/wiz/ - Wizardry

My life has been similar. Not because I can't socialize but because I hate people. Life fucks you over so much and you just lose the urge to talk to fellow apes

I luckily have the form of autism which causes me to not give a fuck about most social interactions. But to get along I do have to "mask up" and do a practiced approximation of normal.
The bad part is I have to REALLY pay attention to not slip up in said social interactions so keeping my "mask on" is mentally exhausting.

Have you though about practicing acting when alone. That way you can sort of pretend to be a version of yourself that is brave enough to do what must be done in regard to social interaction.

I pretend to be attentive and understanding, but on the inside I an indifferent and bored. I can't quite go that extra mile and fake being friendly though.

>have used the internet since the early 2000s but never made a youtube account, newgrounds account, deviantart, or any other account on a forum to talk with people
You know there are other reasons to make accounts on those sites other then social interaction right?
Like getting points every time you rate a new submission, thus doing your part in making newgrounds a place of "quality".
Or having subscriptions and playlist on youtube, which is very convenient. Don't use deviantart so 🤷‍♂️.

Anyway, look up ways of dealing with phobias and maybe ask a love one if they can set up some professional help for you.
It helped me with my social problems (autism), it is probably worth a shot for yours.

Another tip, for practicing online, make alt/throwaway accounts or otherwise be anonymous. That way if whatever you fear happens it doesn't matter because it wasn't a real account, it doesn't count, and you were just messing around. So it doesn't feel personal at all not matter what happens.

>>162674

I am the same way. Antidepressants in high school briefly spurred me to make social media accounts while in a delusional state and try to use them but I couldn't maintain it for very long and I regret ever attempting it and I still have panics thinking about it anytime I see a normiebook link. The rest of my internet useage has been on anonymous imageboards out of neccesity until a couple of months ago when I made a reddit account and found I could handle it. Idk what changed, maybe it was my increasing awareness of impending social collapse that did it. When I first started posting anonymously I would start to shiver and sweat with every post, now that only happens very rarely when I embarrass myself bad.
>>162678
>Tfw crippling social anxiety AND I have to mask up

How do you not get anxiety over having to perform the correct responses? Even if you practice there will always be random situations that you can't predict and don't know how to deal with.

>>162679
>Even if you practice there will always be random situations that you can't predict and don't know how to deal with.

The way I see it is that everyone's foot ends up in their mouth from time to time. A consequence of making moves is that you will end up stepping in shit, that's just a fact of life. Only characters in media are always prepared for the unforeseeable. The sooner you start loading bullets into the revolver of social dynamics the better as we are a flawed species that primarily learns from mistakes.

>>162679
>social collapse
Do you societal collapse or your own collapse?

>>162679
>How do you not get anxiety over having to perform the correct responses?
Most of the time I don't actually care, which has allowed me to get enough practice in.
Not much happens with most minor screw ups anyway. It is honestly worse to be misunderstood then to trip over some social foible.
>predict
There is no prediction or anticipation. I ether reason out a response for a given situation or respond in rote (what I like to call npc mode) base on responses I learned from books/therapy on how to do small talk.

My situation is different. I had to learn "proper" social interaction from the ground up though a more academic approach. literally nothing about it came naturally. But that said, I think confidences for someone in your situation would grow a bit if you learned the basics of interpersonal communication and then practiced them like a drill. Family members are good to practice with as they already know you are a weirdo so there isn't anything on the line.

>>162674
>Is anyone else totally crippled by social phobia both offline and online?
yes

Yeah, I played games like WoW for 10 years and never spoke once on voice chat. I also became less and less likely to even text chat. As a kid I had selective mutism and I suppose I still do now.

I've come to realize that my social anxiety has nothing to do with what other people think about me, but rather it stems from a complete inability to accept certain parts of myself. Anxiety spikes around people because it activates a certain self-awareness and people mirror back your own behavior back to you. As Sartre puts it, shame brings us into a recognition of our being-for-others, of our objective view of ourselves. That by itself isn't shame producing unless coupled with an inability to accept parts of yourself which motivate the production of "shame" behavior like blushing, inhibition, reluctance to speak, a strong desire to hide and escape the situation. One wishes to escape, not the judgemental eyes of others but rather his own self-awareness of the parts of himself he desires to cull. What online anonymity offers is exactly that, a controlled experience of dealing with others, showing only text and an avatar, something with little relation to the real self.

I strongly suspect I'm a narcissist or at least have some narcissistic tendencies, as my anxiety doesn't stem from bullying or some severe rejection by others but from my own vapid ideal self-image. I realize I can only relate to other people on a shallow level and even in my own fantasy, an ideal companionship is one that mirrors back my chosen image of myself.

I don't really know why I'm like this and I don't really know how to change.

>>162685
societal collapse

I was playing TF2 and wanted to trade an item. When the other player messaged me I got so nervous I inmediatly turned off the PC.

What. You want to know somethint me? if(true) continue
read

I phobia have not
But still I only post on imageboards.
I like to be in control. On forum or stema , facebook, you post something, its there forever. Here I can delete what I want.
CHEERS

>>162801
I have narcissistic tendencies and experienced bullying and severe social rejection.

>>162824
I guess it's really about why you've created an ideal self-image in the first place. Severe rejection can trigger narcissistic withdrawal as a defense, inhabiting an ideal self-image where one feels naturally safe and protected.

I don't remember any major bullying or abuse but ever since I was little, I had a tendency to want to impress authority figures and felt more intelligent than my peers. I wasn't really rejected, I mostly withdrew on my own because I felt I had no place around people and the older I got, the more estranged and alienated I became. I think I'm too self-aware and introverted to be the kind of narcissist that builds social support and manipulates people, but I'd be lying if I said that the primary thing I look for in a companionship isn't a sense of (albeit, genuine) admiration and recognition from another person I respect.

The recent NPD literature I've read has caught up on the fact that the usual "oblivious self-aggrandizing" narcissist isn't the only type, but shares a foundation with the "covert vulnerable" narcissist, characterized by passivity, low self-esteem and a sense of inferiority compared to others. The research on this "disorder" is a mess and the DSM nerds can't seem to reconcile these two polar opposite archetypes in the same group.

For the longest time I thought I had AvPD, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that my entire condition is just an inability to humble myself in front of others and handle the give-and-take of social relationships.

Yeah I can post on non-live sites like this ok enough but any live chats I get too nervous.
What makes it worse is that I always get sweaty too, my palms and feet get drenched so easily.

>>162825
This is AvPD.

I have never even played an online game because of fearing other people.
I have had some forum accounts but I mostly lurked and dropped them if thought I was becoming recognizable or just out of embarrassment after posting something stupid.
Never used chatrooms or IRC even though I have been online since about 2000, never had accounts at those other places.
I have always just felt like a spectator in life. It amazes me that other people are able to go around doing things.

One time I tried playing Pokemon Showdown and I ended up forfeiting halfway to anxiety over being bad at it and what literal anon in a simulated online game thought and if they would mock me or bully me.

So yes.

atm im forced to get crippled online. offline… listen being quiet aint a fucking issue until interferes with life desicions or some like that. also remember people do prostitution ALOT.

Same

Internet has become so hostile it's less of a phobia and more of a desperate attempt to find a corner of my own and survive the onslaught.

I remember playing my first game online with others.

They told me I sucked :(

>>163272
and people take pride in being hostile, like a competition.
it's really weird

I realized that the metaphor "if everyone smells like shit, maybe it's you who smells like shit" perfectly represents who I am online and I'm trying to give up talking to my supposed "friends" who probably berate me talking at any time.

I mainly struggle with bad social anxiety in real life. It started when people started making rude comments about my rather big nose when I was about 13. I was a very sensitive kid so it hurt me a lot and I started withdrawing myself to avoid mean comments and I tried really hard to blend in so people wouldn't pick on me. Fast-forward a few years and I can't even go to the supermarket without feeling really anxious and stressed. Constantly angling my face as to make my nose appear less big and unable to look people in the eyes for fear that they'll find me ugly. I barely leave the house now and don't have any close friends because I'm just so scared they'll mock me or betray me. I'm slowly starting to like myself more and I'm starting to care less about what other people think about me. It's liberating. I'm really thankful for this forums because opening it up after a long day feels like coming home.

>>163534
I don't know about wizzie. It's never good to put yourself down. What makes you think your friends berate you?

>>163537
In general I feel bipolar about attention. I like it when I get attention, sometimes I don't, but in the end I always crave it. These days I feel like I've been mostly ignored whenever I talk, and a friend of mine tells me to shut up any time I talk in a group chat. Anywhere I go I usually just end up trolling people for the funny reactions, but then wonder why people hate me and don't take me seriously.

>>163538
I'm the same way, wizzie. I feel like I have been obsessively trying to compensate for the lack of attention and validation I got as a child. I recently deleted my social media because it was making me so depressed. The battle for attention and adequacy is just something you can't win and it's meaningless. The only thing that matters is how you see yourself. Have you tried taking a more serious attitude towards other people? It might make them view you as a more serious person and they'll start to respect you more.

>>163539
Someone a long long time ago told me to get an actual personality instead of being joking around all the time. I would like to believe I achieved that. But even then, people just probably find me annoying. It's hard to say. About validation, I try all the time. I want to make something out of myself. I want to leave a footprint, somewhere, somehow. But then I realize that it's all meaningless, and if anyone was to ever find that footprint, they'll look at it for 2 seconds and forget about it forever. It's a hard fight between "be someone" and "be no-one".

>>163536
A big nose is an attractive trait in a man. You should be proud of it. I often wished my nose were bigger even though I also got made fun of for having a big nose once or twice as a kid. They said I had a big nose and McDonalds eyebrows lol.

>>163541
I was always mocked for my big nose.

I used to get so anxious I'd make a comment on reddit, log out the account, and be too anxious to check the replies. I would go back a few weeks or months later when time had passed to check the reply but sometimes struggled even then.

I am not that anxious anymore and haven't done that for probably 6 or 7 years. So there is a path to overcoming that stuff but I couldn't tell you how I did.

I don't sign up for forum, youtube, reddit accounts etc. because people on the internet nowadays are always wanting to start a fight for no particular reason, and online arguing for me has become a waste of time. I'll sometimes leave mid-conversation because what's the point of all this? Even if I "win" the argument, I'll still feel like shit due to the time and energy wasted when I could've done something else with my time. It doesn't make me grow as a better person. It didn't make me learn a new insight. All internet arguing does was make me angry for no reason.

As for in real life, I used to care about what people thought of me in public until I realized that I was projecting my whole bad experience with a small subset of people online/offline with the entire human population. The mind tends to generalize and make up these negative thought patterns in order to cope with the randomness of reality. Helpful when you burn your hand on the stove, not so helpful when you're trying to predict human behavior on first impression, as human beings are more stohastic than linear. This realization gave me peace knowing that you'll never know what people think about you unless they tell you straight up, and even then, who gives a shit?

>>164874
I can't even comment on anyplace besides anonymous image boards.

>>162678
If you are able to do all that you are pretty normal. Just saying. It's not like normies care about each other either.

>>164879
I used to be afraid to read the replies on them too now I think about it. I haven't used 4chan in line a decade so I forgot I used to do it. I forget how far I came. There can be progress even from your position.

>>162674
>tortured by fear
Become for this world what world has become for you. Can't know how to help better

>>164869
Because of envy, you fool!

Yeah. I've never understood people who claim to suffer from anxiety, but then are complete social fucking butterflies online with over 20 friends, their own special cliques, people to game with, chat rooms, discords, and all that fucking shit. I myself have never even been in a chat room because of anxiety. Online social anxiety is almost as much of an issue for me as traditional social anxiety. I also haven't spoken with a stranger by myself in nearly 13 years. If it wasn't for the interactions/conversations with my mother then I'd literally never be speaking to anyone out loud except myself. I never leave the house alone and I have no license. I've never formed anything social online, not even on a basic acquaintance level. Made tons of junk accounts on reddit, but have never used them and have never tried joining a sub because I don't like reddit and I just don't like anything in general and feel like an outsider everywhere. Haven't played a MP game in over half a decade because of anxiety and because I don't want to compete with others, or even simply interact with them at all. I still feel lonely at times though and I sometimes fantasize about how nice it would be to have someone to play co-op games with, or whatever.

I'm not very good with handling hostility. I've been on the internet for a long time now and wizchan specifically since 2016, but insults still cut me pretty deep. As in they basically ruin my day and I feel anxiety riddled for the rest of said day thinking about it and even affects my enjoyment of stuff like gaming and I can't even browse this site for at least a day or two afterwards. On the flipside, whenever people are kind to me, I tend to have a slight improvement to my mood and enjoy things just a little bit more than I usually do. My skin is literally just that thin and reflective of what people say, good or bad, and even after all these years it's only toughened up by the most minimal amount. I also tend to be hyper defensive when certain kinds of hostility happens, which usually just ends up with me digging an even worse hole for myself. The worst times being when I feel like I actually have been a fool, but then get hyper defensive about it, which leads to people shitting on me even more to the point where it essentially becomes an unconscious form of digital self-immolation. Not even on wizchan do people cut any slack for idiots like me. Wizzies, just like normgroids, have very little patience and will simply call you a dumb, useless cunt over absolutely nothing. To anyone else they'd simply be content ignoring whatever it was, or just replying with, "Yeah, whatever faggot.", before then leaving it at that and then never thinking about it again. Other wizzies who are just like, "lol, I don't give a fuck about anything. I eat hostility and shit like that for breakfast", might as well be aliens from planet normgroid. I have no concept of what it's like to get shit on and just literally not care and not even think one bit at all about it and for it to mean less than nothing to you. Fucking unreal and beyond me. As it is, I'm basically like one of those guys in who are born with literal paper thin skin (as in it physically tears off at the slightest abrasion) and basically just have to live with the agony of it for the rest of their life and try however they can to avoid the overwhelming pain it brings, even though it's basically something that's largely, if not downright impossible, to avoid.

Anyway, I don't know what the fuck else to say. Sick of repeating myself and sick of getting shit on and kicked when I'm already down or just the general rowdy hostility and flippant assholeishness that you're supposed to just reciprocate and put up with even in a casual sense on imageboards, or just people being unforgiving, nitpicky fucking pricks just because they can. My whole life has just been a complete joke of nothing. I don't know why I had to be here existing, simply existing as I am now, and I really resent the fact that I am, since I'm just an empty shadow with a useless and shitty existence that may as well have not even happened at all. All I can do is sit here and wait to die and suffer with all the weaknesses and hang ups of my horrible psyche and personality.

>>163272

Agreed. I've given up on communicating with most of the boards/threads even here because of the likely hostility from others, or just the generally overwhelming contempt one receives either way.

>>162801
>>162825

That really sumps up a lot of my own issues as well. I was never rejected or dealt with abuse growing up either, yet I'm still a complete narcissistic pansy. Like you said, I never had the strength or fortitude to be able to humble myself in front of others and accept that everyone can be dumb or make mistakes. Therefore, I avoided social interaction as much as possible and pushed others away, since I was too afraid of it ending badly and that they'd probably hate, insult or abandon me at some point, or how I'd just make a fool of myself somehow and would be mortified and unable to forgive myself, even if others could. I never had the courage to let myself potentially hurt others, or even hurt myself, or be an idiot and to move on in the face of it all since that's what life and human relationships are all about and that in the end nobody's perfect and we all have are ugly sides and that we will inevitably hurt one another, but as long as we move on and accept/understand our faults and the faults of others then we move forward together and keep helping each other and being there for one another so we're not lonely. The risk of pain in this was always massive for me and it frightened me. Frightened me so much that I eventually just retreated from the world altogether. I always felt like a shell of a human being, with nowhere I wanted to go and nothing I ever wanted to do. I'm just a very flawed and covertly narcissistic person who's always taken himself far too seriously. Even in waifu fantasies, I just want someone who will pat my head and tell me everything is alright and that I'm a good person, while letting me clutch onto them as I cry into their lap. It's all about how the other person can take care of me and compliment my self-pitying nature. I can be hyper defensive to criticism, yet at the same time languish in all my own faults. I don't know what I am, but like you I don't know how to change and to be honest I'd rather just get cancer and die.

