Hi! So I'd just like to note before you get into this that this article is in a very different style to the previous one, and is more of a place for me to just dump what I've been thinking about today than something actually meant to be enjoyable to read. That being said I still think it's interesting enough to unhide the article so that you can see it, so if it still sounds interesting, please do read on. Oh, also, this one's going to be a bit personal, take that how you will.
I'm an introvert
Well I just confirmed that I'm an introvert, and honestly I don't like it. A lot of people don't know what that actually means but all it means is that it takes energy to talk to people, and my goodness I have found that to be true today.
So what happened is yesterday was femboy beat saber day (don't question it), and I ended up playing beat saber for 3 and a half hours, which was very enjoyable. For that night it was fine I was a little physically exhausted from the beat saber but in terms of mental energy I was doing just fine, until today. I woke up today and just felt tired in a mental way, (excuse my tangent here I think this is interesting) there are many ways in which I can feel tired. First is simply being physically tired out, i.e. after 3 hours of beat saber, but I actually think this is unrelated to the other forms of tiredness so I will be ignoring it from here on out. Next is full tiredness, where I am just having a hard time keeping myself awake. Finally, for normally what I experience is a physical tiredness, where I feel like I could fall asleep but my mind is still very much awake. But today was different. All day I felt the opposite of that last tiredness where my body was fine but I was just mentally tired entirely, I could barely answer a simple yes/no question without being fed up with how long the conversation was taking (that feels like an overstatement but it's actually just how I felt trying to talk today).
At first I thought that I just didn't get enough sleep, or my sleep schedule was too erratic, or maybe it was the beat saber? But then I realized that I wasn't feeling physically tired and then I calculated how long I was calling with people for last night and realized that I was in a discord call from 10 PM to 4:30 AM, or 6 and a half hours. Not only that, but I also was wearing a skirt and thigh-highs the entire time. Now I am quite a lot more comfortable doing things like that in front of friends than a lot of people (well I assume it's a lot of people I'm actually just thinking of one person who also was playing femboy beat saber specifically), but I still am not fully comfortable with it. I didn't really feel at the time all that uncomfortable but it was different and stressful and that combined with 6 hours of social interaction just completely used all of my social ability for the next day.
Femboy time
I have a lot of mixed (mostly good) feelings about the whole me-doing-femboy-things thing, but it's somewhat unrelated so I'm putting it down here instead.
So, for context I am a neurotypical, straight, cisgender man (if you don't know what that means you should look it up but effectively it means I am what society used to, and still somewhat does, think of as a "normal" person). I am not going to get into how this gives me advantages in life, but just know that I recognize that I does, and I do not wish that I were different. But with that out of the way, most of the people who I know (actually, barring family, all of the people I consider friends as of right now), are not those three things, which is great. The issue is that the human brain is a caveman brain and one of the things that the caveman brain does is try to fit in, and so (I feel bad that I am this way but I don't think I should) I feel like I should be, at least in some way, different from what society considers normal. It's really weird, and counterintuitive, because I feel like I want to fit in by not fitting in with society. This causes me to act in ways that are sometimes not genuine (usually in the context of being a joke), and honestly I don't know what to feel about this.
Side-tangent/story about wanting to fit in and confirmation bias (skip this paragraph for the continued thought): So on multiple occasions, I have done/said a thing or agreed with someone else saying something that was then immediately clarified to be an ADHD thing. After about 5 or so times of this happening I was starting to seriously consider getting tested, but there are a few reasons why I decided against it. First off is confirmation bias, sure I might have a train of though bouncing though 15 things in literally less than one second, experience this, or a couple of other instances, but there are just as many things that are tied to ADHD that I don't do that I think it would be unreasonable to draw a conclusion from these pieces of anecdotal evidence. Second is that it doesn't affect me in my everyday life, I can do schoolwork (and in the summer programming-work) just fine (mostly), so why get tested for something that even if I do have doesn't affect me? Third, and this is I think the most important takeaway for me, because I feel like I want to have ADHD, just so that I'm not a "normie". This does sound crazy to say and I haven't told anyone before but there is a large part of me that really wants to be different, just so that I can fit in with the rest of my friend group, and honestly I think that is both interesting and annoying and I feel bad about it but all in all I just don't know what to make of it. The last thing to mention here is that there is a part of my brain that is telling me that I am making up reasons to not get tested because I'm afraid that I actually am different, but I have to just ignore that part of my brain and try to exclusively use logic instead.
