize it, I've been this way most of my life, in fact it used to be even worse, in high school I was occasionally gently taken aside to ask if I was abused at home due to how I looked/behaved. (To be clear, I wasn't.)

I've seen your mentions of meditation downthread but, with all due respect, this doesn't seem to me like a problem caused by a lack of introspection.

Might be worth talking to a therapist. Therapists (psychologists) can be hit or miss depending on the issue, personality matches and their competence, but I think it might have some value here. The reason for this is that you need someone competent with the ability to locate and point out your blindspot and help find the root cause.

What I'm not sure about is that I think a lot of personality traits (even extreme ones) can just be temperament related (eg your genetic personality predisposition) and they're hard to track. Coping mechanisms might be different if you can't resolve the 'root cause' because its an intrinsic part of you.

For context, I talked to a therapist once that thought that some of my traits were as a result of something that happened to me when I was 'pre-verbal' (eg an infant with no conscious memory). I've still got no idea if they were onto something, but I've gotten a hold of most of my issues as I've worked on them over time.

Doesn't have to be a discrete happening, could also be a life situtation, a kind of 'this is my life now' at some point in your upbringing. Maybe you picked up on secretiveness and being overly private from others, or maybe you just used your own intelligence to figure that it was probably a good idea. Genetics may play a part too.

Introspection is necessary for healing, because only looking and acting differently outwards will in many cases be an adjacent effect at best and orthogonal at worst. I didn't say that the lack of introspection was what caused the secretiveness issue.

I showed up to the office in a (literal) robe and wizard hat with a tarot deck to do readings with. It was kind of a success even, I expected to play it as an ironic bit but normies people actually took it completely straight without batting an eye, and were even delighted that the ever-reclusive Rayon who never wore anything other than a plain black shirt has a quirky side after all.

That's really cool. And may we never forget bloodninja; perhaps we can fix AI gooners by LoRA-ing the models they talk to with his work.

Funnily enough, saying something retarded/off-key to a chatbot and extracting keks from its confused response seems to be a staple of assorted threads/posts on the topic. The more things change, etc.

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