Kontextmaschine

22nd October 2021

Post with 13 notes

After the personality change, wondering whether the old one wasn’t diagnosable with autism, just high-functioning through conscious processing.

Back in childhood ADD/ADHD was the master neurodivergence of the day – with a come-up just too late to get diagnosed with when they sent me to a shrink in kindergarten for being a hellion mostly cause kindergarteners were unrespectable idiots. “Autism” started my life conceptualized as Rain Man “idiot savant” stuff and didn’t really take its current positioning until the late ‘90s

Mostly it’s the stereotypical complete disinterest in the value of human life qua life and morality arising from said; I think one mechanism is that after the change I found I could feel other people’s emotions. And I had always complained about being accused of lacking “empathy”, I could track and react to emotions just fine but I’m realizing that I was consciously inferring from externally visible signs and mental models of others’ selves but now just feel it directly.

And if I had grown up with that as one of the main tools in my kit maybe I would have found it more important to create good and not bad feelings in others, even worked up a morality around it or glommed onto a premade one

As is, it comes after I already worked up a way – and the conceptualizations to match – to be in social situations without it and it just registers as a gratuitous power-up within that framework. Like, before if I wanted to talk to someone I had to think up a topic and something to say about it, now I have a small talk gift of the gab, but applying all the skills developed in the first I can now spontaneously converse in ways that alter the emotional waveform how I want while being entirely logically consistent and wordplay-witty