So how does doing "femboy things" tie into this? Well, it's complicated, but I think that the fact that I spent $50 on a skirt and thigh highs probably means that it's a little more than just a joke to me. It definitely stated as just a joke, but I think that over time I felt like it was just a fun thing to do on it's own. Honestly I'm not sure I mind that fact, it's just confusing to me. Actually, I don't know what it means to be a femboy, but if it literally just means that you are a boy that enjoys wearing feminine clothing, then I might legitimately fall into that category, that is unless the only reason why I like doing this is because it's different. Although, that might be the same reason anyone would like doing it, so does it really matter what it's fueled by? If you ask me it does, because without my current group of friends I don't know if I would enjoy wearing a skirt, but it's still something that I have to put more thinking into.
"The thing", and being worried about being judged
So it might sound weird for someone who has no problem going around and showing people pictures of me playing beat saber in a skirt, but I am really affected heavily when people "judge" things that I do. The reason I put judge in quotes is that it's not the best word here, what I mean is when someone expresses that something I've said or done does not meet an acceptable standard, almost (like my taste in music isn't good enough, for example). Because of this I think that normally I am very careful to try and do things that are not objectionable, or even pretend to get references that I don't actually get.
What is "the thing"? Well it's a phrase coined by one of my friends to represent how I talk sometimes where I don't take anything seriously, and never say anything that I actually mean. I just thought that I did this because I didn't know how else to be funny, but then one of my friends said something that really made me think about it a lottle bit closer. Specifically what they said was that it might be a defence mechanism, and that it might be to protect me from being judged, and suddenly it made so much more sense. First off if that is the case that would explain why I rely on talking like that so much: because if I didn't I'd be exposing something about myself that might not be up to the standards of others (it's important to note that when I say the standards of others what I really mean is my projected standards, I know at some level they are probably not real). It also makes sense why I feel like talking like this is just part of how I talk, because it is, it's not just a mechanism for jokes, it's actually part of my method for holding a casual conversation. So that kind of just left me with the single question of why might I be so sensitive to being judged this way.
The way that I grew up did not involve anyone judging me, which would make me think that there's no reason why I'd be so averse to it, but on second thought the fact that it's been so rare might be why I'm bad about dealing with it. I did not go to public school until high school, which I'm in now, as such I did not get a lot of social experience that I think I otherwise would have. I think that this is actually the core of a lot of things that I don't like about myself, specifically about how I (can't) interact with my peers. Staying off social media hasn't helped me either but this article isn't about self-pity over not being forced into the public school system to learn social skills, so back to the main point. I think that this contributes two-fold: 1. I don't know a lot of the references that I feel like I should because I just "didn't get out much" if that makes sense, and 2. because I didn't experience interactions, and specifically bad interactions enough to get more used to them.
Summery
So this article is basically things I've learnt about myself in the past less than a year since I've been talking to people online, and I think I've legitimately learnt about myself than I have for the rest of my life before this. It might just be the part of my life that I'm in but I think I owe a lot to the people around me now (and one person specifically, who has an uncanny amount of knowledge about people for their age, who I will not mention by name here for the sake of privacy). I would really like to, if any of you are reading this, thank you for getting to know me and helping me actually have friends, in the middle of the pandemic, no less.
Wow, that was a long one (2,000 words, or three times as long as a high school essay), but it felt good to finally write these things, and I think that I'm finally actually starting to better understand how my own brain works, which is always a good thing.