matt1993, posts by tag: social anxiety - LiveJournal

Hey! Turns out there's a TERM for the EXACT type of depression and anxiety that I frequently struggle with!! How long has there been a term for it?

https://www.additudemag.com/reject…
https://www.webmd.com/add-adhd/rej…
https://www.healthline.com/health/…
https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/m…

I recommend reading these articles to get a better idea of what I typically have meant in the past when I say that I have depression, anxiety, social anxiety, or PTSD, or am worried about being hated or disliked. In fact, it's probably what I meant in some cases when I say that my behaviors or reactions or feelings are because of my autism.

So I think I've mentioned before that I don't find jokes about the coronavirus, social distancing, face masks, etc. very funny - ESPECIALLY when people start taking it to the extreme and judging people in the PAST, or in FICTIONAL WORLDS where the coronavirus doesn't exist, etc. for whether or not they're social distancing or wearing masks. Because it's like, if they're going to be so judgemental about it in scenarios where it's NOT necessary, then I feel like they probably absolutely HATE people in real life just for coming within 5 feet and 11 inches of them or FORGETTING a mask or taking their mask off for like FIVE SECONDS or something.

I really need to vent about a couple of particularly upsetting examples of such jokes I just came across (because of YouTube recommendations, so no, I don't go LOOKING for these), so here they are:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nh…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cS…

And a couple I've been seeing in my YouTube recommendations for a while back but still never seen and never intend to:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQ…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8b…


I've never even seen any of these videos, but I know I'm not going to like them, and I know I DEFINITELY do not like most of the comments on at least the first two. SOME OF THEM ACTUALLY THINK FICTIONAL CHARACTERS HAVE TO FOLLOW THE SAME GUIDELINES AS REAL PEOPLE. Which means those commenters must be REALLY mean to people who don't follow the rules, EVEN WHEN IT'S NOT POSSIBLE TO. As someone who understandings why the guidelines in real life are important, I can say that THAT is why so many people aren't taking it seriously, and why a lot of the time I can't even say I blame people for not taking it seriously.

This is way more annoying than anything else I've ever declared to be annoying.

I might regret saying this, but I think I'm going to feel better if I vent, so I'll just say it. "Jokingly" getting mad at people over new restrictions that NO ONE likes or is used to just makes all the new restrictions even worse than they have to be, and therefore makes more people think they are tyranny. If you actually think any of the above videos or their comments are funny, there is probably something wrong with you.


More examples of what I mean by coronavirus jokes not being funny and making me depressed, since you new readers may have missed this:

https://matt1993.livejournal.com/3…

Good news: I no longer feel like people might see me as a horrible person or hate me just because of the fact that I've had this userpic since I was 15-16.

Bad news: I now feel like people will DEFINITELY see me as a horrible person and hate me just because of the fact that I've had this userpic since I was 15-16.

https://blog.emojipedia.org/ios-13…
https://twitter.com/jeremyburge/st…
https://intheloopaboutneurodiversi…
https://www.learnfromautistics.com…

(Like most entries when I post a lot of links that make me worry, I wanted to address everything I saw on these pages that worried me, but that would require looking at them for much longer and taking a lot longer to write this entry. Also, the less I write, the less likely I am to unintentionally be offensive? Maybe?)

What I feel like these articles are saying in a nutshell:
- I'm a bad person because I made this userpic, even though I was 15 at the time (16 when I made the current version; both versions have identical text)
- I'm an even WORSE person because I continued to have it even after the first time I saw anyone being offended by the idea of puzzle piece(s) representing autism in general
- I'm even worse still because I continued to have it after the first time anyone specifically told me that they were offended by my userpic specifically, which was about two years ago by now
- I'm even worse because I don't want to remove or replace this userpic. Especially not after so long. And because I still like the autism puzzle piece symbol. And because I like how colorful this userpic is and how I used color palettes from Super Mario World for the non-painted-over pieces. If you like other symbols of autism better, that's fine - I just wish I didn't have to feel like almost everyone with autism will hate me because I prefer the puzzle piece(s).
- I'm a horrible person for supporting Autism Speaks, even though I AM autistic. And for thinking that a lot of things Autism Speaks has done that people have issues with remind me a lot of how *I* used to not understand autism very well, so I feel like I'll be hated because of that and for having worded so many things badly over the years. And since a lot of those things were things Autism Speaks has said *in the past*, when autism wasn't well-understood in general, seeing people talking about that makes me feel like *I* can NEVER be forgiven for ANYTHING I do that is wrong or problematic, no matter how much time is passed. More on that: https://matt1993.livejournal.com/3…
- I'm a horrible person for the fact that I thought I strictly *needed* there to be a cure for autism for so long, and while I now get that not everyone wants there to be one, I still feel like *I'd* be a lot happier in general if I weren't autistic. (Because I feel that if I weren't autistic, I wouldn't word things so poorly so often or make userpics that turn out to offend everyone, for starters...)
- I'm a horrible person if I prefer person-first language, and I'm a horrible person if I DON'T prefer person-first language, and I'm a horrible person if I don't care either way. (FWIW, I'm in the "don't care either way" category. More entries about my thoughts about that: https://matt1993.livejournal.com/3… https://matt1993.livejournal.com/3…)


