There are a lot of things that I've consciously learned, or learned late. I know a significant chunk of my ability to interact socially is due to theatre and writing. Theatre consciously deconstructs body language in human interaction, and you pick up the skills to study it that way if you didn't understand it to start with. I act well enough, but I'll never be brilliant there. I do write, and I write well; in order to do as well as I have at that, I have to script out what has to happen and then direct it through in my head, and once it's directed, I can transcribe what the characters are doing.
I've always had little models of people in my head, and I interacted with them better than I did with the people themselves, half the time. I check myself and my models of the people I know to make sure the model is consistent with reality, scripting through what I think someone is going to say sometimes, and then playing it out, seeing if I get the same responses. I used to have to rehearse what I was going to say over and over in my head, until I was sure of what I was going to say before I said it, and then work over my responses again and again until I could speak. I could make unscripted conversation with some people in some circumstances, but it took me literally rewiring my brain to make it possible for me to do that in most circumstances. (I realized that I could have typed conversations realtime in chatrooms, so I knew that I was theoretically capable of having voice conversations with strangers realtime, so I caused the mental source of my typed chat output to output into voice conversation as well. I still have no idea how I did it, other than it felt like pressing. I did it once previously with rewiring my brain to use either eyebrow rather than just the one.)
You're also seeing me after a whole lot of very intensive therapy, pastoral rather than clinical, as my Priestess-confessor isn't certified. Granted, most of that was to put my insides back together and back inside, but a coherent inside has a lot to do with a coherent outside for me. I'm very nearly incapable of serious deception, so I have to actually be whole and healthy to interact that way.
As far as what I am, I'm not tied to a label, as long as there's some acknowledgment that I am not only weird, but wired weird.
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I've always had little models of people in my head, and I interacted with them better than I did with the people themselves, half the time. I check myself and my models of the people I know to make sure the model is consistent with reality, scripting through what I think someone is going to say sometimes, and then playing it out, seeing if I get the same responses. I used to have to rehearse what I was going to say over and over in my head, until I was sure of what I was going to say before I said it, and then work over my responses again and again until I could speak. I could make unscripted conversation with some people in some circumstances, but it took me literally rewiring my brain to make it possible for me to do that in most circumstances. (I realized that I could have typed conversations realtime in chatrooms, so I knew that I was theoretically capable of having voice conversations with strangers realtime, so I caused the mental source of my typed chat output to output into voice conversation as well. I still have no idea how I did it, other than it felt like pressing. I did it once previously with rewiring my brain to use either eyebrow rather than just the one.)
You're also seeing me after a whole lot of very intensive therapy, pastoral rather than clinical, as my Priestess-confessor isn't certified. Granted, most of that was to put my insides back together and back inside, but a coherent inside has a lot to do with a coherent outside for me. I'm very nearly incapable of serious deception, so I have to actually be whole and healthy to interact that way.
As far as what I am, I'm not tied to a label, as long as there's some acknowledgment that I am not only weird, but wired weird.