>>167602
>Like you said, I never had the strength or fortitude to be able to humble myself in front of others and accept that everyone can be dumb or make mistakes. Therefore, I avoided social interaction as much as possible and pushed others away, since I was too afraid of it ending badly and that they'd probably hate, insult or abandon me at some point, or how I'd just make a fool of myself somehow and would be mortified and unable to forgive myself, even if others could. I never had the courage to let myself potentially hurt others, or even hurt myself, or be an idiot and to move on in the face of it all since that's what life and human relationships are all about and that in the end nobody's perfect and we all have are ugly sides and that we will inevitably hurt one another, but as long as we move on and accept/understand our faults and the faults of others then we move forward together and keep helping each other and being there for one another so we're not lonely

Yeah it's always your fault right ? Normie disgusting psychopathic behavior and lack of morals is fine, it's just human imperfection so we should all love each other. I don't know what your experiences were with people for you to blame yourself so much but i can't have the same approach.

>>167602
with me, it was simply easier to talk since I could start out as a blank slate with people I didn't know. when things get heated yeah, then I usually want to bail but it's easy enough to avoid confrontation. I have wasted time doubling down on shit, but it's just easy to pick up and leave online. Making an ass out of myself in the real world since I can't talk like a normal person and am never comfortable in my own skin unless I can show off some trivia knowledge(I'm not good at anything else). On the internet, I can just be a ghost, the bodily tension isn't there.

On chans people are more openly hostile due to the anonymity aspect

Offline? Yes. I can barely string two sentences together without stumbling on words, saying "umm"/"ah", etc. I have a huge phobia of talking on the phone, and of talking to strangers.

Online is a little better. I can post on forums OK. Same with image boards, but I am confused by the hostility surrounding them. IRC, dischord or other chatrooms are a nono. I hate multiplayer games, and I loathe talking on voice chat.

I actually had an account at a computer forum last decade. I managed to post thousands of times, but I never had any "online friends" or anything from it. People rarely even replied to my posts, and over time I realized that a lot of the other posters seemed to actually know each other, there were forum cliques and stuff (I think people even complained about that), there were people who obviously knew each other offline, people organizing real-life meetups, and (of course) the forum grew and then there were threads and even whole boards boards created for the discussion of weight lifting, succubusfriends, high-paying graduate jobs, and all that sort of crap. I guess at some point my self-awareness must have increased to real-life levels and I stopped posting and then just quit out of embarrassment; I changed my email address and password to some randomly generated things so that I couldn't log in anymore and just never went back.
Apart from that I never used most of those other things. I have never even played online games.

>>167603

I always felt like everything was my fault, yes. I still do. Normals can be extremely unforgiving and cruel, I'm not denying that, but my personal experiences with normals, at least over a decade ago when I still went outside, were mostly atypical. People accepted me and were friendly towards me. More so when I was a kid I'd say, before largely just being ignored as I got older and proceeded into middle school and then my brief time in high school before I dropped out and became a hermit. I was too afraid of being hurt or of hurting others. I held myself to a standard that was both neurotic and narcissistic. I took myself too seriously and I couldn't just relax and allow myself to make mistakes. In my mind both now and then, if pain was going to be a factor in human relationships, any sort of pain, then I'd rather just run away. It's better for me and it's better for them, that's what I thought, but the reality is that I was simply too wrapped in myself to let my guard down. I have to check myself on this sort of thinking though because I actually have a diagnosis for severe autism, so my extreme difficulty when it comes to anxiety and forming relationships with others doesn't all just come back to covert narcissism or profound emotional weakness and such. They reinforce it I guess, but my brain and the way I process emotions/thoughts is just fundamentally broken/different when compared to most others. At this stage in my life, people are certainly likely to be nothing more than ravenous hyenas to someone like me. I have no desire to ever stick my neck out and I'll simply remain in isolation until the day I die. I won't deny feeling lonely though because, unwizardly or not, I am. The trouble is that other people are poison, so how exactly can I ever stymie my loneliness? I guess the shitty reality is that, beyond wizchan and my immediate family, I never will. I went from never feeling lonely in my early years, to feeling profoundly lonely later in life. Hopefully I'll swing back to the former stance at some point, but, if not, then there's always death to solve that problem and all the rest of my problems for me.

>>167605

I can understand all that and I can even manage to replicate that sort of indifference on certain occasions, but hostility online still sucks. It's exhausting and just outright ruins any sort of discussion. I don't have the skin for it and I don't have the patience either. Dealing with insults and put downs in real life would obviously be worse, but hostility online has always been pretty much one of the main things, next to my inability to simply connect and feel at home anywhere, which has prevented me from ever engaging socially online, in even a moderate capacity. Wizchan itself has gotten smaller and smaller to me over the years, due to all the rampant and needless hostility. There really isn't much of this website left that's still palatable for someone like me. Someone like me also have nowhere else to go though, so I'm really just stuck in limbo basically.

>>167617
I tried to get along with people and opened up to them but everything you say you fear could happen actually happened to me that's why your post upset me a bit, i'll quote you again

>I avoided social interaction as much as possible and pushed others away, since I was too afraid of it ending badly and that they'd probably hate, insult or abandon me at some point

They do insult and despise you, in a subtle way that ends up eating you from inside.

>or how I'd just make a fool of myself somehow and would be mortified and unable to forgive myself, even if others could.

They won't as long as it serves them to put you down, it's also fuel for their contempt, what they really think about you. Beware of small mistakes really.

>we all have are ugly sides and that we will inevitably hurt one another, but as long as we move on and accept/understand our faults and the faults of others then we move forward together and keep helping each other and being there for one another so we're not lonely.

But that's not really how it works. People often hold grudges and hate each other for ever, never founding common ground again after "standing up for themselves" and all that, it was pretty common at my last workplace so i don't agree with this pro-life tone, normal world is often dirty business. It's good that you acknowledge your autism or whatever it is because it's probably the source of your problem and you hiding from society is a self-preservation reaction. I used to think the same things about myself following 9 years of extreme isolation, that i'm a narcissist and all that, reason why i put my guard down after finding a new job thinking i was the problem just to end up even more mentally broken and depressed in the end, with a new set of social traumas. I find it hilarious that people that wouldn't hurt a fly like us are calling ourselves "narcissists" when i reality according to my experience with others we're probably blaming ourselves for the last leftovers of human pride we have, but that's just a theory and i don't fucking know what to think anymore. Don't mean to discourage you by the way, there are probably less worse people out there, after all i always was an unlucky bastard.

>>167620

Fair enough. I'm really more speaking to the times when I was a kid growing up and how lots of people were genuinely kind and friendly towards me. I pushed them away out of fear and an autistic inability to connect with others. Fear/anxiety and feeling hyper self-conscious about myself all the time pretty much singlehandedly ruined my childhood, or at least significantly diminished it. Things could've probably been different back then had I not been saddled with autism and so much anxiety, since no one ever rejected me or picked on me. If anything it was quite the opposite and I was given pretty much every opportunity possible to join in with everyone else and be accepted, but I just couldn't do it and would either run away or keep everyone at arm's length to protect myself. This was especially true in elementary school, whereas middle/high school I was kind of just left alone/ignored and was when people stopped trying to reach out to me. Someone might say, and I even think to myself most times, how I did all this to myself, but did I? I couldn't control how my mental handicaps like autism, OCD, intense anxiety, paranoid delusions etc., tormented me. These mental ailments fundamentally restricted what I could enjoy or was capable of as a human being. These weren't things I could've simply hand waved away, or just "gotten over" with more effort. Thinking on such aspects to this reminds me how I shouldn't beat myself up so much. Like most wizzies, I was simply a victim of fate in my own way, which left me in both a cruel predicament back then and which has continued on to this day.

I won't pretend that the normal world is sunshine and lollipops. Despite my idealistic ramblings, I don't fool myself over the way the world actually is. I might have gotten lucky in childhood with friendly people, but a guy like me would get eaten the fuck alive if I ever tried to stick my neck out now. No doubt about it. I still think I'm far too wrapped up in myself and take myself too seriously, but, at the end of the day, normals don't really care. You're either useful to them, or you're not. All this stuff I go over in my head is simply irrelevant, or is just ammunition to be used against me. I don't have to have ever been bitten by a mangy hyena to know that it would probably hurt and is quite likely to happen in a world filled with mangy hyenas, so despite me never having been shit on or put down by normals, I'm still well aware of what they're actually like. It really sucks, I tell you. Ultimately I just wish I'd reciprocated the kindness of others and made the most of it when I had the chance, instead of being crippled by my own autism and social anxiety. It can be said that I should cut myself more slack. Most normals have all these faults and more, which sort of leads back to what I said earlier. That I'm not special, since everyone has faults, but I act as if I'm the only who does and that no one could possibly accept or understand me. Of course, I chastise myself over every little flaw and try to hold myself to a monk/saint like standard, when I'm basically just a degenerate hermit, whereas normals gloss over their own flaws and step on others without remorse or hesitation since they feel whatever they do is justified. I just wish I never had to exist in this world. It's so awful and I've never known how to navigate it. There's fucking giant bear traps in every direction and I'm basically just stuck in my isolated corner, miserably waiting for death.

I can't play online team games. I don't care if I constantly lose in 1v1 and someone calls me bad, but in team games I feel awful when teammates call me names. I only play single player games now.

>>167648


Yeah, I think this point you made about being useful to others is the most crucial. It's either that or seeming like hypercompetent or knowledgable about something. I don't really feel that people would stay kind for long, though. I don't think normals have the same as issues as autistics/recluses. They're far less neurotic and usually have a base level of self-esteem they don't sink below. It's very rare for them to do much self-reflection after a certain point. Introspection and then more introspection on specific failures is like my main mode of being, so it is as if I'm on an entirely different planet from most people in real life.

>>167648
I honestly think you should never blame yourself in the slightest for stuff you did when you were a child.

>Most normals have all these faults and more, which sort of leads back to what I said earlier. That I'm not special, since everyone has faults, but I act as if I'm the only who does and that no one could possibly accept or understand me. Of course, I chastise myself over every little flaw and try to hold myself to a monk/saint like standard, when I'm basically just a degenerate hermit, whereas normals gloss over their own flaws and step on others without remorse or hesitation since they feel whatever they do is justified.

I understand what you mean, even the most weirdest nut could take it upon himself and participate in society and feel somewhat accepted so why wouldn't you ? But as you told it yourself, deep down you're not like them and would probably end up confused a lot and taken advantage of in many social settings. Personally it's after experiences like this i understood that modern hermitism does not only exists because of petty psychological reasons but of course it's no excuse to dwell in ressentment or anything of the sort. I think you're really hard on yourself, you're probably a very kind & gentle lad. Altough i drawed a shitty portrait of people i assure you that a good portion of normals are not that bad though, some of them even really kind.

>>167671
I was this competent fast as an arrow useful and helpful idiot at my last job and you're spot on as it effectively raised the question of "how long". At first people really liked me and even let me get away with my awkwardness but didn't last too long though, which was only fair considering that this job was shit (cleaning) so i wasn't doing anything special anyway. I was also very altruistic because this job never tired me but no good deeds goes unpunished i swear it's true, but i will never go into details about such petty pathetic stuff.

Why does it feel more natural to me to interact with my cat than with another human beings? I love my cat. Other people make me anxious. This intellect was born in the wrong body, it should feel natural to interact with other humans, shouldn't it? We are humans after all. Instead it makes me hyper self aware and sometimes gives me an out-of-body experience. I wish I was a cat.

>>162674
Yes, I only really have any semblance of confidence while anonymous online, anything like a name and I'll slowly but surely break down. It used to be worse though, when I was a kid I would alt+f4 a game if someone started talking to me in it. I can kinda hold down a name online these days too but sometimes I get scared to even login to my steam account and sometimes I'll abandon everything online for a couple days and pretend to be someone else.

>>162678
>to get along I do have to "mask up" and do a practiced approximation of normal
That's what every single normalfag says, "just fake it til you make it bro!", sure you can kinda fake it online, it's easy, you cant see faces, but irl people can instantly read your body language and recognize that you're a weirdo. All it takes is literally one thing, a discrepancy in your posture, and small wrong note in your tone, bad eye contact for a second, and then just like that you are a weirdo or a creep.

>>167706
I'm glad you pointed this out because it's what always happened to me. The only time people sort of let it go is if we have more than surface-level interactions e.g similar interests. They still get resentful that I don't change. It's seen as intentional and a character flaw that I'm not like them. They see it as me fucking myself over as it screwed me over in interviews. The reality is the rest of society is brutal anyone that doesn't fit in socially.

Once you ask yourself what do you have to lose by some people's thoughts about you, you will at least fell less anxious.

>>167706
Why do you care if they think you are a weirdo?

>>167671

>I don't think normals have the same as issues as autistics/recluses. They're far less neurotic and usually have a base level of self-esteem they don't sink below.

Yes, that's true. I meant that normals have tons of flaws, but are flawed in very different ways. I guess my point is that we all have flaws, but you're right that the sorts of flaws I posses put me in a substantially worse position than your average normal who's own flaws don't in any way prevent them from aping with all the other apes and proceeding along in this world overflowing with pitiless indifference and mayhem. Your avergae normal might be greedy, possessive, cruel, spiteful, contemptuous, or even suffer with more neutral/sharable issues like addiction, loneliness, a coldness of emotion, or what have you, but none of them will tend to impede their daily actions or sense of confidence in themselves. If anything some of these things I've mentioned just reinforce it. A normal will also tend to get more moments of enjoyable life satisfaction, even when they be down or in a rough patch. For someone like me, I simply get nothing. I have the peace and quiet of solitude, but nothing else. A normal can replicate conditions of peace and quiet if they wish, but, aside from my mother, I have no way possible to ever develop connections with others and someday have loved ones who care deeply for me and that could help stymie loneliness, or places I could leave the house to go to, or things I'm talented in to find solace in, or even just a reason to live and be satisfied with the world. On the counts of things like autism, social/online anxiety, deep depression, moderate to intense OCD related thoughts/rituals, mild schizophrenia and agoraphobia, most normals have no clue what it's like to be truly out of step in a world that you can literally find no place in whatsoever.

I guess I'll still mention that we all have problems and I'm not special in that regard compared to anyone else, but, even so, it's hard not to see how both I, and others like me, are in a far more grave position than most any other normal could even begin to comprehend. I put myself down as being narcissistically self-absorbed, but, as you say, it's really just morbid self-reflection talking more than anything else, mixed with simply unbiasedly acknowledging the grim reality of my situation as it exists. Self-reflection and being able to understand one's faults also isn't necessarily narcissistic, as you say. Again, as you pointed out, most normals barely do much of either, even over the course of their entire lives.