When I wrote the text on this userpic ten years ago, I was expressing my frustration at how autism isn't very well understood, even by me, and how I wish it was understood better. (It DEFINITELY wasn't well understood for a lot of my lifetime!) In other words, I felt that autism IS a puzzle to those who don't understand it well (including well-meaning people, and I feel that well-meaning people don't need to be yelled at and called jerks just because they don't understand; they just need to be educated on the subject) - sometimes including autistic people themselves such as me. Similarly, I've always felt that I never know what to say or do to not offend people and not unintentionally make everyone hate me - social skills have always been a "puzzle" to me in that regard. And I felt that way even more back when I made the userpic.

Could I have worded the userpic better when I first made it? Well... no. Remember, a) I have autism, which in my case has always made finding the right words difficult for me; b) this was back when I was still fairly new to posting online in general, so I was still naïve enough to think that I could word it however I wanted and people would understand what I meant; c) this was also back before I knew that there was ANYONE who hates Autism Speaks, or ANYONE with autism who wouldn't want there to be a cure for it, etc. because my experience with autism back then was so limited.

Could I have worded the userpic better when I redrew it later that year? Probably not. I could have tried to if I'd known that 8-10 years later I would end up feeling like everyone will hate me for wording it the way I did, but since I didn't know that... I didn't. I just used the same wording again. And *even if* I'd known that I should reword it, there's no guarantee that the new version would actually have been better, for all of the same reasons that the first version turned out as poorly-worded as it did.

Could I make a new version of the userpic that is worded better NOW? Maybe. I've even considered it. But I don't want to.
First off, whenever I try to word things in a way that has no possibility of offending anyone, I always feel like I'm being forced to add dozens of disclaimers that make whatever I'm writing far too long to read, which all turns out to be for naught when I inevitably offend someone anyway.
Secondly, I now feel that this userpic is good at representing my personal struggle with autism because it contains symbols and wording that could be seen as problematic. What could be a better representation of my anxiety about being misunderstood and disliked for things I've made years ago when I was worse at wording than something I made years ago that I have anxiety about being misunderstood and disliked for? How can the rainbow/gold infinity symbol (or any other proposed autism symbol that I've never heard of until just today, and am therefore probably a bad person for not knowing about them) represent MY experience with autism in the same way?


I hope this makes sense - as usual, I had to write it quickly so I can get this posted so I can stop worrying about it sooner. So if I worded something wrong, it's because of that AND my being bad at wording in general.


Well, time to be unable to sleep at all for another week or two thanks to worrying about this. :(

So as you've probably noticed (unless you read my entries on DW only), I changed my LJ style... turns out the glitch where videos wouldn't show up in IE only happens on outdated journal styles, which my Pale Yellows style was, so the glitch won't be fixed.

So I had to pick a different style, and wow... not only do videos show up again, I finally get to see when someone "likes" my entry since I no longer get the email notifications about it, and I finally found out that to fix the glitch where status bars that used to show up correctly now made pages unreadable, I didn't have to edit them manually on LJ - all I had to do was set "Resize images in entry" to "No resize"! Though I checked just now and DW doesn't have a similar option. Another reason for me to still prefer LJ...

When I changed my style, I also had to go through and look at all the customization settings again to make it look more or less like it did before, including entering my blurb again. I figured since I had to do that, I might as well not re-enter the same blurb as before and instead put in, on both my LJ and DW sidebars, the new blurb I wrote recently that I was planning on replacing it with eventually anyway.

For posterity, the old blurb said:

What has ten fingers, autism, synesthesia, a crush on Enya, lots of Mario games, thousands of regrets, a feeling of worry about being judged for almost everything, and a tendency to write blurbs that become outdated quickly?

Me!

...You're not laughing. Have you heard this one already?

Anyway, in my journal, at first almost all of my entries were public, but lately I've been making more and more of my entries friends-only, usually if they're about things I worry (MAYBE too much) about. I never really intended for it to turn out that way, hence why I didn't put up any sort of "this journal is semi-friends-only" notice until just now (July 2015).


