I finally went ahead and made that post on the MBTI forum. As expected, my post was misunderstood and nasty things were attributed to me. I am truly a fool. This always happens, yet I always go back and try to participate on non-ASD forums.
I have developed a very specific anxiety over this sort of thing. As I was typing a response (in which I explained that I was not saying the offensive things of which I had been accused) I was shaking and shivering. It took me forever to recognize that as the anxiety response that it is; even though I recognize it rather well by now, for a second I still wondered if it was just the manifestation of low blood sugar. This is what I call alexithymic-stupid: not recognizing one's emotional responses even with very obvious physical signs, being inclined to read the signs as something other than emotional responses to such an extent that even previously-recognized emotional states are suspected to be something else.
There were more neutral responses, but I couldn't stop thinking about the one. The one that dumbfounded me; the one in which the the connotations, rather than the denotations, of my words were analyzed. I sat staring at the screen with my mouth hanging open. The things Feelers come up with. Unbelievable. It actually made me feel less guilty than I would have, so foreign to my cognitive style it was that I could not doubt my inability to have foreseen such an interpretation (and adjusted my wording).
Experience suggests that trying to explain such things to Feelers is a fruitless endeavor; furthermore, I compose my posts with a focus on the denotation of words moreso than the connotations, so I would have run the risk of the same misunderstanding with an explanation. After uselessly perseverating on this for way too long, I resolved not to attempt a response. I tried to tell myself to not allow the experience to be wasted worrying over one comment and nursing bitterness over yet another episode of misunderstanding, and to profit from the other comments instead. For some reason, I only get some of the responses to threads in my inbox, and the ones I looked at suggested that the topic had branched out quite a bit. I didn't have the energy to go through all the comments; I was mentally tired, and I just ignored the thread.
It's times like these that I have a glimmer of understanding of the usefulness of friendships. I had wanted to talk about one particular thing and was disappointed to find that the other commenters had run with my thread and taken it off into unanticipated directions. I sensed that the meaning of my question had been misunderstood even by the more neutral posters, but didn't want to launch any more clarification attempts into the sea of dialogue that had formed. I knew that I would have been able to exercise more control over the direction and depth of the discussion if I were having it with a single friend, rather than putting it to a forum full of strangers. Someone who was familiar and comfortable with my style of expression, and would not derail the discussion to comment on the offensiveness of my choice of terms. I call it a "derailment" knowing full well that it seems quite the opposite to the Feelers who comment upon the tone and feeling of the discussion. It is a derailment from my perspective.
Still, I don't want a friend. I don't have proper "friend" feelings, and doubt that I could develop any. But I will blog about that some other time, perhaps.
I have developed a very specific anxiety over this sort of thing. As I was typing a response (in which I explained that I was not saying the offensive things of which I had been accused) I was shaking and shivering. It took me forever to recognize that as the anxiety response that it is; even though I recognize it rather well by now, for a second I still wondered if it was just the manifestation of low blood sugar. This is what I call alexithymic-stupid: not recognizing one's emotional responses even with very obvious physical signs, being inclined to read the signs as something other than emotional responses to such an extent that even previously-recognized emotional states are suspected to be something else.
There were more neutral responses, but I couldn't stop thinking about the one. The one that dumbfounded me; the one in which the the connotations, rather than the denotations, of my words were analyzed. I sat staring at the screen with my mouth hanging open. The things Feelers come up with. Unbelievable. It actually made me feel less guilty than I would have, so foreign to my cognitive style it was that I could not doubt my inability to have foreseen such an interpretation (and adjusted my wording).
Experience suggests that trying to explain such things to Feelers is a fruitless endeavor; furthermore, I compose my posts with a focus on the denotation of words moreso than the connotations, so I would have run the risk of the same misunderstanding with an explanation. After uselessly perseverating on this for way too long, I resolved not to attempt a response. I tried to tell myself to not allow the experience to be wasted worrying over one comment and nursing bitterness over yet another episode of misunderstanding, and to profit from the other comments instead. For some reason, I only get some of the responses to threads in my inbox, and the ones I looked at suggested that the topic had branched out quite a bit. I didn't have the energy to go through all the comments; I was mentally tired, and I just ignored the thread.
It's times like these that I have a glimmer of understanding of the usefulness of friendships. I had wanted to talk about one particular thing and was disappointed to find that the other commenters had run with my thread and taken it off into unanticipated directions. I sensed that the meaning of my question had been misunderstood even by the more neutral posters, but didn't want to launch any more clarification attempts into the sea of dialogue that had formed. I knew that I would have been able to exercise more control over the direction and depth of the discussion if I were having it with a single friend, rather than putting it to a forum full of strangers. Someone who was familiar and comfortable with my style of expression, and would not derail the discussion to comment on the offensiveness of my choice of terms. I call it a "derailment" knowing full well that it seems quite the opposite to the Feelers who comment upon the tone and feeling of the discussion. It is a derailment from my perspective.
Still, I don't want a friend. I don't have proper "friend" feelings, and doubt that I could develop any. But I will blog about that some other time, perhaps.
