Reorg, Olympics, sociopath book
Jul. 28th, 2024 11:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flexagonThis week the reorg news did break. I have too many direct reports and will have to become a manager-of-managers again, or at least one manager. There's a plausible prospect among my directs, and tomorrow he and I will talk some more; if he says no then I'm in a more difficult spot than I'd prefer, but... it's just work. I'll deal.
On Friday I broke through a really frustrating communication logjam I was having around getting my house re-painted. I think painting won't happen until next spring, and that's bad, but better than being stonewalled.
I set up weekly donations to Kamala Harris because that's the format she's asking for, and I'm looking into ways to volunteer for her campaign, although I can't do much on the actual day of polling because I'll be in Costa Rica. (The jokes about not coming back, under certain circumstances, just write themselves.) Subscribed to Peacock, started watching some Olympics, laughed really hard to hear a commentator refer to pommel horse specialists as "the meerkats of the gymnastics world".
I'm having a terrifyingly interesting time listening to Sociopath: A Memoir. I identify with the narrator quite a lot, in terms of feeling she had an "emotional learning disorder" that made it difficult for her to learn and access the "social emotions", even though my exact ones are different from hers (and I was never violent). There's weirdly specific shit too. We have the same hair color and we both had ferrets as children. Check this out:
Uh... holy shit? Holy shit. She's my age too. The only reason nobody is going around thinking I wrote this damn book is that she grew up in a much nicer neighborhood than I did, and describes having a sister. The ferret though? And get this: we loved our ferrets, but we both made our parents uncomfortable, to the point of anger, by not acting sad enough when the ferrets died. A core memory, by the way, and I still worry about other people's responses to my response to death. She basically talks about cognitive empathy, too, without using the term. Anyway, there's some controversy around this book and some people think her diagnosis and/or credentials might be BS, but for me it's so truthy that these things are mostly beside the point.
On Friday I broke through a really frustrating communication logjam I was having around getting my house re-painted. I think painting won't happen until next spring, and that's bad, but better than being stonewalled.
I set up weekly donations to Kamala Harris because that's the format she's asking for, and I'm looking into ways to volunteer for her campaign, although I can't do much on the actual day of polling because I'll be in Costa Rica. (The jokes about not coming back, under certain circumstances, just write themselves.) Subscribed to Peacock, started watching some Olympics, laughed really hard to hear a commentator refer to pommel horse specialists as "the meerkats of the gymnastics world".
I'm having a terrifyingly interesting time listening to Sociopath: A Memoir. I identify with the narrator quite a lot, in terms of feeling she had an "emotional learning disorder" that made it difficult for her to learn and access the "social emotions", even though my exact ones are different from hers (and I was never violent). There's weirdly specific shit too. We have the same hair color and we both had ferrets as children. Check this out:
I was more like a blonde, ferret-toting Wednesday Addams, leisurely repelling everyone in my path. Occasionally I tried to fit in, to act normal like the other kids around me, only it never lasted. For one thing, my exposure to conventional behavior and reactions was limited to my immediate family, so I could only fake it for so long. But more importantly, I didn't have anyone who could teach me.
Uh... holy shit? Holy shit. She's my age too. The only reason nobody is going around thinking I wrote this damn book is that she grew up in a much nicer neighborhood than I did, and describes having a sister. The ferret though? And get this: we loved our ferrets, but we both made our parents uncomfortable, to the point of anger, by not acting sad enough when the ferrets died. A core memory, by the way, and I still worry about other people's responses to my response to death. She basically talks about cognitive empathy, too, without using the term. Anyway, there's some controversy around this book and some people think her diagnosis and/or credentials might be BS, but for me it's so truthy that these things are mostly beside the point.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-30 01:57 pm (UTC)and reading that book sounds fascinating! i wonder how that diagnosis is differentiated from autism - does the book go into that? (i have only a pop-culture, social-media-fed understanding of each of them.)
i definitely relate to struggling to broadcast the expected response to sad events. that particular ferret death parallel is uncanny!
no subject
Date: 2024-07-30 03:52 pm (UTC)I just finished the book. While it doesn't go into autism, a fair number of reviews and things are speculating that autism is what the narrator actually has -- which strikes me as ridiculous since she was formally diagnosed, and got a PhD in psychology (thus would have been fully aware of autism as a potential thing), and also autistics seem generally to get overstimulated by typical environments where sociopaths are plagued by apathy and more likely to be understimulated.
I think what gets me most is the description of it as a learning disability around the "social emotions". From Wikipedia these include embarrassment, guilt, shame, jealousy, envy, elevation, empathy, and pride. (While in contrast, basic emotions such as happiness and sadness only require the awareness of one's own physical state. I would argue that pride is the same. I can totally be proud of myself all alone in my room, can't anyone?) I would add gratitude to that list. I struggled SO hard with "gratitude" as a young adult -- often people wouldn't even engage with me intellectually on the topic, I guess because they thought I just sucked for needing to start there and then their own feelings got in the way of the discussion.
Clearly both autistic people and sociopathic people ("sociopathy"... social pathy... social trouble) have some similarities in struggling to grok some of these more subtle and/or social states though. And so did I. I would argue that it's possible to go further than normal on learning pro-social emotions -- how else would you describe compersion in polyamory, or the feeling (actual feeling) of one-with-the-universe that you hear about from Buddist monks?
Hypothesis: it's a spectrum, normal/standard/average adult humans are not all the way at either end of it, and everyone learns these things in a different order and at a different pace. And yeah I think I just blew my own mind and should write a Medium article or something, if nobody has yet.
no subject
Date: 2024-08-01 03:56 pm (UTC)i think so many of these diagnoses art part of a spectrum with many people having only a few traits and to varying degrees. that's the only way i can make sense of how so many people seem to have adhd.