I guess I just feel that I should've tried to be more accepting of my human faults when I was younger and when I still participated in the world and is the time when people still went out of their way to be kind to me and to get to know me. I'll admit that I've been giving normals, in a general sense, a bit too much credit, since they can be far more often vicious, judgmental and generally unforgiving. They exclude others for the faults they carry at the drop of a hat, but never account for their own. Of course, to say all normals are like this is equally ridiculous. I'm sure that, even for a guy of my age, there are normals out there who would probably be able to show me kindness and acceptance (who can say how one goes about finding them), which I'd more than likely runaway from because, just like when I was a kid, I'd be too afraid of them hurting me or abandoning me, or, if not that, that I'd just make their lives worse by association of knowing me. I guess I just feel it's somewhat narcissistic to feel like I should never cause anyone pain and that it's unforgivably wrong, since nobody's perfect and everybody, no matter how nice or kind they are, can sometimes cause pain to another. Even as a kid, I was almost puritanical when it came to avoiding any sort of pain infliction or of finding myself in a position where I might be forced to humble/make a fool of myself, even though one might say that pushing others away could've also caused them pain, but better a one-time pain like that, versus myriad other pains that might come from a continued association, or at least that was my thought process at the time, whether I realized it or not. In the end, like I said before, it really just came back to me being crippled by anxiety and being unable to let my guard down or connect with other due to my autism, which, while it surprisingly never got me any grief from anyone, was still quite pronounced in its own way.

>>167680

>I honestly think you should never blame yourself in the slightest for stuff you did when you were a child.

I don't necessarily blame myself per se, but I do lament the faults I was born with and which developed/worsened from there. Ultimately I just wish I had been born as someone else or, better yet, not been born at all.

>even the most weirdest nut could take it upon himself and participate in society and feel somewhat accepted so why wouldn't you?

That wasn't quite what I was getting at, but it's a point to mention nonetheless, I suppose. I'd actually say that certain oddballs/nutbars can prove to be very well equipped to operate in society and the greater world at large. Sometimes even moreso than normals. So long as they have a blind confidence in themselves, or are otherwise unphased by the normal world, then it would make perfect sense why someone like them could do what they do, whereas I could not. As you say, the key is to never let yourself be taken advantage of and to stand resolute in your own identity, which I'd have a great difficulty in doing, given the neurotic and insecure mess that I've always been and still am. I guess it sometimes bothers me however that you sometimes see "depressed" or "autistic" individuals who seem to be able to participate and enjoy life just to the same extent normals can. I seem to recall some autistic young succubus who's been posted here sometimes that fits this description, but there are a couple others as well. One I can think of is some animator guy on YouTube called 'Lev', who's does the whole, "I'm so depressed and anxious", thing, but acts just like a normal for the most part and can still participate in the normal world, (partying, having sex, carving their path through the world, etc.). It's a really random example, but I'm sure you get what I mean. To my mind, these people just aren't as debilitated with these issues as I, or other extremely debilitated wizards are, so I don't really wonder how they can function with normals when I can't, since their level of debilitation never precluded them from doing so, whereas it always has for me.

>Altough i drawed a shitty portrait of people i assure you that a good portion of normals are not that bad though, some of them even really kind.

Yes, I'm sure you're right, but given my extreme unlikelihood in ever meeting them they may as well not even exist at all.

>>167720
I'm not him, but being a a weirdo means you will get treated like shit.

It's sort of like Pompoko: the tanuki that can pose as humans can survive and the ones that can't get fucked.

yo

My life has been completely dominated by social anxiety since the last years of high school. I know it probably affected my younger years as well, but back then most people assumed I was a "late bloomer" or just shy.

I'm 28 now, never had a job, can't drive (I know how to drive, but anxiety prevents me from doing it or going for the test), have very few friends, never had a girlfriend or any sexual experiences. I still can't leave the house alone in ANY capacity, and have basically rotted over the last 10 years.

I can't walk around the block by myself, or make appointments on the phone by myself. I struggle to, and avoid answering the door if I get a fucking pizza delivered. All doctor's appointments I go with my mom, I walk the dog with my mom, etc. If my mom isn't around I can do those things with my sister as well.

Honestly surprised I'm not an alcoholic or drug addict at this stage. I'm overweight from binge eating non-stop to cope. I've tried SSRIs (they don't do shit) and benzos have high risk of tolerance and/or addiction. That's if you can even find a shrink to hand them over in the first place.

My assumption is that I'll end up killing myself at some point, or if my parents die I'll just end up rotting away alone in an apartment somewhere. Too scared to live.

I'm the opposite. Tried socializing online/offline for years trying to make friends, but completely unable to. Made zero progress.

>>167926
The words of a stranger can only do so much, but I hope you overcome this one day wizard. Even if you do commit suicide, don't allow social anxiety / social phobia to contribute to you making that decision, you are demeaning yourself and betraying the little boy inside of you.

My advice is to realise that really nobody cares about you and that the only thing stopping you opening the door and heading to Destination A is your own panic-ridden mind. Some people are naturally shy, and I wish there were more shy people around. But collapsing inwardly will stop you from either appreciating life for what it's worth, or taking your life as a result of rational consideration. Please, dear wiz, calm down and go for a walk each day, even if it's around the block as you say. You were brought into this world as vulnerable and innocent as anybody else, as valuable or value-less as anybody else, and you deserve to assert your right to exist.

>>167926

Yeah. My position in life is about the same, if not actually a little worse. I'm also 28, have no license, only had one job in my entire life which lasted for about a month at a local video store nearly 13 years ago, highschool dropout, zero friends online or offline. Depressed, anhedonic, socially anxious, clinically confirmed autist, fairly frequent bouts of OCD thought loops/rituals and occasional schizophrenic/paranoid delusions which flare in intensity whenever I go outside or anywhere unfamiliar. I'm also more or less agoraphobic at this point and haven't gone anywhere by myself in just about 13 years (apart from 2 walks around the block in the middle of the night spread years apart from one another), which is when I dropped out of school and just after I quit/was about to be fired from that job I mentioned. In all this time, I'd reckon I've only clocked about 300-400 hours outside at an absolute maximum. I can't answer the phone and I certainly couldn't ever answer the door. Outside of my mother, father and occasionally my brother when he comes to visit, I speak with no one. Never used a mic, never been in a chat room and I haven't verbally spoken with any sort of strangers at all, outside of dentists/doctors which both my parents always accompany me for and I only very, very rarely ever go to see.

At this point, I spend most days nearly catatonic and have developed a strong habit towards napping/sleeping to the point I might as well have narcolepsy. I have no dreams or healthy hopes for the future and I'm not sure I ever really did. I've ideated on suicide/a painless death practically every day for many, many years now, which itself amounts to essentially my only hope in life. My room is a stuffy, sterile tomb and all the windows are sealed over with bull clipped curtains, cardboard and garbage bags. Even when I open the window, I just reach my hand through the curtain so as to keep the curtains closed, since the fresh air is able to circulate even in spite of that. My days are spent catatonically staring off into space, sleeping, forcing myself to play video games so as to kill time, aimlessly refreshing a handful of tabs and refreshing wizchan (wizchan, wikipedia, torrent websites, and occasionally a couple reddit subs are quite literally the only sites I browse), or sometimes just spontaneously picking a spot on the floor in here to just lay down on for a little while staring at the carpet fibers and other random objects that I've stared at a thousand times before.

This is all rather starkly juxtaposed for me against other things. For instance, I used to be fairly overweight (obese, even), like yourself, but managed to drop almost all of it a number of years back. At this point, my diet is about as clean and healthy as you could possibly get. Keep in mind that I have an extremely weak stomach that, as I got older, only seemed to get weaker and weaker to the point I couldn't even stomach eating most kinds of junk without downright excruciating gut cramps. As in feeling like you just hate broken glass, or have an alien chestburster trying to gnaw its way out of your guts. It wasn't all just because of that though, since I also started exercising fairly regularly and intensely which mostly sprang from what were essentially waifu fantasies and wanting to lose weight/get fit on account of making myself worthy of her and also because I just simply couldn't stand the thought of me being fat anymore. Pathetic you might say, but there it is anyway. To this day, I still exercise for something to do, but only once or twice a week and only for about 10-20 minutes, if that. I mostly just do goblet squats and tall kneeling presses with a couple kettlebells I got a while back. I mostly just use the 25 pound bell, but sometimes use the 35 pound one for swings or squats. As it stands, it'll never be enough to really get me in super great shape, but at least it's something to do every now and again and keeps me from pulling anything whenever I have to stretch for something. It was ultimately all futile however, since it couldn't change the vacant mess I've always been and still am. Eating healthily and exercise can only compliment and truly improve the life of an already well adjusted, or cognitively able person. They're just useless gestures for someone like me, who is both cognitively limited in terms of autism and who also suffers from a level of shyness that's criminally vulgar and completely incapacitating. Thus these things are empty, pointless, and mean about as much as just doing nothing at all. A chronic sense of utter nihilism, depression and being an efilist to boot, are all pretty much just the icing on the non-existent cake.

On the plus side, my parents always greet me warmly and treat me quite well. I'm glad I have them to talk to. Once they're gone, I imagine I'm going to suffer a steep decline in my mental health and I'm not sure where I'll end up. I'm fortunate that, unless the whole world comes undone, I have no concerns of ever ending up on the streets. As things are, I can expect to live in this house until the day I die, even after my parents are gone. I also get disability money and am even managing to save quite a bit for the future, thanks to the additional savings features. I'm thankful for that of course, but I'm not looking forward to the day I'm completely alone. I can imagine I might get an odd visit every year or so from my brother, but that's about it. As awful as I felt for so long now, it hurts the most to realize that these are actually the good times. Things can only get worse as time goes on.

Song related pretty much sums all this up for me, since I know there will come a day when my mother will die, who's my best and only friend in the whole world and is the only one who truly gives a shit about me, and by her dying leave me all alone and I'll be left to linger/wander on by myself in a cold/cruel world as an aged autistic shut-in withering away and waiting to die himself in a lonesome and dusty old house. I hold out for the possibility that I might finally find the nerve to kill myself in such a situation, but, considering my weak, gutless nature, I just don't know.

>>167957

Not him, but, since we're similar, I'll just mention that I'm a completely hollow human being. I was born with a mote of dust for a heart and a useless block of wood for a brain. You say that sorts like me and him deserve to assert our respective existences just like anyone else, but in what way? Assert it towards what? I can't speak for him obviously, but when I think of even just going for a walk I can only ever dismiss the possibility. For what purpose would I do such a thing? Where would I go? I have no interest in aimless wandering, especially when I feel so vulnerable and anxious when outside. The point is, is that there is no point for me. I managed to start exercising and eating well, which are things some other wizzies couldn't even fathom doing, that's true, but so what? The origins for doing those things were entirely unique and based on pure chance. I didn't just "will" them into being, they just randomly happened and that's the truth. And even in spite of what you might call the benefits of doing such things, where I am now? I'm still trapped and continuing to mentally and physically deteriorate in this stuffy hole of a room, except I'm just a little bit fitter and healthier than I otherwise would be. I still ideate on suicide pretty much every day and I still sit catatonically, languishing in depression/anhedonia. I don't know. Maybe I'll get another bolt of lightning that will compel me to do something with myself. I doubt it, but I guess it could happen. What would be the point? Well, that's a great question. You tell me. You know what else, though? I'd still much, MUCH rather just die right now and save myself the hassle of all of it, good or bad.

>>167989
>>167926
I relate to these a lot. Been dealing with anxiety for nearly thirty years. Diet and excercise sort of helps and I can sometimes calm myself a tiny bit by trying to reason my way out of it. It's depressing to be an over thirty person who can't wait in line at the grocery store without shaking. I'm tall and muscular, but my body language is that of a scared child. Even night walks in my tiny, safe town are stressful.

It's hard to know where my anxiety ends and my autism begins. I have a lot of sensory hyper-sensitivity issues that add to my anxiety. ASD and anxiety make for a bad and life constricting combo.

Good luck, wizzies.

>>167926
well I haven't just stayed home, but to be honest, it'd have been better for me to be this way instead of failing. It's a constant battle between when I'm on my own and knowing I'm shit and then having had to subject myself to trying to function normally in public only to get treated like trash. It's sort of like just the endgame and actively doing stuff has fucked me due to the material cost or failing at it.

This is more of a combination of social anxiety and just being terrible at everything and a bad learner.

>>168001
Same here. People talk about "exposure therapy" and how you just need to go out and do things and get used to them but I don't think exposure to the outside helped me at all. Even with being forced to work I never really got better at simple things like sending emails or making phone calls. It never improved anything else. I can make myself go for a walk but I still feel as jumpy and nervous as the first time I ever went for a walk by myself. Absent some obligation to go out, I just don't, and for the most part I wish I had just stayed home the whole time.

>>168007
Yeah, I have remorse every time I go out to walk.

There's also the whole "people don't care about you" shit and it's like not the same as being invisible. Do they feel strongly about some random on the street? no. But if they seem creepy, ugly, etc. the judgement is still made. Only difference is they only remember if they see me again while Im haunted by the upset look for hours on end after.

I think normals just assume that exposure makes you better at interaction. There's the other route I've seen talked about where it's more like you have to basically act 24/7 to emulate normal people, but I've never been a good actor.

>>168007
>>168010
I can relate.
>I can make myself go for a walk but I still feel as jumpy and nervous as the first time I ever went for a walk by myself.
Same, and I go out for walks as much as I can, as fast as I can and without walking into stores, buses, or interacting with anyone. To be fair it got easier over time, but I'm still anxious, and I know that other people can see it. It also doesn't take much to completely shatter what little confidence I might have mustered.

>>167999

>my body language is that of a scared child. Even night walks in my tiny, safe town are stressful.

Yeah, that's exactly how it is for me and which is why, next to it basically being a stupid hassle with no point, I don't go on walks. It's been a very long time since I last went for a walk by myself, but I can still recall how uncomfortable the moments were when I'd be walking along down the sidewalk and suddenly see someone else in the distance walking the opposite direction and whom I'd inevitably have to pass. I'd begin to get hyper self-conscious about my stride, or whether or not I'm walking really awkwardly, or whether I should just cross the street and avoid passing whoever it is, which would just make me look even more strange/pathetic looking, only for me to just awkwardly pass them and go on my way. And yeah, I'm well aware of how little of a shit the other person cares about things like this. To them, I'm basically just a shadow or equivalent to a telephone pole they have to walk past. These days, most people are just looking at their phones anyway, so they might not look up even once to see that I was there. I can logically realize this to be the case, but I still feel generally uncomfortable, exposed and anxious when outside. Of course it's not logical or rational to carry myself as if all eyes are on me and that people are peeking through their windows to see what a freak I am, but realizing such things doesn't make as much of a difference as one would hope it would.

As a child I used to always hide behind my mother when we were walking down the street when random strangers would pass us by. That habit of mine really exemplified my meek and overwhelmingly shy nature. To this day, like yourself, I have very meek, tense and awkward looking body language. Even my mother has commented on this in the rare times when I've been out, in a reassuring way mind you, telling me how I don't have to look so tense and uptight and to try to not instinctively look away or seem uncomfortable when others pass near me, or are just generally nearby me. Oddly enough, she tells me that I don't walk as tensely as I did years ago, but, even so, despite being an average looking man, of average looking build and stature, I carry myself like I'm an abused, quivering little lamb. Many years ago, I can remember when I went in with my mother to the grocery store and how when we got to the cashier, I just stood there stiff as a board with my neck turned and autistically looking away out the nearby window, despite no one being around us and the cashier just being a rather tiny succubus. Even on the odd times when I go to a restaurant with my family, I dread having to order anything and the last time I went to one I actually just got my mother to do it for me.

