Special Interest in Social Success Like a MMORPG?

Post Reply New Topic

It has occurred to me that for about 10 years social success was a special interest of mine, in fact I would say that it was my main one. I pursued it single-mindedly, AS-style, not really caring much about anything or anyone else, from age 14/16 or so, until I was in my mid-twenties when the cost of pursuing it, ( to my health, to study and career opportunities, and to relationships ), became too much.

To begin with I studied the "theory"; bought and read a lot of glossy magazines, read romances, watched women in films very carefully, etc etc etc. And then, from sixth form college onwards I pursued my interest with the help of alcohol, lots of late nights, and by going with the flow/forcing myself to be easy-going, ( for which alcohol was essential ), etc etc etc, through university ( graduated in "social success" ... and barely scraped through the "set"/official subject ).

Then in my mid-twenties, a book of radical feminist analysis caught me just as I was beginning to find it all less interesting/rewarding anyway, ( probably because it was taking more and more alcohol and money to keep my social success afloat and making it difficult for me to do my "boring" job ). Crash! Feminist analysis exposed/"diagnosed" my special interest in social success as, oddly enough, oppression! And breakdown ensued.

But for 10 years I performed socially like a chess player, or marathon runner, making the right moves. Concentrated on that, did whatever it took, made millions of mistakes, blundered terribly, hurt people, ( usually without realising it, including myself ), but carried on. I was fascinated, totally obsessed by it, "saw" ( and was interested in ) almost nothing else.

The irony about my AS interest in social success was that I wasn't interested in/wasn't really aware of the people, didn't really "care" about them except in so far as they contributed to/participated in the "game", the success. I had friends but only two of them, ( both I suspect on or near the spectrum ), have remained friends since the crash. I was hopeless at intimacy, still am pretty bad.

Could this be why many AS women, women being most likely to make social success a special interest, pass as NT, ( compared to AS men )? Pass until they burn-out, lose interest, have children, ( social success skills don't work for parenting ), and then are suddenly exposed, disorientated, having poured all their energies into social success the way so many AS men pour it into computers/technology etc, ( not as useful for finding a job tho' ).

I imagine that many/most AS whose main special interest is currently social success will not be on WP, so the poll results will be very skewed, but I think it would be interesting to get some idea of how many women, and men, have "been there, done that".
.

Last edited by ouinon on 12 Dec 2009, 3:53 pm, edited 3 times in total.

After years of bullying and social stress. At 16-y-old it became my "special interest", I usually call it "my big experiment", I carried it on for 5 years and it helped me a lot to understand NT. I faked my self into an extroverted, social (still weird) guy and I've reached a lot of success (and sex ) but after "enough data gathered", I've stopped because it was not "my life".

Not exactly social success, but I had an obsession with being "normal", and tried to build myself a new personality.

I went as far as saying I wanted babies because other girls did. I even convinced myself that I wanted to get married and have babies.

I didn't keep that up. Suppressing my baseline personality messed with my head a lot.

I'm very interested in becoming socially successful... but I just don't know where to start. It's like my own mind keeps me from actually doing things I know that I should, because I cannot stop questioning the "why" it needs to be done. I can't figure out the EXACT purpose it serves, therefore cannot force myself just to do it automatically.

I know a lot of things I should do, but cannot get out of my own mind and just make myself do it... because to me it serves very little purpose. Most of the social norms people try to teach me are often for others' benefit. I can't force myself to do something that is a real pain in the butt for me to wrap my mind around if I'm not seeing any benefit from doing so.

I was fixated on the idea of becoming socially accepted in grades 8 and 9. Awkwardness ensued. Because although I could picture myself being social in my head, once I found myself in a social setting, things did not go according to how I have imagined them to go. Social situations are very unpredictable and very confusing for me, and every time I made an attempt to socialize, I ended up feeling awkward and stupid. I often found myself in groups of people having conversations that were too confusing for me to follow, trying to participate by repeating the things other people have said. By the end of grade 9, I gave up, making a few short-term friends who ended up discovering my true self eventually and moving on.

As an 8th grader I focused on it in a pitiful attempt to be normal, alsa, old classmates from middle school still describe me as "the weird, quiet chick"

People fascinate me. It used to be numbers and train timetables until I was about 15, and then all of a sudden it was people. And that's kind of stuck most of my adult life. I still can't really hold my own in social situations for more than a few minutes, but when I've been well enough to work, it's normally in roles where I'm looking after people, which I guess is quite weird. Normal people aren't that interesting though. I'm only interested in people who are hard to figure out, for whatever reason.

I've never been very interested in social success.

