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by CamperBob2 5110 days ago
In her case, she doesn't seem to have any neuroses that couldn't be fixed with perspective. Instead of brooding about a perceived insult from some experimental poet guy she met at a bar, she could try volunteering in any number of capacities, from neutral social/cultural organizations to civil libertarian causes to overt partisan activism. You can't look closely at the lives and roles of others without seeing your own in more detail.

Somewhere in the Universe a supernova or a gamma-ray burst probably wiped out a dozen advanced civilizations between the time I typed 'Somewhere' and the time I typed 'typed.' Fretting over anything less is, by definition, sweating the small stuff.

1 comments

Brooding isn't voluntary. Bad experiences with people don't fade away with time and can return in flashbacks many years after when your mood is down for whatever reason. I perfectly understand OP as I'm also the kind of person that has this strange memory for people doing me harm by what for most people seem nearly benign act.
Perhaps, but still, it seems like a lot of people are confusing the introvert <-> extrovert axis with the self-centered <-> socially-conscious axis. They are in fact highly orthogonal in my experience. At least insofar as it's possible to judge someone's psychology from a blog post, she would score far into the "self-centered" region of the latter axis, while being somewhere on the introverted side of center on the former... even if she doesn't recognize it.

I don't expect a leopard to change its spots, but at the same time I believe it's possible to consciously nudge yourself in one direction or the other on both axes.