I remember a couple years ago when I wanted to try riding a bicycle again with a slight whim towards maybe using it regularly, since when you're on a bicycle you don't have to worry about awkwardly passing by anybody, or at least not to the same degree when you're walking. It was a sports/enthusiast bicycle I'd gotten a long time ago as a present from my grandfather, but never used. Well, I got on the thing one night and couldn't even figure out how all the different gears and shit worked, which created this loud clicking noise and mechanical delay whenever I pedaled and I pretty much just looked like a total fool and could only stomach riding towards only a couple meters away from our driveway before just turning back in anxiety and embarrassment, despite not a soul being around. I even asked my parents to get the tires refilled and I bought myself a comfy seat, so it'd be less uncomfortable to sit on. Even after doing that, I can recall how my mother drove down to the bay one night, which is only about 5 minutes away from here, and how I'd meet her there on the bike. Again, the clicking was still fucking there and I still couldn't figure out how the gears worked. I awkwardly clicked my way down to the bay and, fortunately, only had to briefly pass one random couple who were walking along that night and whom couldn't help, but stop and look at me, this disheveled, overweight, out of breath and poorly dressed looking bum on a clicking bicycle that he clearly didn't even know how to use properly. Well, I just clicked my way past and not long after ended up at the location on the bay where my mom was, where I loaded the bike into the trunk, went home and never used it again. My dad had already taken the bicycle in to a shop to see if it was working correctly and apparently it was and, like I said, I was just too stupid to use it properly.

>It's hard to know where my anxiety ends and my autism begins. I have a lot of sensory hyper-sensitivity issues that add to my anxiety. ASD and anxiety make for a bad and life constricting combo.

Both are so bad for me that it really doesn't matter. Even so, I sometimes wonder if maybe being an agoraphobe has intensified these things to a certain extent. Since leaving the house in broad daylight literally feels like stepping out into an alien world and can be quite surreal/unpleasant for me. I'm very thankful I live in a quiet, small town, since too much activity or people makes me shut down completely. Even just going outside on a quiet sunny day, makes me shut my eyes until we get wherever it is that we're going to, since looking at the sunlit scenery is too much for me to process and just gives me a headache and makes me queasy. Despite this, me and my parents managed to make 2 separate excursions to local nature trails within the last few months, which I'll admit were nice given how completely deserted they were and how cloudy the weather was, making getting there/being there less of a hassle. I even saw an Osprey fly right in front of me and off into the distance when I climbed to the top of a vacant watchtower. My parents make the act of going outside possible. Without them, I could never do it, not unless I was literally starving to death and perhaps not even then.

>>168045
Holy shit. I can really relate to this. The person walking in the opposite direction thing is always stressful as hell. The phone stuff helps because I can fake looking at it and then it takes the eye contact aspect out of it. The issue is, also my walking isn't normal at all due to some motor skills issues so it compounds the stress and I also have to constantly retie my shoes.

The body language thing is totally me as well. I can try to just walk straight or appear not stressed out, but it breaks down quickly. I know deep down I'm worthless so I don't have the normal pride everyone does. I've done the neck thing so many times as well.

I can still go outside, but it's nerve wracking. The phone and also using buses and looking out of the window are what make it possible. I usually just walk as much as possible on the backstreets.

Though I've gotten into shit since some people will react poorly to awkward stuff. One time I was tying my shoes but moved onto the side and some super tall blonde chiseled guy was accusing me of messing with his car since it was parked on the sidewalk.

On the bus, I went to the back and some black guy got upset with me since I was sweaty and said I had lice because I was adjusting my hair and demanded I move. He was just yelling a lot.

There are also like multiple incidents where law enforcement or store security people have fucked with me either walking or going to stores.

Had this problem since forever. Hopelessly shy and rejected from every social circle I could muster the courage to tackle, then got bullied to hell and have been trying to climb my way out ever since. Really just needed a good friend, not sure whether to blame myself since I acted like such a fraud to keep them around so would inevitably lose them. I think I was just the result of bad luck, surrounded by peers that were nothing like me and didn't care to know anything about me. It's hard to blame yourself when you feel cheated.

I'm mostly daydreaming when I'm outside and don't mind other people except if they block my path. If they think something of me I don't see that? Never thought about it much if there is something wrong with me. I don't see how they are different from me when they are alone? And groups mind their own business. No direct eye contact and I am good to go.

>>168061
nothing worse than a normalfag who chooses to pick on someone who is clearly socially anxious, absolute scum

>>168045
Sometimes I feel thankful my autism is so bad. I lack a lot of self-awareness most of the time, which may shield me in a way from even more pain. On the fairly rare times I can pick up on people's body language and when I'm able to look them directly in the face, I see how weirded out they are by me. Most days I'm sort of oblivious to how odd I must appear beyond a stray thought of "well, that interaction at the store didn't seem to go so great."

>>168061

Well, I've actually never had any of these sorts of things happen to me, (which I have to say sound pretty awful, by the way,) so, in my case, it somewhat makes my fear of going for a walk, or just going outside, a bit baseless. At the same time though, not really, since that sort of stuff you described could easily have happened to me too, but since I go outside so rarely, and literally almost never by myself, this sort of stuff just isn't very likely to happen. Still, even the thought of such a thing happening is quite unpleasant and would essentially be enough to mentally ruin a guy like me and I'd most likely agonize over it for weeks/months afterwards, if not my whole miserable life. Therefore, I'd say that I feel relieved that I'm not required to go outside, since my parents handle all the necessities. Not everyone has such luxuries and, like yourself, the means of survival in the form of a job, or going to the grocery store, or what have you, become unavoidable. Assuming you just go for casual walks sometimes though, I don't really get that sort of thing and I can't relate at all to whatever might compel you to do that.

>>168165

Yeah, it can go both ways with me. I'd say my aloofness more springs from my anxiety, though. As in, from within my head I'm like, "I'm just gonna awkwardly look out this window or at the ground, or at the ceiling, since as long as I'm not looking at whoever it is, or just away from other people, it's fine." Somehow by avoiding directly looking at someone, or just looking elsewhere, I can feel a tad more relaxed and act as if I'm not really there. I suppose you could call that the 'head in sand' approach. The irrational basis being that, "If I can't see them, or am looking away, then I'm safe". Again, I always go out with my parents, so I always just tend to stand a step behind them while they do all the talking, leaving me the ability to just look off and pretend I'm elsewhere.

Almost always however I just stay in the car with the seat down and pretend I'm sleeping, so I don't have to worry about looking at anyone or anyone looking at me. I remember one time about 11-12 years ago, I was pretending to be asleep in the car, like usual, and some group of kids, (15-16, I think), passed by and one of the succubi cheerfully said, "Wake up!", as she passed by, since the window happened to be open. Again, she didn't really say it in a meanspirited way or anything and I even sometimes think back on how actually nice of her it was to say something to me at all, or even just notice me laying there in the first place. In a weird way, it almost felt like Gollum sitting in some dark cave and then suddenly is able to hear and see in front of him near the opening a jovial band of travelers wander on by enjoying a sunlit day, as he himself sits in a damp and frigid cave all alone, before one of their number briefly notices him and makes a random cheerful comment acknowledging his existence such as, "You there. The sun's lovely today you know!.". My life is a microscopic dung heap where nothing ever happens, so even random, infinitesimally small moments like these tend to stick in my memory long after they've happened.

>I lack a lot of self-awareness most of the time, which may shield me in a way from even more pain.

Reminds me of that video store job I had way back when. There was this one night when a guy came in and me still not really knowing my way around the cash register yet, I took a little longer than usual to process the transaction. Eventually I got everything in order and the guy went on his way. It wasn't until he had left that my coworker immediately said to me, "Dude, how could you put up with that guy's shit just now? I would've refused him after 5 seconds and told to him to just take off and get out. You must have some thick skin, or something. Jeez, man." Turns out the guy was pretty much mocking me the entire time, but I was so absorbed with working the cash register that it had all went completely over my head and I might not have even accounted it for it at all had it been for the guy I was working with at the time making a point of mentioning it. To this day, I still don't remember what the guy exactly said, aside from a couple hazy comments of him telling me to hurry up, or that I was proof that the manager would hire anyone. Up to that point in my life, I'd never experienced a moment like that of complete social unawareness and to this day I actually still haven't. Any other time I would've been hyper aware of everything and been probably so devastated by this random customer's mocking of me that I indeed would've needed to step away from the cash register, but not out of defiance mind you, but out of defeat. As it happened though, it was pretty much like when someone's been talking to you and you haven't really been paying attention and 5 minutes later you just go, "Oh, wait. Huh? Sorry, what did you say?". In this instance, that sort of thing really worked out in my favor. If it hadn't, then that would've surely turned out to be one of the most emotionally painful experiences of my entire life.

Come to think of it though, I can recall how I was pretty socially absent in other ways. For instance, I can recall one night when I was putting video tapes away and my female coworker at the time had some friends briefly come in and, for all I know, they could've been taking the piss out of me, while I was just simplemindedly going about putting each video tape away. I can also remember that time being unpleasant, since I started to just pretend to put video tapes away until her friends left. Either way, I'm fairly certain I was seen as a weirdo/creep, at least when it came to my female coworkers. I didn't understand the concept of a "break" for instance and I can recall having no idea what to do with myself when it was suddenly time for me to take one. I can remember saying how I didn't need a break to one of my female coworkers one day and she was like, "What? What are you saying? Well, you've got a 15 minute break and you can't be in here, so just go stand outside, or something.". So that's just what I did and I simply found myself awkwardly leaning against the side of the store simply doing nothing, but since I didn't have a watch I had no idea when exactly to come back in. In the end, I came back in 5 minutes late, which noticeably irritated my female coworker, which left me feeling entrapped and confused, since I didn't want to even take a break in the first place and I didn't know what else to do. I also didn't want to come back in early, since I was worried that would make her upset too, so I just tried to guess at 15 minutes and failed horribly. In retrospect, I probably should've just counted the time in my head, which itself would've also at least given me something to do.

I have a few stories of how I fucked up at that job. Let a customer go without paying, went home one night and forgot that the store keys were still in my back pocket, literally broke the store's backroom sink after I was tasked to clean the store's popcorn dispenser one night and all the butter grease went down the drain and clogged it up, (etc.). It was the only job in my entire life and it lasted for around a month or so before my mother just pressured me to quit, since she wanted to protect me from any further harm/abuse I might cause myself by staying there. We also only have one car and the stress of me getting to work and sometimes needing a moment to cope with my anxiety before starting my shift was too much of a hassle for my parents, which they just didn't want to deal with anymore. I'll admit that I didn't know what I wanted at the time, but in retrospect it's probably for the best that I quit, since the manager didn't exactly like me and was probably pretty close to firing me anyway.

My life is such a sad joke. A pitiful, meaningless, joyless joke. My existence is a miserable death march towards nothing and nowhere. I get absolutely nothing out of life. Nothing. Why am I even here? Because I'm too pussy to end it. Why am I here at all? Because my parents unconsciously rutted me into existence. I really hate the fact that I was so unlucky to be the one sitting here right now, instead of being a dead sperm cell washed out of my mother's snatch and still safe in the paradise of non-existence.

>>168185
always a pleasure to read your posts, I appreciate that you essentially put into words what I and maybe others I assume cannot verbalize or describe, though our experiences vary of course. How did you even land this job? did a family member of yours pull some strings or something?
by the way I think I passive agressively called you a "tech whore" or something to that effect a long time ago on the crawl thread, I apologize for that.

I am nervous around blacks because I got mugged by two black thugs once. They beat my head until I passed out, stole my wallet and took off my clothes. I was woken up by a friend. But… welll…. we are no longer friends because he's a black whiteknight

>>168201

>How did you even land this job? did a family member of yours pull some strings or something?

No, nothing like that. I think it may have been my father who mentioned to me that they were hiring (given that he worked for the government at an employment outreach service and sometimes knew about various job openings around town), but all he did was just drive me to the interview. Truth be told, neither of my parents were really all that enthusiastic about me getting a job and, if anything, would've rather I simply stayed at home. To them, it was actually a huge hassle, since I needed them to drive me to my shifts and then pick me up later, since I didn't know how to drive (still don't) and plus we only had/still have one car. If I were a normal person I could've simply used a bicycle or something to get there, but I was too anxious, not to mention too out of shape, for that. Like I said, I'd sometimes need a minute or two to collect myself in the car before going in due to my anxiety, which required my parents drive me there early, which between the two, greatly irritated my father and I can remember him giving me major shit as he were sitting there one night with him saying how I just need to man-up and get over it, and how he was just going to kick my ass out of the car if I didn't hurry up and make up my mind since he didn't want to wait around doing nothing in a nearly empty parking lot anymore, since he had TV shows he wanted to watch at home and he could honestly have cared less about what I was feeling, or even whether I went in or not, or managed to keep the job at all.

I was pretty desperate back then for some way to make extra cash though, so, with that in mind, I pushed myself to go and give it a shot. The interview itself literally just took place in the store's storage closet and which itself was basically no bigger than a small bedroom. It was basically just me, the manager, and the assistant manager, crammed in a closet together and sitting/squatting at a table, which may have actually just been an overturned box. I can't remember what I said exactly, but I can recall putting on airs of enthusiasm and trying to mimic the words/motivations that a normal person would say in such a situation. How I'm quick on my feet, can work well with others, and am generally a diligent worker. Of course, in the weeks that followed, all this turned out to be complete bullshit, but, in the moment, it managed to land me the job and they actually went and hired me right there in the closet. It's fair to say, I think, that the manager might very well have just been desperate to hire anybody, so maybe he hired me merely because I was all he could get and my autistic pantomiming of being a normal person was about as genuine as an alien wearing the tattered/bloodied skin of a human and thinking that this can somehow allow it to blend in. Or maybe that autistic pantomiming actually managed to fool them. I really don't know.

Thinking back on it, I really have no idea how I managed to gather the nerve, or the motivation to do what I did back then. It was just after school had ended for that year, which is noteworthy since I couldn't even manage to attend school directly at all during my second semester due to an intense sense of anxiety and also just a lack of motivation or desire to do anything or go anywhere with my life. It was my first year of high school and the only reason I was able to finish was due to having an EA (educational assistant) who I could meet with in a more neutral location and whom I could do the required school work with. At first, we simply met in the school's library, before then shifting over to the city's local library, and even a couple occasions at my house. My anxiety continued to deepen however and I withdrew more and more to the point I only just barely finished what was required academically to complete my first year of high school, despite me never returning for the following year and instead choosing to completely drop out. My parents were so exhausted that they just didn't care anymore. Not to mention that my brother was an all-star at school, which probably made it easier for them to cut me loose, I think. I was basically the acceptable dud, I guess you could say.