And wow... I've been using the Pale Yellows style since 2009. There were a couple of times I changed the colors to custom color schemes, and then in July 2015 I reverted it back to its original colors so it'd feel like a return to the good old days, and in August 2017 I temporarily made it look as much like my pre-Pale Yellows layout as possible (without actually switching to the old layout) to celebrate the tenth anniversary of my journal... but in nine years, I've never replaced the Pale Yellows style entirely until now.


Now I have to look at my first 700 or so LJ entries again just to make sure the new layout didn't also cause any of them to not show up correctly anymore. At least this should be faster than the first time around since I've already fixed them once. :)

I'm so far behind on these Miiverse backup entries... this one was supposed to have been posted in the FIRST week of April. At least I have several semi-legitimate reasons to put it off this long instead of it being ENTIRELY procrastination this time? :P

← 01/05/2013 3:30-5:30 PM 01/05/2013 10:30 PM-midnight →

Nintendo Land Community
Matt 01/05/2013 5:37 PM

Balloon Trip Breeze
Dear birds: How do you fly with boxing gloves on?

1 0

Nintendo Land Community
Matt 01/05/2013 5:50 PM

Balloon Trip Breeze
Are the birds in red eggs different from the birds in white eggs in any way other than color?

3 1

(The one comment on this is - if I remember correctly - me eventually figuring out that the bird enemies with the red eggs have one more hit point than the ones with the white eggs. Like the other Nintendo Land games, I don't think I ever 100% completed Balloon Trip Breeze so if they come in any other colors in later stages, I was never aware of it.)

Nintendo Land Community
Matt 01/05/2013 8:03 PM

Octopus Dance
Got to Stage 4 for the first time!

5 0

Nintendo Land Community
Matt 01/05/2013 8:43 PM

Yoshi's Fruit Cart
My sister saw "You gave this post a Yeah" and thought it said "You gave this post a Yoshi" :)

7 0

Okay, anxiety, I get why you think the entire Internet is going to be gone two years from now. You're probably right about that.

But WHY are you continuing to make me worry about everyone hating me for still liking/using/refusing to leave LJ? It's been nearly TWO MONTHS, and not one person has actually said "I hate you because you still like LJ", and I've actually met several new friends who are on LJ and not DreamWidth. So why are you still making me worry about it?! Anxiety, you're ruining my life!

Sincerely,
Matt1993

This has been kind of a disappointing April Fools' Day because:

1) Homestar Runner didn't update at all today, even though they did for April Fools' Day 2014, 2015, and 2016, and April Fools and Halloween are almost the only times they ever update nowadays.
2) I don't think many people noticed my April Fools prank at all.

For reference, my April Fools prank was this entry; however, when I first posted it (on March 31 in my time zone, but late enough that it was April 1 already for some of you), it was an exact copy of my first entry. Then I waited a few minutes or so and changed it to a copy of a different past entry in the same way... then changed it to another after a few more minutes, and so on - basically, if I was at my computer, I'd change the entry anywhere from once an hour to once every few minutes. (At first. I gradually updated it less and less often because it seemed like no one was noticing...)

By "exact copy", that means including the subject line, repost button, userpic, tags, mood, music, location... basically, everything except the timestamp, the comments, and friends-only status [though, of course, the only friends-only entries I used were ones that probably would've been fine being public]. And anything that I intended to change each time but accidentally forgot sometimes. Though if I used an entry I'd posted in _dreams_, autism, or asperger, I added a notice saying that it was cross-posted (even though I don't think copying a community entry to my own journal years later for April Fools' Day actually counts as cross-posting).

I chose the entries semi-randomly, sometimes by going to my Calendar for random years and months and picking a random entry I'd feel comfortable posting again, and sometimes by just putting in notable entries that I remember and wanted to include in this prank at some point. Some entries were used more than once.

And just to mess with your heads even more, I thought it might be fun to come up with a hypothetical FUTURE entry and add it into the mix! That's what the 2023 year in review is for. It ended up being my favorite thing about this prank, so I left that one up significantly longer than any other single entry.


Now that April Fools' Day is over, all the entries I ended up using are listed below for posterity. (Don't expect the repost buttons to work correctly, though...)


( Collapse )

Go to your Calendar and find the first entry for each month of 2016. Post the first line of it in your journal, and that's your "Year In Review".

← 2015 2017 →

January 2016

https://ghostsingles.com/

February 2016

You'd think that given how easy it probably is to misunderstand my previous entry, I would've posted again as soon as I thought of something else to post about. But nope, somehow I let an easily-misunderstood entry be the newest one for a month minus a few hours.

[Great. I have to link to an easily-misunderstood entry AGAIN - and one that's now even MORE easily-misunderstood since some of you aren't familiar with the sort of stuff I worried about almost constantly from November 2011 to November 2015 {and to a lesser extent, after that}.]

