My last post I talked about wanting people to see how they contribute to the mental health of those around them then talked about getting assaulted by a teacher as a kid. Not much of a call to action for those of you who clear the low bar of not beating school children that my teachers tripped over. Let's make it a little more normal. Social norms. Some of us are weird. Twitching, stimming, lack of eye contact, obsessive interests, info dumping, on and on. If you fit in you can't see how high compliance society is. Behavior that doesn't obey the norms gets constant feedback from everyone that ranges from ostracizing, bullying, to being repeatedly corrected for "doing it wrong." It doesn't matter if you are hurtful or disruptive or not. The important part is that you fit the defined behavior window. Some of us can't comply. Some of us can just barely comply with constant mental focus. A lifetime of getting constant negative feedback teaches us to hide ourselves. Just being honest, I'm not listening to you. I can't because you'll stop if I start stimming. So instead I sit and think "don't stim, don't stim, don't stim" the entire conversation. Experience tells me the majority of neurotypicals are mostly talking to hear themselves talk and will consistently pick a still and quiet person who doesn't distract them from the sound of their own voice over someone actually listening but fidgeting. I'm sure someone reading is 100% sure my stim is taking mental energy away from listening. You are wrong. I promise. It is kind of like listening to someone when you need to pee. A part of your brain is dedicated to not pissing yourself. The longer it goes on without you going to the bathroom the less you are listening. Sometimes the need to pee comes on slowly and sometimes it hits fast. All true of supressing a stim. That compulsion to tell someone else how their experience is over what they are telling you it is, that's exactly the high compliance thing I'm talking about. Don't tell me I can't listen while rolling a pen through my fingers, you don't know what it is like to be me. So I implore you, if someone's weird isn't hurting anyone, let them be. They are fine and you are missing out on a friend who might accidentally spice up your palette of all alike friends by having an interest. Listen to people who look at their own shoes and fidget while talking once in a while. They are interesting people. You can learn an awful lot about the world if you never had friends and social events eating into your time. What's the big deal in terms of harm? Neurodivergents, even introverts, still have a basic human need for connection and belonging. 1 person doesn't matter. A lifetime of a death of 1000 cuts absolutely matters. Substance abuse rates are wildly higher for neurodivergents. Suicide rates also. All of this hurts more when you don't know why. There is no amount of trying that makes you fit in so there is no escape. For myself, alcohol quieted the pain of being excluded from EVERYTHING and the noise in my head in social situations. It was the first thing I found that turned down that suffering. So I leaned into it. A decade later I was clearly an alcoholic. As your tolerance increases you need more to get the same level of numb. Not long term sustainable at all. I decided to cut way back and ultimately I pretty much don't drink at all anymore. That was better for my physical health but... The only coping mechanism I ever learned was gone. Queue the decline. Life had only gotten harder in adulthood adding a wife and kids but my coping skills were still stuck in my teenage years before I found booze. No alcoholic quits drinking because everything is going great. If you wonder why people go back to booze despite all the problems it causes them, that's it. Booze is a coping skill crutch for many, you can't take away someone's only means of coping without replacing it and expect them to succeed. I can speak for booze but this likely applies to quitting other addictions as well. I'm telling you now because I learned the hard way. Nobody ever told me. At that point the downhill slope became falling off a cliff. This is another long post already so I'll stop here for now. Maybe something else or maybe the burnout experience itself next. I'm just winging these one at a time.