The video store job happened in between all this, beginning in early July just after school had ended and then ending sometime in August. As a result, that job turned out to be the very final thing I've ever do by myself in the outside world. Once it was over, I simply became a shut-in hermit utterly incapable of even going for a walk by myself. Nearly 13 years later, that's still where I'm at. As far as why I wanted that job in the first place I guess, like I said, it must've just been because of the money. It really wasn't that bad of a place though, at least as far as most other video stores are concerned and was certainly much better than working in some divey fast food chain. Not that many customers ever came in and it was the sort of place that, to anyone else, would've been an extremely laid back place to work at. It was actually what I'd consider to be a specialty video store, since it stocked figurines, tons of video games, and lots of other random stuff, which most other video stores don't tend to carry. Sort of like a Blockbuster Video+, for lack of a better comparison. It's not like I could've stayed working there for 13 years, but I don't know. It was a comfy video store, is I guess all I'm trying to say. To this day though, that place is still open. I was quite shocked when my parents relayed that to me about a year or so ago. I had long assumed it had already went out of business. It's in a different, smaller location now, but it's still somehow going after all this time. Good for them, I guess.

As for me, I eventually managed to get myself on disability about 5 years later, which is more than enough money for a guy like me to really even know what to do with, frankly. Well, like the video store itself, it's staggering to account for the fact that I'm still here. Taken together, I'm just left profoundly depressed and suicidal. The level of stasis is just overwhelming. I haven't grown, I haven't done anything. I've just sat and rotted away, like some inanimate object fallen away out of sight and gathering layer upon layer of dust in some unknown corner. Funny that between the two, me and that store, I guess you could say I'm the one who went out of business. Whether as a human being asserting their own course though life, or really just as anything at all. The only shame is that I'm still breathing. I suppose, in that sense, I won't be truly out of business until I stop breathing. Well, I'm open to that any day now, that'd be great.

>>168211
We have somewhat similar stories then, except I never had a job. I almost went job hunting online with help from my sister after like a couple years of neeting but it didn't amount to much of anything and I quickly deleted my profiles from temporary work websites because it was so embarassing. Had I ever had a job of any kind I don't believe I would have lasted half as long as you did before I'd lose it mentally… oh and I tried taking driving lessons and that was a monumental failure so I'm never going through this ever again.

>Not to mention that my brother was an all-star at school, which probably made it easier for them to cut me loose, I think. I was basically the acceptable dud, I guess you could say.
Yeah I also have siblings who are normal. Not high achievers or anything but still "functioning" human beings with social skills, jobs, aced their driving tests (big deal in my family) and so on… It's puzzling that I'm such a failure compared to them, but that's how it is. I suppose we're still lucky enough to have somewhat understanding parents, by that I mean they're not going to kick us out or anything. I remember my mother made such a threat when she found out I didn't sign up for college as I graduated from high school, and for an instant I panicked as I believed she would go through with it, or at the very least make my life hell…

>As for me, I eventually managed to get myself on disability about 5 years later, which is more than enough money for a guy like me to really even know what to do with, frankly. Well, like the video store itself, it's staggering to account for the fact that I'm still here. Taken together, I'm just left profoundly depressed and suicidal. The level of stasis is just overwhelming. I haven't grown, I haven't done anything. I've just sat and rotted away, like some inanimate object fallen away out of sight and gathering layer upon layer of dust in some unknown corner. Funny that between the two, me and that store, I guess you could say I'm the one who went out of business. Whether as a human being asserting their own course though life, or really just as anything at all. The only shame is that I'm still breathing. I suppose, in that sense, I won't be truly out of business until I stop breathing. Well, I'm open to that any day now, that'd be great.
Same here including disability
Sometimes I wish I would never wake up, but it would cause so much pain to my parents I can't entertain the thought, as for the rest of my family they'd be better off without me honestly, even if they genuinely care, since I don't want to be a burden to them emotionally or in any other way. Better to have never been born indeed.
Do you sometimes dream about your high school years or any other period of your youth?

>>168226

>oh and I tried taking driving lessons and that was a monumental failure so I'm never going through this ever again.

The idea of having to eventually sit in a car with a stranger while they're constantly judging and scrutinizing my every action, downright mortifies me and makes the possibility of me ever getting my license essentially non-existent. Maybe 13 years ago I could've done it, but definitely not now. Even if by some miracle I could, I'd be far too anxious to ever drive anywhere. Even something like a 4-way stop would utterly paralyze me, assuming I could even get out of the driveway at all. Plus, I'm a hermit. What would an agoraphobic hermit like me need with a license? I'm too afraid to go outside and I have nowhere to go.

>It's puzzling that I'm such a failure compared to them, but that's how it is.

I've often wondered the exact same thing. Our father was checked out and utterly indifferent to raising either of us (from ages 8-12, he'd also fairly regularly smack us across the head, so hard that I can still recall how my head would go partially numb, if we did something wrong, even if it was just accidentally spilling something), while our mother was overprotective and lax in discipline to a fault, (in addition to also being insanely overinvested over how both of us did at school to the point she'd even do assignments or science projects for us), yet somehow despite it all he turned out to be a somewhat overachieving normal whereas I simply became a fearful, helpless, autistic hermit. My brother's traveled quite extensively, won national competitions, has cultivated and learned many different skills, and is about to go off to medical school to study to become a doctor. Meanwhile, I'm just sitting here miserable, mindlessly consuming media that I haven't enjoyed for years, simply so as to kill time and await the release of death. I guess I must've just been the genetic runoff, or something. I really don't know.

My brother's success also pretty much made criticizing the parenting of my mother and father an exercise in futility, since the usual trump card was always, "Well, look at your brother. He turned out alright. You torpedoed your own life and have no one to blame, but yourself.". And yeah, I guess they, mostly my mother, were right when they said these sorts of things. In the end, I really did completely fuck myself, but that didn't stop me from wanting to pin most of the fault on them. Keep in mind that arguments like these were like 10 years ago and that nowadays both I, and my parents, are of the position that I'm simply the way I am. Everyone is affected by things differently and it's no one's fault. Some are just destined to be autistic depressives like me, while others are destined to be life loving normals like my brother. Like you said, it's just how it is. Fate rolls the dice and we all have to suffer the rewards/consequences with whatever the result is. It just really fucking sucks is all. My brother honestly has no god damn idea how much he lucked out, frankly. He really, really doesn't. Literally the only fucking problem he has in his life right now is his student debt. That's literally it. It's quite surreal how when I talk to him sometimes it's like he has no idea that I've been a complete fucking hermit for the past 13 years and that my life is a steaming pile of shit. It's like none of that even gets through to him and he just talks with me as if I were living a normal and productive life. It's almost like the opposite problem of when you have someone who always judges you where instead the person doesn't think about or really is aware of your existence at all. In some sense, it'd almost be nice if he occasionally acknowledged what a fucking train wreck my existence is and how he's thankful not to be me.

>I suppose we're still lucky enough to have somewhat understanding parents

Indeed. I'd say that's specifically where I happened to luck out the most in life. My parents are basically doing everything they can to ensure that I'll be able to live here, even after they're gone. The thought of living long enough to see that come to pass isn't exactly something I'm pleased to think about, but the level of concern they're showing for making sure I'm taken care of is far and above what most other parents would ever be willing to do.

>I remember my mother made such a threat when she found out I didn't sign up for college as I graduated from high school

Yeah, my mother used to threaten me all the time that she'd ship me off to a halfway house, or have me committed to a mental hospital if I ever dropped out of school. Like yourself, there were times where I'd feel panicked in thinking she actually meant it, but the panic I felt from actually having to go to school itself eventually proved to be greater and my mother's threats withered in the face of it. Once I dropped out of school, she continued to make a few random threats on how I'd need to somehow get myself back there at some point, but after a few months passed, she simply accepted it. My father, as per usual, could've cared less. The sheer rage my mother would sometimes express at my inability to get to school was something that proved to be quite emotionally distressing for me and made my life at home, in a certain sense, hell. I can understand that her anger was over her being terrified of me flushing my future down the toilet, but it's also fair to say that her pride played a role in it as well. The thought of one of her sons being a delinquent dropout was a humiliation she just couldn't stand to contemplate and thus she vented all that frustration on me, while dragging me to shrink after shrink to try and "fix me". Despite my mother never really having any friends as me and my brother were growing up, she was always hyper sensitive over either us ever "embarrassing" her. Any time we ever did something wrong, it was always about how "embarrassed" she was and how much of a "fool" she looked like as our mother. It was an extremely vain and inconsiderate tendency of hers that, thankfully, she managed to largely move past many, many years ago. She's essentially a completely different person now and is far more understanding and compassionate when it comes to this sort of thing.

>I can't entertain the thought of suicide

I'll be honest that I really don't care about such things. If I could blow my brains out right now, I would. I'd be dead, so what would I care how my parents feel? I can understand how this might hold others back from suicide, but I'm definitely not one of them. For me, it really all just comes down to the fact that I'm gutless, anhedonic zombie. Too gutless to try and get a hold of a gun and probably too gutless to ever use it even if I did. I'd personally love to die in my sleep, or get some kind of fatal disease like cancer. There's nothing that compels me to exist other than prior inertia and gutlessness. I'm sick of haunting this house like a ghost and it can be said that I already died a long time ago. I just want the dignity of being buried and forgotten about, instead of lingering on as a ghost in limbo, or being kept like a puppet/pet for the sake of others like my family, whom I otherwise don't really owe anything. As my parents, it's their job to look after me. Most other parents are hopeless narcissists who utterly fail in this task. That task being, if you have a kid, it's your duty to take care of them no matter what and no matter who it is they grow up to be. Parents sign up for that duty/risk the moment they decide to have a kid.

>>168241

(Continued from above)

>Do you sometimes dream about your high school years or any other period of your youth?

When it comes to high school? No, not really. I wasn't really there long enough for it make that much of an impression on me. I only participated in high school, in a traditional sense, for just one semester. Do I regret leaving? Well again, not really. When I think back on it all, I largely just come up with a feeling of nothingness and am, if anything, aloof/glad I left when I did. Near the end, after I had been granted an EA, but before we started meeting at the local library, I sometimes found myself wandering the empty halls when everyone else was in class. It was a surreal feeling and the emptiness seemed to resound me in the notion that I simply didn't belong there and that none of this was meant for a guy like me. I can recall one day where I was walking along and the math teacher I'd normally see with everyone else noticed me wandering the halls and told me to stop and that I wasn't allowed to be milling about like that and that she'd have to see me to the principal's office after class was done. I just nodded and said, "Oh, heh, sorry I didn't know. My mistake.", and about a minute after she shut the door I just kept on wandering. There was another day where I actually went and walked back home completely after standing outside of the school, where I just sat out in front of my house for a bit before walking back, since I was too anxious to meet with my EA that day and I didn't want to upset my mother by showing up home early and this was all what essentially led to me and my EA meeting at the local library from then on.

I'd say the main thing I regret and sometimes wish could've been different is what I mentioned here >>167648 in my other post. As I said, my autism and anxiety significantly diminished what could've probably otherwise been a really great childhood and I can't help, but sometimes rue how things turned out that in regard. However, if we entertain the idea that someone could offer me the chance to change anything about my past, I'd simply want to strangle myself in the womb, Butterfly Effect style. Anything else I could change wouldn't make a difference and it would all just roughly play out the same way as it did before.

Do I ever literally dream about my childhood or younger years when I'm sleeping? Almost never, actually. Funnily enough, my dreams seem to give very little of a shit about how my life actually is or how I feel. Most of my dreams are either just me wandering through abstract places, or some such other random stuff. I could feel super miserable before going to sleep and often do, but then go on to have a dream about wandering along some pleasant beach with sparkling, silver grains of sand. I'd say I actually dream a lot about my family. As in, I'll just dream like I'm talking with them, or going somewhere, or what have you, just as I normally would. Not even as anyone different, but just as I am now. I guess it makes sense, since my family are the only ones I ever see or talk to, so of course they'd show up in my dreams. I almost never dream about being with fictional characters I like, which is kind of depressing, since I wouldn't mind having some dreams like that.

>>168243
>Yeah, my mother used to threaten me all the time that she'd ship me off to a halfway house, or have me committed to a mental hospital if I ever dropped out of school. Like yourself, there were times where I'd feel panicked in thinking she actually meant it, but the panic I felt from actually having to go to school itself eventually proved to be greater and my mother's threats withered in the face of it. Once I dropped out of school, she continued to make a few random threats on how I'd need to somehow get myself back there at some point, but after a few months passed, she simply accepted it. My father, as per usual, could've cared less. The sheer rage my mother would sometimes express at my inability to get to school was something that proved to be quite emotionally distressing for me and made my life at home, in a certain sense, hell. I can understand that her anger was over her being terrified of me flushing my future down the toilet, but it's also fair to say that her pride played a role in it as well. The thought of one of her sons being a delinquent dropout was a humiliation she just couldn't stand to contemplate and thus she vented all that frustration on me, while dragging me to shrink after shrink to try and "fix me"
Haha, similar experience here again. For instance my dad would give me the letters the school would send to my parents before my mother could pick them up so she wouldn't be aware I was skipping classes. Of course it didn't last, eventually I was given a severe dressing down by both the school and my mother, and she got mad at my father for hiding it from her all this time, and being so lenient in general. I don't know how I managed to complete my high school education, it's not like it mattered in hindsight though. I think I would have snapped if I hadn't bunked all these stupid classes, and it's why I'm unlikely to ever hold down a job for very long. It would be too tempting to merely walk away when I get too anxious.

The driving licence thing was to give my parents something to be proud of, and because that's a step to normalcy and adulthood I guess. At least if someone asks me why I don't just go to the driving school to get a licence I can answer that I have already tried, that I was awful and I hated it.

I've been trying to socialize on the internet by making friends from other imageboards, but now I'm feeling overwhelmed. I can't maintain more than 3 friendships at once.

I remove friends often and I sometimes make new accounts or profiles, as though I'm going through new identities.

>>162674
For the most part yes. It won't get better. You're fucked for life, like me. I consider myself a live ghost. That's how little interaction I have with anyone. I average less than 10 spoken words a month.

>>167989
I'm >>167926

Sorry to hear about your position. Sounds quite similar to mine, although I don't have autism. Only diagnosed with Social Anxiety and Agoraphobia/Panic Attacks.

All I do is sleep, watch TV/Movies and play video games. I don't find many of these particularly enjoyable anymore. I seem to visit old favourites mostly - new series or movies are all boring.

Not really sure what I want anymore. The way things are currently (assuming nothing drastic occurs) I'll never have a girlfriend or wife (which means no kids/family). I'll never have a significant career either. The most I could hope to get is some dead end retail job or work in a factory until I'm dead. But neither are things I'm willing to do yet.

I'm uncertain how long I can live like this without giving up. Depression comes and goes for me. It depends how entertained I am usually. If I have a good game or series to watch, I can forget about my life and just distract myself. Binge eating was a good cope for this too, but the negative effects caught up to me. With no passions or purpose I'm just wasting away. Wasting time. Everyday for the last 10 years has been almost the exact same thing.

Every couple years I try therapy again and give up after a couple of sessions. Breathing techniques don't make my anxiety go away, talking about how I feel doesn't change it. Exposure therapy doesn't work for me and I can't rely on powerful drugs long term. There doesn't seem to be any solution to my problem.

>>168263
>I've been trying to socialize on the internet by making friends from other imageboards, but now I'm feeling overwhelmed. I can't maintain more than 3 friendships at once.

>I remove friends often and I sometimes make new accounts or profiles, as though I'm going through new identities.

what a horrible person you are.

>>162680
The fear of this is so so much worse than any actual consequences from it. It actually becomes a sort of ironic sense of disappointment when you finally realize just how little people even care what you do or say. That was always my struggle. Nobody usually ever put me down for things I said/did, they just never even noticed me in the first place or cared about what I was saying/doing. Trust me people don’t care, and ultimately it’s a good thing. I’m one of these people that is perfectly ok among strangers. It’s seeing people that know me that freaks me the fuck out.

