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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Notes -
Things are going slightly better. I still believe that I am fundamentally unlovable due to autism and subpar physical appearance, but I've realized - just like my dad taught me with respect to work performance - that if I'm going to avoid terrible outcomes, I need to be in the top ten percent. That just gets you a seat at the table...just like top-10-percent performance at work is table stakes for an Aspie to get a job, keep food on the table, and not be living in the ghetto or trailerpark dodging bullets and assholes chasing you with knives. I've got to look like I could compete in physique bodybuilding competitions, be impeccably dressed, and be extremely kind AND make...hmm...maybe a million a year? just to have a chance at a relationship with someone that isn't going to wind up with someone in some kind of institution or other. There is nothing wrong with this...that's just how it is.
So I've been practicing speaking better, learning facial expressions, and being graceful. I believe that the average person - the average Joe - is every bit as good socially as an English longbowman was at archery seven hundred years ago, or as good as his Mongolian counterpart was on horseback. That they can go years without making a blunder large enough to be put into words (at least, while sober), that every smile, every gesture, every laugh is as graceful, as effortless, and as beautiful as a concert pianist's music or a professional ballerina's grace. To be better than this takes immense determination and talent, but I hope to be tolerable at some point...to not subtly repulse people because I laughed for a fraction of a second too long at a joke.
I don't know if anyone on the spectrum has ever become above-average socially. Maybe Aella, but she's a special case...I'm a dude, and short of independently advancing medical science I'll never be pretty or beautiful. But I hope that I can be charismatic enough to not only have a large social circle but convince someone to willingly and freely endure something they find disgusting. That's a hard thing to do...but there have been average people that have pulled it off.
A question, for all of you: If you have ever seen anyone who was charismatic enough to inspire people to willingly endure disgust, or misery, or chronic pain simply to make THEM happy, how did they do it?
Hmm. About the cult leaders: William Penn did something like this in 1670 with twelve jurors who went two days without food or drink, then spent nine weeks in jail because they refused to convict him. Bushel’s Case is the only one that I’m aware of, but I’m far from a historian. William Penn was a remarkably charismatic aristocrat…like the difference between, say, LeBron James or Michael Jordan and the second-string point guard for the Golden State Warriors, whose name you likely don’t know unless you follow basketball. Penn, however - unlike me - was doing what he did for some concept of the greater good. I cannot see how people like me having families and making more like me - more people who cause mild biological offense simply by existing, who activate systems of bias and prejudice almost as central to our nature as human beings as the feelings we feel about deformed people - feelings, I might add, that are either inborn or learned by six months of age. Months, not years. Six month old infants prefer attractive people to ugly ones. I can understand and accept that people like me ought to be celibate for the greater good, and should dedicate their lives to something prosocial in exchange for ordinary social inclusion. I understand the idea that we ought to be expected never to express a single shred of interest in sex or relationships, either: if we did, we might get the idea that we, like other “normal” people, had a right to shoot our shot (but not to never be rejected or some bullshit like that) like anyone else. There is value to that: we might become resentful and find ways to fuck up the social fabric that we all depend on or something.
I do not understand why we are encouraged to have relationships, given that it is likely that lights and sirens, institutions and social workers, tragedy and misery, will be involved. The best I can come up with is that I’ve earned some kind of dispensation by being a medical student, and people assume and hope that physicians can say “Not today” to personal misery and tragedy the same way they do for their hospital patients. Who knows: maybe we can figure out how to get good outcomes for our 400lb wives, or be good husbands and fathers if our wives decide to try and stab us, or some other miserable crap like that. And…maybe, and this is a hell of a stretch - I can’t quite understand - it’s better to contribute by making the next generation in these conditions than to be celibate.
I might have been exaggerating about the Mongols and ballerinas, but I think that people like this are maybe 95th percentile at best? The longbowmen I wasn’t joking about; John Smythe c. 1300 was an ordinary village blacksmith that could pull a 130lb bow and hit a dinner plate at a football field. Same with the barrel-maker in the next village over. This was ordinary. That is the ability that I think average people have. Someone that’s say, a salesman? Definitely comparable to a professional musician or something like that. And I have a friend that’s a professional musician, another that became a professional golfer. Know a couple guys that hold state powerlifting records.
You talk so much about your supposed ugliness. Have you posted a picture of yourself so far?
I talk about being unattractive. My physical appearance is...20th percentile, I'd say. Not Quasimodo, but not at all good. Add autism to that, and it's not looking good at all. I will contend that autism functions in more or less the same way as physical deformity or ugliness. Someone could watch me talking with my friends and form a durable opinion on my awkwardness after just a couple seconds. A single still photo would be enough.
Please show, don't tell.
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