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I never felt like a real person. I didn’t entirely know what I meant by this, but I knew it had to do with how I only ever existed in two states - around other people, fake, like I was constructed for them - around myself, non-existence, like I wasn’t a real person to talk to
. . . part of it has to do with living in a world where there felt consequences, not just school, looking good for new pieces of paper; . . . https://t.co/D6rfom2mll
It blew my mind, my sophomore summer, when for the first time in my life, I had begun talking to myself—invented all sorts of mental voices, the coach, the Human, the executive—and suddenly, I remember it distinctly, had an insight and didn’t feel the need to share it.
I stopped construing everything in terms of optimising, optimising, optimising for others I suppose, and instead, gave way to the arbitrary Wants and Desires of myself. https://t.co/jADZDMVsFE
I outlined 4 distinct ways I didn’t feel real, but they’re related, of course; just above, I connected [not feeling real except around others] to [not feeling real due to optimising, not know what it was to want arbitrarily]. https://t.co/MrL0cQqpAc
Why was I that way? Some speculations 1. An an INTP, the main way I processed information as through my Ti-Ne loop: expressing ideas out loud, then checking internally for consistency. https://t.co/dzuAEJ56Ok
It was deeply important to speak out loud. I had to speak every thought out loud. I always wanted to be cool and have internal monologues around people, but that just wasn’t my brain’s primary way of processing information.
2. I grew up as a Floating Head Person. I kinda rendered other people at the lowest possible resolution of my “people GPU.” People sometimes came to me and bothered me with a stimulus and I had to provide a certain response so they would go away satisfied.
The thing about that is—when you don’t need a model of other people so much, you don’t need a model of yourself either. Everything just existed, there was no clear “I,” and so I’m not surprised I grew up without a clear sense of what I wanted, my internal monologue, etc.