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Sadly, the grinning goon is often the reality of the situation. I grew up being treated as weird because I hated crowds and needed to rest after interacting with people. Externally, this got treated as me hating people and noisy places, which is not really true at all. I like people and when I have enough bandwidth available, I'll gladly interact with them even knowing that it will cost me some shut-down time later. There's a,"spoons" analogy for this that people seem to like, but I tend to think of it more in terms of how a computer allocates resources to process information. The "noisy" bit is really more social noise, but some environments acoustically confound me. Coffee shops, for example, where the espresso machines make those god-awful noises at random intervals, only to bounce around in some idiotic open-ceiling aesthetic that has become fashionable for reasons I do not understand, since even extroverts like to hear who they are talking to. Thankfully, I have really nice earplugs. Anyway, it was not until my 20's that I was diagnosed with Anxiety, which made things click. People that do not experience this have no clue, but I can't really blame them. The advertising and entertainment media I grew up on always displayed social interaction as healthy or some kind of key to happiness, which got pigeon-holed as "normal behavior", so who would want to be unhealthy or unhappy? You were supposed to just get out there and it would get easier with time, right? These people mean well, but again, they have no clue. But the opposite is true. One of my best friends is a textbook extrovert, constantly needing social interaction and experiencing heavy mental and emotional distress when he's alone with just himself and his thoughts for too long. I have no clue what that's like, though I possess enough empathy to understand that's how he is wired, so his needs are different than mine (he also has enough empathy to return the same understanding toward my needs). Empathy, as you imply, bridges that gap but also takes tremendous effort, hence why Othering is such a pervasive social issue. |