>>168263
got the same problem and fear of getting too close to people
I think it's because im shallow

>>168444
>It actually becomes a sort of ironic sense of disappointment when you finally realize just how little people even care what you do or say.
In this sense social anxiety seems to be more of a special snowflake kind of thing. The anxious person thinks he is so important that people honestly care about him. Often the anxious person is very self absorbed. It's not a miracle that the Internet is populated by these kind of guys.

>>168454
Depends if you're an actual average person or a weirdo. The idea that people aren't talking about you seems inaccurate in my experience of hearing shop staff, people on the bus, and generally people around talking about other people, mocking them, or generally commenting on them. Maybe people don't actually pay attention to their surroundings but I see humans mocking and abusing others quite often.

Similarly I've had people bring up old things I've done and one even filmed me because I looked weird doing something, as they told me. People who are actually weird need to be taught to shut down their empathy and dismiss other human beings, do not engage in social situations treating the others emotions as having weight or worth emulation.

People don't "care" but they will consume you for their own entertainment and that is generally uncomfortable for social creatures unless they have good mental defences.

>>168454
I have incredibly severe Social anxiety and regular general anxiety disorder. I am well aware of the fact people normally do not care what I do or say but it doesn't matter. Its like a train going off the rails and derailing when ever it decides to act up. I know its stupid I know it shouldn't be happening but in the end I can do nothing to stop it. All I can do is try and wait it out and mitigate the problems until I calm down. This often means removing myself from the situation sometimes entirely and sometimes partially.

That's mental illness in a nutshell though. Most people are aware its stupid and they are over reacting. But they can't actually stop it.

>>168444
>Nobody usually ever put me down for things I said/did
Must be nice.

>>168454

>Often the anxious person is very self absorbed. It's not a miracle that the Internet is populated by these kind of guys.
>these kinds of guys

While it might be somewhat true to say that social anxiety is a form of covert narcissism, most who suffer from this sort of thing can't help feeling the way they do. One can consciously realize that it's irrational to think this way, but the nature of mental illness is fundamentally irrational, which makes any attempt to logically reason your way out of it often futile. I'd also say that those who are anxious can be better described as being hyper self-conscious as opposed to self-absorbed. The former implies someone struggling with their insecurities, while the latter implies someone who's simply indulging in their own sense off vanity. Writing those off who suffer with these sort of issues as being nothing more than "self-absorbed" is very inconsiderate, not to mention mostly inaccurate. Especially since most wizards happen to already suffer from being socially anxious, so why be such a needless cunt as to smugly deem them self-absorbed? People like you who show their blatant contempt for mental illness are no better than the worst normalfags.

>>168606
I suffer from social anxiety as well. Unlike you I just admit what it is and don't have any sort of self deluding excuse for my egocentrism. Being self-conscious is merely a symptom that makes you question your own immediate egocentrism. Not giving up on this ego results in being anxious to other people. You don't really want to engage with them because all you care about is yourself and the picture that others have of you, but you never care about others.

>>168609

Is anyone else really any different in this regard? A large amount of people, I'd say pretty much the whole human race frankly, really only care about themselves. Egocentrism is pretty much at the core of everyone, whether they want to admit to it or not. The only difference between a normal person and a socially anxious person is that the socially anxious person has a faulty form of egocentrism, in the sense of it leading to hyper-self consciousness and hyper-sensitivity to social situations. Either way, I'm not really sure what your point is. That socially anxious people are just covert egomaniacs who only care about their own self-image? Socially anxious people aren't angels. So what if they happen to only care about themselves? Are they to be condemned on this basis? Again, are normal people really so different? Also, social anxiety isn't a character flaw. It's a mental illness. And those who suffer with it often try the best they can to cope with the many challenges it brings. It's not a result of them simply being bad people, with bad personalities who are stuck up their own ass, as you seem to keep suggesting.

>>168544
I never said anything really.

I've realized what the essential cause of social anxiety really is - a lack of meaningful differentiation in social situations. Whether you make a simple mistake like fumble your words or can't handle eating in front of strangers, the cause of anxiety is the inability to differentiate between what is really socially damaging and what is not. The socially anxious person confuses emotionally or perceptually, all social faux pas and even regular behavior into this one horrible thing where there is little difference between tripping in front of strangers and perhaps being outed as a pervert. Much like a layman might not differentiate between types of snakes and their danger to humans, he reacts the same way in horrible fear.

Regular people seem to have this ability to quickly move on from blunders because they can differentiate between social non-events and actually damaging stuff. And this doesn't seem like a rational problem, as most socially anxious people can realize their symptoms are overblown and irrational, yet they cannot help it. The necessary cure would be to learn this process of differentiation, to be able to perceive social situations in finer detail. For instance, you might feel really bad after a trivial trip to the store because you couldn't differentiate the clerk's ambivalent expression meaningfully, leading yourself to believe that you were rude or just a horrible human. Perhaps there's a lack of ability to differentiate between situations where you are responsible for another person's emotion and behavior and when you are not. I know that most SA people will instantly blame themselves and feel like shit whenever people are nasty towards them, because they cannot perceive the situation properly, in terms of the necessary detail. The socially anxious person's "social perception" is much more blurry than a regular person.

This is perhaps why continual exposure and social experience usually fixes most people's anxiety. But it's not because they get used to the anxiety but because they gradually improve their social perception, the ability to differentiate between what is truly embarrassing, wrong, rude etc. as well as other people's reactions and behavior, when someone is just being an asshole and when you were genuinely in the wrong.

Just a thought I've had.

>>168689
I think it comes more from the person’s self worth. When someone views themselves as unworthy or deserving of mockery, or that their company is more worthy than them, they become concerned that others are trying assess them. And so it causes great anxiety that whatever you do is wrong, and then like you said everything becomes a major faux pas, even if it’s not.

>>168690
Maybe, but it can also be the other way around. If you observe yourself continually acting inappropriately, always getting the shit end in every interaction, taking responsibility for everyone's behavior, not having much success or even knowing what it looks like, you naturally end up having very little self-worth. It definitely feels that way for me.

Online, my anxiety is pretty much non-existent because it's easier to gauge social situations in a bunch of text posts than it is to gauge whether someone's laughing is supposed to be mocking or friendly, people's facial expressions, pauses in conversation, whether you are doing something wrong simply by standing there.

The key feature of social anxiety is this complete inability to accurately gauge social situations. I'm always unsure how to feel about an interaction, even completely neutral stuff.

>>162674
>anyone else totally crippled by social phobia
Nope. Just you buddy

>>168674
Well I have to agree with you in the sense that anxiety is a mental/ behavioral issue rather than a moral flaw. The anxious person wants to act differently but he can't. Psychological dispositions make it nearly impossible. In that way you are right and I was wrong. As always I didn't think something through here.

>>168689
This is correct.

>This is perhaps why continual exposure and social experience usually fixes most people's anxiety.
This is also correct, but I don't think it ever becomes genuine/spontaneous for people like us, it's a rationalization of things you acquire through observation, that makes the whole process pretty tiresome since you have to actively look for cues and expend mental fortitude to keep it going.

I've always felt like it came spontaneously to other people and I was the only one who actually had to struggle to learn everything from scratch.

>>168691
My anxiety is worse online, and im pretty sure it's because i sit in front of the computer all day and being online turned into my reality.

>>168689
Been thinking about this some more.

My initial hypothesis was that social anxiety stemmed from the lack of ability to differentiate what is truly socially damaging and what is not, and that this didn't seem related to a person's rational, conscious understanding of social situations. A person could understand that a particular social mistake wasn't a big deal, yet they would experience a great deal of anxiety nonetheless, disproportionate to any rational assessment of it.

I want to tie this in with a bigger picture about perceptual learning. There's two essential learning mechanisms at play - differentiation and unitization. They are both concerned with creating perceptual units. For instance in differentiation, a person might learn to differentiate between wine tastes, going from a single wine taste to a much finer distinction that becomes an automatic part of their perception of wine in the future. As for unitization, a person will combine two or more seemingly distinct stimuli into a single one, like the letters of a word. You usually do not read every letter of a word, but you automatically sense the whole gestalt without really noticing the letters.

This explains how something like social anxiety can be learned as well as unlearned. Hypothetically, a socially anxious person has had an event in their previous history that caused them to learn to unitize all social mistakes, disapproval, attention etc. with some grave danger, abandonment, humiliation and so on. The solution would be to learn to differentiate it, split it back into finer detail, learn the difference between a social mistake and humiliation, the difference between disapproval and abandonment, attention and danger etc. To split the cue from the supposed meaning.

For me, stuff like laughter usually gets me. Like, a random group of people might be laughing on the bus and this makes me shrivel up completely and want to avoid their attention. Might explain why I feel more comfortable with text because there's zero chance of that cue occurring.

For someone else, a stern look might be a trigger, or disinterest, or a smug smile or whatever. Each person's anxiety is based on variety of cues that they associate with something terrible that warrants the anxiety and avoidance. The solution would be to identify those cues and break their associations, but I can't say I have a practical way to do that.

>>168722
What makes online feel worse than offline? Everyone's anxiety is different, I guess.

>>168689

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpMDX7n14Bg

Watching this genuinely helped me to go easier on myself on social situations. I recommend.

>>168689
>>168899
Very accurate. Is it form of autism then?
Also anyone got over these fears on internet? I feel like I can sense the tone in written communication and also always feel like my posts are so bad they kill any threads I post into.

My experience with anxiety is that it is purely irrational.

When I did Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, the focus was on changing "negative thoughts", like worrying about what people are you thinking about you.

The problem is I've never had those kind of thoughts. I am fully aware that people don't give a shit about me, and will forget about me in five minutes even if I were to say something stupid or awkward.

The hesitancy to speak my thoughts, the sweating and paralysis I feel in social situations has nothing to do with my conscious thoughts, it's purely an unconcious response to social situations.

>>168689
Cropping this for those who want to copypaste.

>>169029
Conscious thoughts and exposure can change your unconscious mind eventually. Many things aren't necessarily overtly rationalized, but there is an inner reason they happen nonetheless. It's honestly not easy to change, especially when it's something rooted within you since childhood, but I don't really think there is some other way. It's really ultimately up to you whether you want to pursue a solution to that issue, but even as a wizard it's good to have the means to deal with social situations because they will pursue you whether or not you like it.

>>169029
like the other guy said, exposure helps.
I've always had bad social anxiety, but it just kind of went away after a few months of working in fast food and taking people's orders. After I quit that job, I became a NEET again and the social anxiety came back and it was just as bad. Now I have a retail job, and it's gone again.
although I still have no friends, but I'm sure that's unrelated

>>169043
I had a different experience. Exposure does almost nothing to help; any improvements are very modest and limited to fairly specific or predictable situations. If anything, exposure makes things worse because the fuckups and constant stress of being in those situations accumulate until they overwhelm me and I have to rest to recover.

>>169029
I really dislike CBT. It's like the culmination of everything that's wrong with psychotherapy. The focus on conscious thinking is completely ineffective because most mental problems are related to these automatic, unconscious systems that don't really respond to verbal reasoning. A CBT therapist will always try to shoe-horn a negative thought because that's his whole theory and it falls apart if the person doesn't have an inner voice. They also shoe-horn negative beliefs, as if they are arbitrary and not the result of how you actually perceive the world. If you really believe something is terrible irrationally, it is because it appears as such to you contrary to what might be rational and trying to tell yourself think otherwise always feels self-deceptive.

The problem to me seems to be related to a person's unitization of various social cues and something terrible. To you, probably, the act of speaking really feels like a dangerous thing, something that should not be taken lightly, like holding a gun in your hand that can go off if you mishandle it. That's not a rational thing, it just appears to you as such because at some point in your life you just learn to associate it with something terrible, creating this single unit in your mind that makes no difference between the two (at least not automatically).

Something which I've tried the last few days is trying to notice when I'm overreacting to a certain cue, make a note of it and then try to consciously split the cue and this terrible thing that I perceive to be behind it. You don't want to have an argument with yourself, but rather use your perceptual faculties to note the differences, to get a sense that these things really are different, perhaps completely unrelated, by showing yourself that they are different through imaginative exploration. If you can successfully get to a sense that these two things are different, a noticeable decrease in anxiety will likely follow when it comes to that cue. The thing about generalized social anxiety though is that you just have a lot of cues like that (hence the name generalized) while someone else might just react only to "being perceived while eating" or "being the center of attention on a stage" (public speaking).

Unrelated to social anxiety, it seems that this idea can be applied to other areas like motivation. For instance, when I am motivated about an activity, there seems to be a similar unitization between the activity and something positive, they seem like one in the same. If there is demotivation, then there is unitization with something negative, so that even if you rationally might think something is beneficial, you still perceive it as something bad hence the procrastination and aversion.

This positive/negative cue association influences so much of our behavior. It would be nice to find a full-proof way of breaking/creating these which mostly seems to happen unconsciously.

>>169043
>I've always had bad social anxiety, but it just kind of went away after a few months of working in fast food and taking people's orders.
Yeah so you didnt have “bad social anxiety”. Thanks for the insightful post.

>>169046
Yeah, this is me. It gets really stressful. I then just want to be left alone. Worst is when people can tell you're anxious and they get pretty upset.

>>169050
>Worst is when people can tell you're anxious and they get pretty upset.
FUCKING THIS. I can't control how I feel. I can control how you perceive how I feel, but I'm still going to hate social interaction. That fact always manages to piss people off.

>>169050
All i want out of life is to be left alone, is that really too much to ask?

>>169050
I think about the exposure stuff like hurting your toe. Your toe doesn't get less sensitive. You can't heal your toe by hurting it over and over, doing that only makes it increasingly sensitive until even brushing against some cloth causes excruciating pain. The only thing you can do at that point is rest your toe until your body heals.
But you're supposed to fix stress by repeatedly inducing it?? If that really worked people would never get nervous disorders in the first place.

>>169046
It is likely that you underestimate the level of exposure that is necessary. It needs to be some marathon shit once you're already in adulthood

>>169064
Exposure shouldn't be traumatic or enforced, that just makes things worse. It needs to be gentle and gradual

>>169061
Pretty much yes.
Otherwise minimal wage/bux would allow us to live comfortably alone.

CBT and exposure therapy don't seem to work for me either. I mean, my anxiety basically peaked in my last years of high school and has never gotten better. I still went to school most days, and that exposure never improved my anxiety.

Then when I started seeing a psychiatrist and psychologist, the exposure therapy was basically walk to the mail box, then walk down to the next house, etc. Small steps. Well this sort of worked at first. Every 3 days I'd progress another house, whatever. And everyday that nothing happened, you feel a small amount more confident. Until something goes wrong. A guy in a hoodie walking towards me with a dog (I like dogs, for the record) and I panic and turn around and go home. I failed because something I wasn't "used to" happened. So now when I try and do this task again, I'm already at 10/10 anxiety because of this hoodie incident. So maybe I do another 7 days and get down to 6/10 on the anxiety scale. And then maybe a car honks its horn at me? Back to 10/10 and 0 progress is made. In fact, I'd argue more harm was done because I know eventually an event will occur that will spike my anxiety, causing more anxiety.

And this is despite the fact that I'd purposely choose the time of day when I'd least likely encounter anything that triggers my anxiety. I'd go middle of the day, when kids are at school and adults are at work. Going at night would be cheating so I made sure it was during the day, at the very least.

