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?
Your writing is quite good (the claims themselves less so). Why wouldn't the same intelligence that lets you do that apply to being 'social' as well? Both are about communicating with or having a certain impact on people.
This is hilariously false. Where'd you get that impression? Small blunders happen pretty frequently. Large blunders still happen with some frequency. From the smallest things like 'you're talking to someone, intend to say one word but say another, and they get confused' to something like 'you suggest a restaurant / activity, everyone goes to it, turns out they all hate it' to ...
I'm still struggling to understand how you came to believe all of this. Could you narrate, like, a recent particular five to ten-minute period where all of your normal acquaintances were acting like impeccable socialites while you made a bunch of blunders? As that's apparently the normal state of your life?
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