March 2016

Lately I've just had SO MUCH to do that not only do I not get much time to relax, but whenever I do get to take a break, it's usually not actually that relaxing because I still end up thinking about the stuff that has to get done soon.

April 2016

I just looked at the interests in my profile for the first time in a while and...

WHOA. It's WAY outdated.

May 2016

http://www.ew.com/article/2016/05/…

June 2016

Poll ♯2047590 Name the first 10 famous people you can think of whose first name is Matt or Matthew. (If you can't think of ten, that's okay - I doubt it would be easy to think of that many. Just list as many as you can.)

July 2016

Happy Fourth of July!! :-)

August 2016

So about a week and a half ago, I was so stressed out, I was stressed in!... or something.

September 2016

My birthdate appears at the 65,167th digit of pi! Where is yours?

October 2016

[the entry begins with a video called "Super Mario Kart with 101 players!", then the next line is...]

I'm trying not to overuse this phrase too much nowadays, but HOLY WHOLE HAND DEALER.

November 2016

Explanation to those who are new here: I decided a couple of years ago that I'd start revisiting every quiz/survey I've posted on LJ five years later to see how things have changed. But then I procrastinated so long that I'm having to do some of them seven years later instead.

December 2016

[the entry begins with a video called "SNES Code Injection - Flappy Bird in SMW", then the next line is...]

I don't think that's what they mean by shell sort. ;)

No, I haven't turned into my exact opposite! :) (I hope that link still works once this entry goes up. If not, just go to my previous entry.)

DISCLAIMER: Just because something was in my not-interests list doesn't necessarily mean that I hate it. Of course there are things that I actually hate in there (e.g. essays), but there's also things that I merely find overrated (e.g. zombies, Captain Falcon, Chuck Norris, Team Fortress), or are fandoms that I can see myself getting into eventually but am not currently into (e.g. Game of Thrones, Dragonball Z), or are things that actually are the opposite, or an opposite, of my actual interests (e.g. ESTJ instead of INFP, atheism instead of Christianity), and so on and so forth. And, of course, unless you're new here (or haven't been here in a while, or something), you know the score with the word "feminism" - the actual definition of the word is something I agree with, but the word itself has become so associated with the extremes of feminism that I don't really like to identify with it.


Unfortunately, due to the conference being today, by the time this entry goes up, I probably still won't know if anyone fell for it. Or even if anyone hates me for liking Comic Sans - to the point that visiting Ban Comic Sans or any page that links to it (except, hopefully, this one) is so traumatic for me, I'm not even going to make sure that link actually goes to it. Please don't kill me...

In fact, the timing of the conference prevented this prank from being exactly what I wanted to do - I wanted to actually replace the interests list for April Fool's Day (and even leave it that way for about a week in case anyone wanted to explore the Dungeon of Not Matt1993 or Starship Not Matt1993 or something). I've had this idea since *checks* January 23 at the latest and was really hoping I'd get to do it this way, but April Fool's Day ended up being the day before I present, and there's no way to schedule a temporary replacement for the interests list like there is for scheduled entries.

So I had to make up a plausible-sounding reason other than "I'm trying to do an April Fool's prank on LJ at a time when I may or may not have access to a computer, let alone one that I'd feel comfortable accessing LJ on" for why I would come up with a new interests list but not actually put it in my profile right away. "There's more than 150 and so I need to narrow it down" was the best I thought of, but as it turns out, my not-interests list had less than 150 when I thought of that idea, so I actually had to add more just because of that.

I considered just waiting until next year to try this prank, but with my luck, I'll probably have even less free time in 2017. :(

Remember in 2014 when I was revisiting quizzes and surveys I'd taken exactly five years earlier, in 2009, for a while?

http://matt1993.livejournal.com/25…
http://matt1993.livejournal.com/25…
http://matt1993.livejournal.com/25…
http://matt1993.livejournal.com/25…
http://matt1993.livejournal.com/25…
http://matt1993.livejournal.com/25…
http://matt1993.livejournal.com/25…

And then there were some that I couldn't revisit because Quiz Galaxy wasn't working? And then eventually I stopped getting around to revisiting even the non-Quiz-Galaxy ones?

Well, turns out Quiz Galaxy works again now, so I finally went back and retook a quiz I first took on February 10, 2009:

Originally posted by matt1993 at Ababnormal

Apparently they changed up the results page at some point in the past 7 years and 12 days - when I retook it, I got this:



I am in no way surprised by my new result.

NOTE: If you plan to take this quiz as well, the link in my old result doesn't work but the link in my new result does.