I'm willing to try again, at some stage. Not sure when. I usually give therapy and medication a go, nothing really comes of it after 4 months and I just stop. After multiple cycles of failure it's harder to justify doing it again. Especially when you go see a psychiatrist, pay a fortune for a couple of sessions, you're a 29 year old who doesn't drive, has never had a girlfriend, never held a job and they still don't believe what you're saying. And I'm pretty good at reading people. I think my anxiety might actually stem from being able to tell what people are thinking so easily. I can tell if people are bored, interested or not etc. If I say something inappropriate I realise straight away. I can tell if other people are nervous or aggressive instantly. My speech is quite on point, I don't stutter or sound nervous. Inside I'm terrified though.

It's funny because one of my only friends growing up had autism. It was mild, but the guy would say some whack stuff. Inappropriate stuff around people, and instantly I'd be cringing on the inside because I could tell the other people around noticed his "weirdness". But to him it was water off a duck's back. He didn't care one bit. 0 anxiety. I felt anxiety for him. It's totally fucked up.

Where did my anxiety even stem from? My dad never beat me. But he was a cunt. Narcissistic asshole. And I'm sure it's the way he treated me that caused me to become so introverted and shy. Too bad there's nothing I can do about it now.

>>169064
That's a shitty analogy my wizbro

>>169072
You can't wage and be alone unless you are remote. Even then you still are under the mercy of delivery drivers and utility companies..
In the anti-civ thread there is this vietnamese rice farmer filming his life, that is the TrueWay, even if it means broken back and teeth by 40, i'll take it, since i'll be getting there anyway

My anxiety is a problem, but so are lots of other things. And they're just as bad as problems for me as anxiety, if not moreso. Chronic depression, OCD, paranoid delusions, autism, agoraphobia, (etc.). If anxiety was the only problem I had then perhaps changing my perception, or whatever, might do some good with it, but it's tied up in all this other shit so tight that it's like a knot you have no choice, but to cut since it's impossible to actually unravel it on its own. To be honest, I'm not sure why just because something is a mental issue it has to always be seen as if it's 'fixable'. You wouldn't look at guy with a mangled, necrotic and broken body and say, "Yeah, that's fixable.". It depends on the severity of the pre-existing, or current injury. If the damage is too severe, then no it's not fixable. Maybe those with relatively normal, or unautistic brains might benefit from the usual spiel of changing one's thoughts and perceptions, but, to be fair, I'll be the first to say that not being in this category puts me in a fairly narrow range of severe cases of those who couldn't actually benefit from such things. Then again, since these are just mental issues, nothing should be beyond their ability to fix, right? Clearly, I'm just declaring myself as hopeless so as to avoid taking any responsibility to fix myself, or at least that's the usual overwhelmingly ignorant, normalfaggot-tier take on this sort of thing. In the end, I can't "prove" my brain is broken, not in the same way someone can "prove" some part of their physical body is broken and is beyond any sort of further help or repair. If I'm being truly honest though and humoring the idea I truly could improve with this, whether through exposure or perceptional change (just sounds like another version of CBT, if you ask me), I simply don't have enough reason to do so. What would be the point? I'm already well looked after and have no need to ever leave the house I live in at all. Even if I did, first things first, I'd need to get my depression and paranoid delusions under control and also find a reason to want to value my life and to feel like it has something to offer me, before beginning to tackle my anxiety. I'd also need to have something to look forward to, to make all this effort worthwhile. Something I'd wish to do, or somewhere I'd wish to go, which overcoming these issues would finally allow me to bring to fruition. Unfortunately, I have no such desires and could never even imagine ever having any, since I fundamentally don't care about anything. That is, aside from that which is negative and irrational like with anxiety, but even that doesn't mean I actually 'truly' care about anything. As far as I'm concerned, to truly "fix" anxiety, you need to have firstly, the fundamental means to do so, a relatively normal brain, capable of relatively normal functions, and secondly, to have an actual reason to want to fix it. I have neither, so, like with other permanent disabilities people have to bear in life, I simply endure my predicament as best I can. It's made my life a horrendous death march to the grave and, yes, it does make me miserable knowing I wasn't born with the same capacity to be able to enjoy life the same way a normal person can. I was born simply to be idle and miserably wait out my own death. No matter how you slice it, that really fucking sucks.

>>168899

>What makes online feel worse than offline? Everyone's anxiety is different, I guess.

I'm not sure I'd say it's worse for me, but I've always struggled heavily with anxiety while online and it's made enjoying the internet or feeling comfortable while using it pretty much impossible for me. If I post my thoughts and someone insults me then, for me, that's just as painful as if I were walking down the sidewalk and someone yelled out their car and called me a faggot as they drove by. The same way I'm hyper self-aware and self-conscious of both my and other people's mannerisms in person, I'm also hyper self-aware and self-conscious of what both I and other's say while online. Fundamentally, there's still a person behind the words I'm seeing online. In my case, that makes really high traffic websites almost like overcrowded public squares chock full of people, except these people are much more likely to dismiss you or harass you than they would in real life. I also can't send friend requests or engage in real time chats because those feel way too personal for me and I have no idea how to build a consistent rapport with others. I fear for that moment when the awkwardness would set in and either I'd say something, or they'd say something, that would pretty much sour the entire thing, making either them or myself want to bail from it as soon as possible. Ultimately, those who can strut around online without a care are about as much of a universe apart from me as those who can strut around in the outside world without care. I can't even get over my anxiety while online, so that itself servers as a blazing testament to how poor my chances are of ever getting over it when it comes to the outside world.

>>169093
I've read here and there over the years that professionals say therapies like CBT and exposure treatments for anxiety have to be modified for autistic patients. The basic treatment plans for NTs often don't seem to work so well for us.

>>169080
why? your toe doesn't hurt when you hurt it?

"Exposure" is bullshit. I was exposed to society for the first 20 years of my life with school, college, and my first shortlived job. And my anxiety just got worse and worse.

>>169052

I'm baffled by how normies respond to anxiety. You'd think the basic response would be sympathy, and an attempt to make you feel a bit more comfortable.

Instead people actually get angry. They think you're rude or a nuisance. It boggles my mind and is one of the reasons I decided long ago to just opt out of normie society.

>>169101
sympathy is hard

>>169101
Exactly. It gets you a lot of shit. They just can't really relate to it at all because that's supposed to be reserved for very few situations.

>>169100
This so much. School, college, work and having to go out and deal with people because living alone, all this exposure for 26 years and now I can't leave the house of my parents anymore. Exposure made me dead inside and all I want is to never deal with humans again.

>>169071
I have been going to work for years and it never changed anything in that respect. I still find it very hard to initiate contact with anyone, still nervous when I shop at the supermarket and even more nervous when going to a smaller shop than that (and procrastinate for days/weeks/months). Just ordering stuff online makes me nervous. So I don't think it does much.

I think my 'underlying' anxiety level (just the general feeling of being constantly under siege) has decreased a bit because of some other things I did but that didn't change my aversion to being around people.

>>168899
>For me, stuff like laughter usually gets me. Like, a random group of people might be laughing on the bus and this makes me shrivel up completely and want to avoid their attention. Might explain why I feel more comfortable with text because there's zero chance of that cue occurring.

I get that too. I think that kind of stuff probably has to do with the difference in energy levels between me and healthy people. Being low-energy, slow-witted and weak, it just seems completely natural to fear healthy, uninhibited people. Just the way they move around, talk, laugh, (especially when they do any of it with others) requires more energy and confidence than to move about meekly, basically it's all an advertisement of their energy, confidence (which arises from ability), social power, etc. I think that even if it didn't remind me of my bullies it would still seem inherently threatening.

>>169046
>>169064
I think the reason exposure is such a hit and miss is because it's not really about becoming less sensitive. The idea is that you get used to the anxiety, used to the possibility of failure and so on. But negative exposure experiences are likely to aggravate the problem even more.

The fundamental problem is learning. If exposure is successful, it is only because it results in some kind of learning that then creates changes in cognition and behavior. That learning is mostly unconscious and relates to these automatic, unconscious processes like perception, motivation and subjective value judgments of "good" and "bad". For instance, you learn to perceive situations differently, you are more motivated to seek out social situations and what you consider as "good" and "bad" in situations changes i.e. someone smug smile becomes neutral to you while before you would take it as a bad sign.

Whether the right corrective experience occurs is really a hit or miss. Chances are, you'll just confirm everything you know and nothing will change. Exposure is pretty much a gamble and blind luck without a deeper understanding how and why learning occurs.

>>169076
Exposure approached simply as sensitivity training is likely to be ineffective. The idea is that continual exposure to an anxiety provoking situation will result in less anxiety over time. And this is usually the case as the person learns to make their anxiety more manageable, but it doesn't necessarily remove it.

The key is learning. It's not enough to simply be around an anxiety-provoking cue, but rather, you have to learn to perceive the cue differently. You could probably muster up enough willpower to push through passing that guy with the dog and at best, you might learn "i can push through if I really need to", but you never learn to see the guy differently, in a way that isn't anxiety provoking. Exposure therapy essentially hopes that the more you do it, the more likely it is that you will have such an experience but it really doesn't make it an obvious or clear goal. ET is usually focused on the single variable of your current anxiety level and if it decreases, it's gauged as a success. But perhaps that time there was no one one the street or your particular anxiety provoking cue didn't come up. It misses all of that.

There might be less dangerous and painful ways of achieving that corrective learning. Since the goal isn't to be less sensitive to stress, but to remove it entirely, by changing what you actually experience rather than your reaction to it which for all we know is perfectly rational. Most normies aren't that adapted to stress either, they just don't experience it every time they go outside.

>>169093
>just sounds like another version of CBT, if you ask me

I mean, it's neither cognitive nor behavioral. I've continually mentioned that what you think and do matter very little since the problem is on a lower-level. A situation seems dangerous even before you have a conscious thought of "It's dangerous" and then thinking the opposite will only create cognitive dissonance. The world appears to you a certain way and what you think and how you behave are more often than not simply an expression of that. Changing how you experience the world is about changing these low level processes of perception, motivation and subjective value judgments. The rules of that aren't obvious and I'm not pretending they are.

Your brain isn't broken, in the same way a badly programmed computer isn't broken. In all likelihood, your brain is fine but your previous learning and development happened to make you really bad at dealing with life, hence the suffering. I'm not saying undoing all of that is easy or even realistically possible, especially when you consider the analogy of a badly programmed computer fixing itself, but it's better than giving up. I'm determined to figure out and deal with all of my emotional problems because no one else will do it. It's unfortunate but sometimes you have to make your own tools and deal with problems with no obvious solution.

>169093

>that's just as painful as if I were walking down the sidewalk and someone yelled out their car and called me a faggot as they drove by.

This actually happened to me one time. They didn't call me a faggot, but as I was walking home one day a car driving by slowed down and beeped their horn at me. Once they had my attention, I saw that the guy driving was a chad with his succubus in the other seat, and he yelled "IT'S NOT UNUUUUUSUAL TO BE LOVED BY ANYONE!" and then they drove off laughing.

It's the kind of thing I wouldn't believe could happen had I not actually experienced it.

>>169126

>Changing how you experience the world is about changing these low level processes of perception, motivation and subjective value judgments.

In this regard, I mostly agree with you. I just question whether such things are actually changeable. It's almost like willing yourself to change your DNA, or something. It's simply a fixed point of who you are. Throw in stuff like autism and being of an older age (fundamentally less plasticity and wiggle room for change within the brain) and even the faintest possibility of developing any sort of method to change whatever one's maladaptive mannerisms are becomes even slimmer, assuming they aren't just hardwired and beyond changing in the first place.

>I'm not saying undoing all of that is easy or even realistically possible, especially when you consider the analogy of a badly programmed computer fixing itself, but it's better than giving up.

I'm not saying anyone should give up. If they think they can find themselves to a better place psychologically and emotionally then all the more power to them. All I'm saying is that certain individuals can get shafted extremely hard when it comes to their general physiological make-up. So much so that, yes, the chances of them seeing an improvement in this area are essentially zero. Similar to how certain people whom find themselves crippled in an accident are sometimes capable of engaging in physical therapy to eventually walk again, some others aren't. This isn't just a matter of having a bad attitude, or of clinging to a self-fulfilling prophecy about how broken one is, therefore making it their reality. Reality is reality. If a person is incapable of receiving the benefits of physical therapy, then that's just how it is. I'd argue that such a person believing themselves to still be a candidate for treatment would just be a sign of unhealthy delusion (this is discounting the rather low instances of those who have persisted in therapy even when doctors claimed they'd never walk again, versus the vast majority of others who were simply met with failure in their defiance of the doctor's prognosis), instead of the arguably better option of just accepting the state of who they are, and all the limitations that come with it, and making the best of it. You're right that a badly programmed computer can't fix itself. It needs someone else, like a technician, to do the actual fixing. That is in fact the only way it can get fixed. The tragedy is that nobody understands the human brain. No outside technician exists so as to fix it when it goes bad and, to be honest, the possibility of there ever being one is kind of frightening in itself. The best society can currently offer is self-help, pills and therapy. If fixing the brain is like fixing a computer, then fixing the body is like fixing a wagon. One is far more straightforward than the other. Anyway, I don't know. I guess I'll just cut to the chase and say that, outside of gene therapy, or cutting edge, essentially sci-fi techniques, to change neural pathways in the brain, or what have you, someone like me is just completely fucked. I'm talking a device that could literally pinpoint botched neural pathways that lead to chronic depression, excessive anxiety or overthinking and to correct said pathways just like that. You'd still be who you are, just without the torment of additional anxiety or depression crippling one's experience of life.

>I'm determined to figure out and deal with all of my emotional problems because no one else will do it. It's unfortunate but sometimes you have to make your own tools and deal with problems with no obvious solution.

Well, best of luck to you then. As you say, I hope you can find, or develop, your own unique tools to solve the challenges you're faced with. It's tragic that those kinds of tools aren't equally accessible to everyone, and they sometimes require great pains to discover or develop, assuming they ever can at all, but I guess that's just life, really.

>>169135

Sorry to hear that. I've never actually had it happen to me personally, but it just seemed like an appropriate comparison to make when talking about insults online, since someone shouting slurs or insults as they speed on by in car shares at least a small portion of the anonymity of those who do so online. Difference being that such things said in-person, or in a drive by, tend to be much more devastating and painful. I guess, in both instances, the best approach is to simply ignore whoever it is and keep on your way. The more inert the response the more triggered/bored the instigating party tends to be. I'm not saying that's easy to do or even possible to do sometimes, and it can still feel like a painful defeat, but it still seems to be the best option.

>>169136
>It's simply a fixed point of who you are.

That's just your assumption. You can easily observe the dynamic nature of these processes and it makes sense from an evolutionary point of view that they would be susceptible to learning and development. You weren't born with the knowledge of your native tongue, you gradually learned to perceive the arbitrary sounds of people around you as meaningful. Learning might be stable over time but it's by no means set in stone. Research on memory reconsolidation has already demonstrated that long-term consolidated memories can be erased or updated when the proper corrective experience happens.

The computer analogy was supposed to convey that bad programming doesn't mean the machine is broken. Fixing it simply requires better programming and the brain is not a block of dead matter, it's evolved to learn and help you adapt to things. Every time you sit down to play a new video game, you learn how to perceive the graphics, sounds, behavior in a meaningful way and you might even get pretty worked up about its virtual goals, as you learn to perceive certain cues as bad and others as good. Is that encoded in your DNA? No, your biology has developed in such a way as to make it most adaptable, letting itself be programmed by the environment based on certain rules.

