I mean… that’s true, but I was incapable of understanding why it might be worth it until I was able to learn enough socialization to see how that might be the case, which I wasn’t able to do until I was able to be with people who were like myself. Until then I was just sort of flailing around, and if you’d told me, “You need to network!” I’d have been like, “I don’t even know how to be friends with the kids at school, why are you even talking to me about this?” So it’s a little bit of a back and forth for sure, but that dance began with being with people like myself so that I could understand on a visceral level (as well as get practice) how and why I could socialize with them.
I’m seeing that now with my kid as well. I could preach to her (and did) until I was blue in the face about how it was important to learn social skills and how you could get useful information and opportunities etc from other people, but it didn’t really take at the time. She didn’t see viscerally that it was important until she started hanging around other kids who liked math and started seeing that she might like to be friends with them, after all.
Relatedly, my parents had a copy of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People around the house. I loved that book! And learned lessons from that book that I found very useful… later. But when I first read it as a young adolescent I had no idea how to apply it at all.
In response to the OP, I think it’s more accurate to say that the most visible of these groups are what’s forming your opinion.
For every “introvert” on a social platform interacting with the world to explain how terrified they are of interacting with the world, there are thousands of people that hide from any interaction due to true fear of it. For every trans person with an Insta or Onlyfans sexualizing the group, there are tons of people just trying to feel better in their own skin regardless of what others think of it. For every person putting their Tourette syndrome on display for their followers in exchange for ad dollars, there’s tons of people that feel trapped in their homes due to not wanting to have a bad episode in public.
Etc. for every group you can think of.
There will always be a percentage of people in any group that turn it into an incredibly public affair, whether or not it needs to be.
I don’t know, if talking about medical conditions, it has developed itself to give diagnosis to what before was seen as laziness. For example, many students with ADHD were treated in the past as lazy, as lacking motivation, as “hopeless” even by some BS teachers. With more diagnosis of ADHD and it becoming more well known and accessible, it is a positive thing so people know they have ways to deal with what they lack not for fault of their own.
Though diagnosis of adhd arguably inflates more with ppl seeking performance improvement and thus wanting to have ADHD, or getting meds with no prescriptions to handle with pressure and tasks.
Societal groups are always a valid form of expression (depending on the group tho, not a racist, sexist or whatever shit)… Group that defends rights of minorities maybe have increase (or maybe hasn’t…), I mean, in a certain aspect of society it has. But strong response due to social panic, the panic of “society is sick” makes ppl pay way more attention in a bad way to gatherings, to labels, to shared communities (that are totally valuable and needed ones) and thus, make what is not an issue, an issue…
Yeah. I hadn’t realised how much of an overlap there is until recently. I’ve started to think I may have ADHD as well, something I would never have considered for a moment when I was younger. I certainly have a lot of the symptoms.
Agreed. Most mental health issues are like this too. We can see patterns in the problems people have, but still don’t really understand what’s going on.
Is this really, truly a thing? I don’t think I gain or lose energy from being with other people (what is this energy, exactly?). If I’m alone too long, I get lonely and want to spend time with other people. If I spend a lot of time with other people, I feel overwhelmed and want to be alone. Aren’t most people somewhere in the middle of the scale?
I’ll add it to the To Do list of life-improving things that I never get around to.