Social sucuess was never important for me, but then I had a suppotive family who loved me just the way I was. Sure we had our rough times but then what family is perfect? My special intrests had to do with animals, not people. As early as I can remember, my mother was always telling me I should never change myself for anyone and that if someone did not like me that was their fault not mine.

My vote is male with no special interest in social success.

Bullying and social stress definitely played a big part in motivating me, to begin with anyway. I was mocked, excluded, ridiculed, and hassled for several years at girl's grammar school. I was very miserable, begged my parents to be allowed to homeschool when I was 13-14, etc, and when they said no, I began to "study" the subject.

But I think that I must have been already interested in it anyway, to have been "so" affected by the exclusion, the constant "failure", because my sister, just as "square" and "odd" and as excluded as me, ( at another school because being younger than me she "missed" the grammar school system and went to a "comprehensive" school instead ), didn't feel it; she seemed oblivious to it, concentrated on her school studies, carried on wearing the embarrassing clothes, etc. At some point I "got the bug", was "grabbed by" social success; it became "important" and interesting to me in a way it never did to her. I "wanted" to do well at this game.


I don't think that it did help me understand NTs. I just thought that they were boring, on the whole. I didn't actually ever succeed at the kind of social success which is NT. I succeeded at it as a game, like a MMORPG.

Looking back it is obvious that most of the people who I hung out with were neurodivergent of some kind, and "playing" the game too. When I came up against the NT kind of social competence/skill it threw me. Either it seemed dull/empty, desperately ordinary ( compared to the "epic" quality, to quote techstepgeneration's description somewhere, of "our" exploits/adventures ), or incomprehensible.

I think the reason that it was so destructive, for me, was that, ( being a special interest in "social success" ) I confused it with "real life", "real" socialising, and didn't realise that it was almost literally a MMORPG, just with real life avatars. And like MMORPGs often do, it took over my life, and wrecked my studies, career, health, and relationships. I wonder whether it is easier for a man to realise that it is "not their life" than it is for a woman.

.

Last edited by ouinon on 11 Dec 2009, 4:47 am, edited 1 time in total.

I can agree with you, I always described my "social life" like a big "Role Playing" but probably the difference was that for me was really only a role game, I was aware that I can't fit in but only fake it, I just wanted to know how good I can be at it.

Yes, I think now that that was the worst aspect of the whole period; simply not realising that my socialising was role play. I think I didn't notice because I didn't experience other people as very 3D anyway. I wasn't aware of them having much of an inner life/inner existence. People were avatars.

It wasn't until I had a very brief out of body experience, ( after a terrible headache, the year I turned 29 ), in which my "I" seemed to be floating about two meters above my body and I suddenly/shockingly "saw" it, my body, as a tragically beaten, battered, abused animal/creature, ( think Black Beauty or Uncle Tom ), and found myself back in my body crying with remorse and pity for this being, that I understood that these "avatars" had real people in them.

And from that moment on, with only brief/fleeting exceptions, I have been almost totally unable to play the social game the way I did in my late teens and early to mid twenties.

.

Not one of my interests...maybe subconsciously.

I did the whole "wanted to be like others" bit in elementary, but that died out around the beginning of middle school.

In terms of hands-on, practicing-social-situations-with-other-people and having experiences I would have to say that no, this was never a special interest of mine. Any attempt I made to be decent socially had to do more with outside pressure and self preservation than anything else. If anything, I was often told, at various times, that I made too little effort in regards to social situations. I am quite fascinated by girls and women with AS- (I hope to write a book someday, there is far too little known about this subject)- so I am also interested in why females seem to "appear" less AS-like. Is it because people tend to see what they expect to see? I can´t speak for anyone else, but I do know that, in my case, there was an awful lot of pressure from the world around me to be empathetic and socially adept; this has to do with society´s expectation of women. Due to this pressure, for my own preservation, I knew, at a very young age, that it was important to not ask questions, to pretend I knew what was going on, to try to work out what was expected of me and to fake certain things.

When I was a child, I do remember that when my parents had company over, I would lie in bed and listen, usually for hours, to their conversations. I would listen to the flow of conversation, the different sounds their voices made, their laughter, what they talked about, when they spoke quietly or loudly. I can´t really say what made me do this: was it because I had sleep problems anyway, and their voices kept me up? Was it because I had no idea how to have a conversation of my own? Was it just my natural tendency to systemize? In any case, I think these ultimately helped me. (I guess an AS child with AS parents wouldn´t have had this opportunity. My Mom was definitely NT, my Dad seems to be a borderline-mix of AS and NT).

On the other hand, in terms of reading and studying, I have had that aspect as a special interest. For years I studied the psychology of people; I also studied male/female relationships, hoping to learn about them that way. At the moment I´m quite interested in mirror neurons, and I also find the psychology of group situations quite interesting...(maybe that will be my next special interest)?