Just avoiding the subject here.

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I keep thinking I should send some texts but it's rare for anybody to respond when there isn't a natural disaster happening everywhere. Maybe that would be adapting too much & my usual shyness is all that's called for.

I've made a desolate mess of my social life before this all went down. I've been trying to get some work done for a lot of other people recently & only just started to think of myself regarding the ways my state of being gets to people who know me. It feels like my presence is all too surprising on a good day.

I don't know if I've ever managed to translate my "unrestricted" aspie sensibility to digital communication.

I'd like to think those problems are in the past but I just don't know today.

Do you keep a journal? Even in digital form. Writing helps me sort through things immensely. It takes practice and perseverance, but I've been using journals since I was a kid. It's really helpful for me to reflect and help myself understand myself and how I'm feeling/doing better. I can evaluate things better once they're out of my head and I can step back a bit from it, and the frustration of having to be precise isn't there because you can keep writing and writing, even if it doesn't make sense at the time, because it doesn't have to; there's no one else there that has to interpret it. The pressure of that is gone.

I suppose that's a big reason I stick around WP; IMO that process is 100% introspective for me since usually when I try to expand my headspace towards women, they don't want to deal with the same things that seem normal to me.

I was wondering before all this if anything could make me more isolated. I know that's not how loved ones want me to feel but I know I was too confusing & alien to be close to before anyway.

I had all these woozy visions & lucid dreams about what might happen if I myself were as destructive as the virus. I'm tired of internalizing blame. I can manage to love several people in some ways at least & I'm sure that's the answer to this mess but there's no way of knowing if that means anything for me anymore.

Stop overthinking. Concentrate on your tasks. Don't drink to much. Care about yourself and hit the gym. Learn to start conversations. Life becomes an adventure if you are trying to make it one.

I have plenty to concentrate on & at least I got a bike ride with my roommate in today. I don't think I'm seen as capable of starting some conversations though.

I hope we all become closer to those we need too soon.

What kinds of things?

And dating is a tedious endeavor, if that’s what you meant by women. Most people are disappointing— and I suspect even NTs feel this way too. People generally are not very skilled in communicating or listening, so it exacerbates our difficulties. Friends and family are not always very skilled with communicating and listening either. It’s not always your deficiency, I can assure you. And accepting that will really get you through some hurdles.

I know you’ve dealt with sustained isolation from intimacy in one form or another, so it can be difficult to see past that. It’s easier to give up on yourself but there’s value in your personhood if you can get past all the bad things crowding your head. And trust me, I know that’s easier said than done. It took me basically 30 years to undo my own self loathing and constantly scrutinizing my perceived deficiencies. Intimacy will come with time, and the work you do now will increase the quality of your relationships in the future.

Also keep in mind adults our age are ridiculously busy and don’t mean anything by not talking or hanging out much. Many of us have a lot on our plate and very little free time.

I suppose just my being a low key wacky incognito autist is most of it but that doesn't mean the reasons stop there. There's a general feeling that my obsession with technology is some exclusively masculine edifice that just doesn't really work around other people socially.

There's really not much in the way of blame going around in times such as these but that doesn't stop me feeling like a scapegoat; someone we can project negative masculine stereotypes onto because of my past. I'm guilty of it too & I'm trying to learn what really separates me from all that nonsense in my head.

The world needed a vacation & we had one forced upon us. Unfortunately for me it's a vacation from almost all human interaction.

I have no idea when I'll have a love life again, if ever. There just aren't many people alive equipped to understand me on that level & I'm probably too weird for anyone who is anyway.

I don't know myself as well as some of my friends & I feel like they're simply gone.

It occurs to me that all I can really do about this in the foreseeable is to fight the notion that I've got no one left to turn to.

^^^that's the spirit

Maybe if I can teach myself to make better fried rice I can teach myself to be more female-facing.

At least a few women in my life are aware that I can cook. I really hope all the reasons I learned become obvious eventually.

I don't blame women for misinterpreting my inclination to take care of people as a self-serving act. It's pointless to deny that there are feminine aspects of my male persona, there's no such thing as a well-represented gender anymore anyway.

I need a beer for this line of semi-implied questions.

the men who have no feminine aspects, in my experience, are terrible people.

As weird as it seems to even me right now, people don't seem as terrible as they did yesterday. Humbling forces of nature just seem to do that. I certainly learned as much playing around in the mountains when that wasn't something of a grave concern.