In your mind, a brain is this static fixed thing that you can only update by replacing it. The reality is that the brain is most dynamic thing in your body and you wouldn't survive if that weren't the case.

Anti-society thinking has become too ingrained in my psyche to just cast it off. I've been to therapy, and the fundamental problem is that you have to want to change your way of thinking for it to work. I'm so thoroughly anti-work and anti-people that it's part of my identity. At my core I don't want to work, and I don't want to change myself to fit in with normies, so any therapy that aims to makes those things possible is doomed to fail.

>>169140

>You weren't born with the knowledge of your native tongue, you gradually learned to perceive the arbitrary sounds of people around you as meaningful.

Okay, but information acquisition and absorbing new ideas and habits is strongest when one is younger. It's the sort of thing that has varying speeds associated to it, which something like autism can noticeably impede. The ability to store and acquire new information also slows down significantly when you throw aging into the mix. On average, more than that even, the brain essentially becomes a highly inflexible, mushy rock when you hit 25 and it no longer develops in the sense that it is growing and maturing. Just like your height, at some point (usually after puberty around 18/19) you stop growing in height. After age 25 most brain development consists of learning new connections among the neurons we already have at age 25, and that includes any bad ones, (depression shrinks neurons, which can lead to impaired cognitive function and memory problems).

>proper corrective experience happens.

Like what, exactly? That's pretty nebulous. It sounds like to me then that change, true change, is pretty much just a fluke one has to hope and pray to have happen to them. Funnily enough, I can actually attest to this being the case, since eating healthier, exercising, losing tons of weight. I managed to do all these things and to continue doing them, but it almost entirely came about through a unique sequence of rather unlikely events that led to them happening. If those events hadn't happened, the change wouldn't have occurred. So, in other words, a complete fluke. In that case, I suppose the best thing anyone can do is just cross their fingers and hope for a pseudo-miracle to have happen to them, similar to what triggered my path to weight loss and eating healthier/exercise.

>Every time you sit down to play a new video game, you learn how to perceive the graphics, sounds, behavior in a meaningful way and you might even get pretty worked up about its virtual goals, as you learn to perceive certain cues as bad and others as good.

A lot of video games essentially boil down to the same thing though. All platformers are pretty much like this, all shooters are pretty much like that. It's actually pretty wrote and rudimentary, at least for me anyway. Doesn't really feel applicable to learning and adapting to an entirely new way, built from the bottom up, to engage and interact with the world. Especially when it runs headlong into other learned, malformed habits that have been deeply ingrained and have formed physical neural pathways in the brain. I'd say it's more like trying to play a video game based around an entirely new sense that one has never even used before. Like someone trying to play a shooter with their feet after many decades with their hands, or something. It'd be extremely challenging, but even that would be simple compared to restructuring and replacing the connections and associations one has reinforced over an entire lifetime when it comes to finding an entirely new, more healthier way to interact with others and the world.

>No, your biology has developed in such a way as to make it most adaptable, letting itself be programmed by the environment based on certain rules.

Well, again, that itself can vary immensely from person to person, based around what their age is, what pre-existing cerebral impairments they might suffer from, or just how generally flexible their minds are to learning new habits and information. I mean, someone with down syndrome is not equipped with a brain which is very adaptable, compared to an average, or highly intelligent person. That's pretty much the far end of bad on the spectrum, sure, but there are still limits of what one can expect from their own mind. Not all brains are created equal, unfortunately. Based on what I said earlier however, some amount of change was clearly possible for me, but, keep in mind, that none of it really shook my world up to a point where it would really change who I fundamentally was, or still am. In the end, it was a very surface level change. Eating healthy, exercising, and losing weight. All of these things were done without needing to leave the house and certainly didn't require addressing what my core problems are. Case in point, I'm just as anxious, depressed, and paranoid as I've ever been.

>The reality is that the brain is most dynamic thing in your body and you wouldn't survive if that weren't the case.

Only to a point though. When the brain is fresh, young and free of other impairments, it can chart and rewrite neural pathways like nobody's business. Eventually however, that process slows down and long-time pathways in the brain can essentially become calcified, for lack of a better term, and more or less fixed. I'd say that's why it's important for young wizards to make a concerted effort to change and chart new neural pathways for themselves while they still have the chance, since there does come a point where that shit becomes significantly more, if not downright impossible, for one to do.

And, let's not forget, that there is another large reason to all this. And that's the why. Why do I want to do this? Why do I want to put in this kind of effort? It'd have to be a pretty damn important reason. Something that would drive me to madness if I were to sit still, leaving me no other choice, but to work myself towards it, regardless of the challenges involved. Right here is how I was able to lose weight and start eating healthily. Among other things, one night, as I was laying in bed, it struck me how I literally could not stand being fat and unhealthy anymore. That was my main reason. The pain of stopping my efforts, far outweighed the pain and hassle of actually doing them. How did this happen? I have no idea. Like I said, a lot of stuff just happened to transpire in the right sequence, at the right time to lead to this change.

>>169144

>At my core I don't want to work, and I don't want to change myself to fit in with normies, so any therapy that aims to makes those things possible is doomed to fail.

Agreed. At the same time, I can understand that for wizards that have to work and have to engage with normals on a daily basis, then finding ways of stymieing or perhaps even overriding their anxiety would be enormously beneficial. I'm not in that sort of position myself and if there's any reason I'd ever truly want to get better, it'd be just for simple stuff. Like going for a walk at night down the deserted and peaceful streets in my small town without feeling anxiety riddled the whole time, or finally feeling at ease and capable of social interaction online beyond imageboards. I also have this fictitious notion of people in my head, people I could engage with and who I could share wonderful moments with and feel completely at ease being around, but I have to remind myself that this sort of shit largely doesn't exist. I could go to therapy, or flounder around trying to fix myself, but what I want and am looking for in this respect would more than likely feel just as far away, even if I were successful in correcting all of my own issues. I guess that's where that whole meme of seeing anime world through a noose comes from, since teleporting to a different, more benign universe, with oneself as the main character which everyone adores, feels like essentially the only way it could ever happen.

>>169144
Me too, it's almost like i'm role-playing a person who wants to get better, but below the surface, i like who i am and don't actually want to change

>>169100
This. My time on this planet has been deeply traumatizing.

Has anyone tried talking online with someone that's also socially anxious as a way of getting accustomed to social situations? Usually I can't handle IM type chats, but if it was with someone dealing with the same issues, it could be manageable. If both sides are equally inept, and understand it's only for practice, the expectations are lower. And there wouldn't be any pressure to respond immediately, or fear of saying the "wrong" things. If anyone's interested, let me know. Could be worth a try.

>>170087
I don't really have much issue with online chatting via text (email or live chat like Discord etc). It's my real life that's totally fucked up. But if you need somebody to talk to who understands social anxiety/agoraphobia I'd be happy to chat. Not sure what program or app you want to use.

I can't play chess online because of that.

>>162674
My anxiety comes and goes, but it's been a huge factor as to why I've never been able to keep a job for very long or establish any meaningful relationships, platonic or otherwise. I get especially hung up on things to do with breathing and swallowing, and often go through phases where I can't stop thinking about manual breathing and or choking when I swallow. Happens for weeks or months at a time, then it goes away randomly, but it always seems to come back again.

If I lived in a country where firearms were legal, I'd probably have gotten drunk and shot myself by now. I don't actually drink or take any form of drugs, and I try to exercise to take my mind off it, but the results are kinda mixed. I've always resisted going to the doctor for it, but I'm getting pretty desperate and will probably end up taking meds or trying therapy in the near future. I just live in fear all the time and rely on my mother for everything, which is pathetic for a man who is about to turn 30. I guess having no friends, no job, no experiences and no accomplishments all contributes to the anxiety as I get older.

>>170450
Your only chance is the way of warp wanings. Why no posts about how some us get to reduce or control our inner disease?

>>162674
Yes I know exactly what you mean. I can't use sites like reddit because I feel like the interaction is to close and personal and people tend to nit pick what I say to make me feel stupid, which makes things worst for my anxiety. Plus the fact they can check my post history gives them more ammo to fire at me, which they seem to do often.
I don't like using discord for similar reasons. Everything moves to fast and I don't feel like I could fit into any conversations going on. Plus, the site is full of normalfags, even in the "no normies" servers. Anytime I try to join a voice chat I pretty much sit there awkwardly quiet, like I do in real life. Plus, they mute your for simply posting gore or some other retarded shit.
I hate talking on video games too, same issue I get with the voice chats on discord. Just can't seem like I can fit myself into any of the conversations going on. I can only talk one on one with others. Online or offline, that's when it seems natural to me.
I like wizchan because it keeps things slow and I can keep up with a thread a few days after it's been posted, it's just a different feel than other sites that rush you (like 4chan, discord, and reddit). Plus I feel much less judged/awkward. I can truly speak my mind on this site.

>>170636
>people tend to nit pick what I say to make me feel stupid

Agreed. I hate that autistic shit so much. Its like they perfectly understand what you say but they just have to point out something each time. Its so fucking annoying and stupid and I hate it so much. Sometimes I think that people of this low brain level and behavioral pattern should not have access to technology. I think their brains are fucked up or no capable of acting right.

I also agree with you on the imageboards just being more free for you to speak your mind. They arent consensus based like twatter and plebbit.

>>170641
I'm glad a wiz gets how I feel, It's overwhelming sometimes. It gets me so angry for no reason.
>>164877 kinda like what this guy's saying, it only leads to argument, so I try to avoid sites that promote that in their community's actions.

>>170508
> warp warnings
Can you explain more, WarpWarningWiz?

>>164877
It's easier to plot your whole argument, when feeling about it… then pasting it suddenly, and let them scorch.

>>169081
Which rice farmer? Do you know how hard farming rice is? It takes a family to do it, which is unironically why people had children in the first place

4chan used to be my home but I hate how for the past….fuck, decade maybe, everything is now mixed up in several layers of irony, jadedness and sarcasm that nobody takes themselves or others seriously any more. Shitposting is out of control. It's so rare to find a genuine discussion with another human being on a topic you're both interested in where the only thing to judge is each others word. No aggression, no toxicity, no attention-whoring and no cancer. Everyone is so aggressive now and it's not just 4chan that is at fault but the internet as a whole. I partly blame politics and extremism thanks to the flood of normies that have taken over towards the end of the 00's and the centralisation of the internet, removing little communities and absorbing them into amorphous blobs like reddit. It's just made it harder than ever to engage with people even while anonymous due to the aforementioned issues on sites like 4chan. Even wizchan has this issue. Everyone feels the need to be an asshole. I'm tired of it.

>phobia
>fear
for me it is not fear
I am just tired of competition
I hated competition and competitive things since forever

be it soccer, pokemon battles or board games. I was always more the collector type of person

When I for example hide on a sunny day, I avoid the swarms of daypeople that mingle outside. The people with which I have to compete for everyting. Be it for food on a busy mcdonalds or for groceries waiting in the supermarket. By avoiding the crowds I simple have the entire store or burger joint for myself and I can choose on which table I can sit down and I can occupy 4 places for myself because there is nobody there

I really hate competition

>>171382
I'm obsessed with competition but utterly terrified of failure. I make everything in my life a competition. Nothing is ever a bit of fun, I need to win or else I'll feel like shit for the rest of the day.

>>171382
>I am just tired of competition
>I hated competition and competitive things since forever
iktf wizbro
I grew up somewhere with so many people it was always a rat race and I got tired of it decades ago. It's so demoralizing and tiring and it never fucking ends.
It's rare to find people who hate it though, every clown claims to be some confident competitor even if he's been a total loser all his life. Seems like some weird form of coping.

>>172339
That is an accurate depiction of the world though

>>172354
Not anymore.

>>172356
Which African banks do you know of?
Yeah, that's what i thought

>>172339
what was that rat nazi gay dude's name here?
confirmed simpson poster

>>172362
Just because someone is a stupid failure doesn't mean they're being victimized or oppressed by anyone. That's trashy postmodern Hegel thinking.

>>172373
>somehow getting Hegel and postmodern in the same sentence

Postmodernists are too dumb to even read Hegel.

>>162674
don't waste will power, time and energy on thinking and worrying about what you know you need to do, just do it, regardless of the fear and pain

>>171382
>>172335
you only need to compete against yourself. Getting better then the person you were yesterday. No one can actually make you feel bad for being a loser or failing, thats actually you, and don't kid yourself, you do care and you do feel bad about it. Other people can only take advantage of the vulnerability in the self esteem of a failure. The more you allow yourself to fail the more you allow your self esteem to be vulnerable to the abuse of others. Be honest with yourself and give yourself an honest assessment of where you're at, or other people will

>>171312
I didn't fully read this but its kind of the opposite for me, 4chan isn't funny or fun anymore. All that levity that came from the ruthlessly irreverant humor that didn't hold anything as too sacred or wasn't held back by anything being too dark is gone. All the wit's gone and nobody there is funny anymore, I think it has something to do with the new generation.

Plus, its all normies now, their careers their wives their kids their lay counts is all they seem to post about.
> Everyone is so aggressive now
and this, ruthless turbo normgroids and psychopathic bullies weilding the jackboot of the normie world without any of the empathy or mercy normies have.

There really are no crabs / robots / wizards anywhere online except here now. Even though they talk about us and how pathetic they think we are constantly as if we're still around or we're all on that other website (like reddit talking about 4chan) or on 4chan everyone talks about us as if they are the only one who isn't one of us, they don't seem to notice that everyone on 4chan is them now.

>>16267
> Used internet since early 2000s
>I'm 25

What were you browsing when you were 8? Teletubbies threesome?

>>172381
Not him, but I used sites like albino black sheep and new grounds when I was pretty young.

>>172381
Searching for cheats was probably the first thing I did on the internet.

>>172393
same here
>year 2003
>looking for pokemon sapphire cheats and tricks
>posting teams in forums
>getting owned in discussions by the competitive normies there
I remember when they spread this rumor that if you went to the cave that is different with the tides, you can find this mega rare pokemon called Xeo Xeo

Oh and I had an old N64 with goldeneye
I looked for cheats for that one too and they worked

>>172378
everyone wants to be the coold kids
as always
life is one giant competition for all normalfags
they can never take it easy and just slack away a day or 2

We should pity them

>>172439
Yeah it was actually legit, i did that
It was the waves by the shore in ruby i think
The pokemon came up all pixelated and had a crazy level like 99999
Never did catch that guy..

>>172439
did you also press alt+f4 in World of Warcraft when asking for help in world chat? I know I did :(

I literally cannot talk to people without them wanting to kill me anymore. Its utterly hopeless.

Can't keep an eye contact. I'm not even that sociophobic, but this simple thing is somehow out of my control.

>>172493
I have the same problem. I had bad social anxiety as a teenager but it's been basically gone for ages. I just don't care enough about other people for it anymore.
Eye contact isn't an anxiety thing, it's a personal space thing. It feels too "close", like the other person is an inch from my face.
I have a very hard time even looking at people's faces at all when I talk, I tend to stare off into space at the nearest table or something.

>>172514
It's both for me. One time I was shifting to avoid eye contact while crossing the street and there was like a Khloe Kardashian lookalike who was upset and said "this guy" in a whiny tone and seemingly took offense like it was an act of disrespect.