Character Respec through Learning
Jan. 23rd, 2013 11:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
goldkinIn hindsight, when I rolled my character for this lifetime, I made some pretty good decisions. Among them, starting out with high CON and DEX scores, plus several points invested into INT, did me a lot of good. The downside is, I also took a lot of character-specific disadvantages to compensate, in the hopes that the innate creativity and versatility welded into my character sheet would get me out of the more difficult binds.
Common and semi-irrelevant disadvantages aside (really, who didn't take Fear of Spiders at the first available opportunity?), I'm realizing that Social Aversion and Lack of Empathy have seriously been harming me. These were required to attain high competency in the Video Games and Game Design skill branches, but what I didn't anticipate was the additional penalty to all rolls when determining the intentions of others. Indeed, I completely missed these rolls' full ramifications.
See, I'm not especially bad at what I do. Quite the contrary: given how I've invested my skill points, I run the gamut of competent to relatively (or in rare cases, extremely) good. But, because I cannot determine the intentions of others in conversation, I'm currently the perpetual butt monkey. I read emotions and meaning just fine, but intention, not so well. Unsurprisingly, I'm also flagged as an extremely bad listener, and not for lack of trying to learn, perpetually, over the course of my entire lifetime.
As a result, I ask stupid questions. A lot of stupid questions. An insane number of stupid questions. And the net impact on my friends, my family, and my coworkers is people either don't understand me or build very low respect in my abilities over time, because this communication carries tremendous up-front costs. It also erodes my confidence and weathers the quality of how my work is presented, eventually giving me an (undeserved?) aura of well-meaning incompetence.
It nearly goes without saying that I can't interview competently, either, and that's harmed me at varying intervals for my entire career. Socially, I'm pegged somewhere between jovial-but-incoherent and an intellectual social pariah. Internally, I have anywhere from middling to extremely low self-esteem as a result, and it's only through investing heavily in will saves that I don't fall into a yawning pit of depression from whence I will never emerge.
Bluh.
This situation, to put it bluntly, sucks. I'd like to fix it, because hovering a scant two or three rolls above crippling depression and self-harm isn't a very nice place to be in for even a moment, much less a lifetime.
Other than reading books on the subject and trying to digest several lifetimes worth of qualia and communicated experiences (which I intend to do as soon as feasibly possible), I don't know quite what else I can do to work around or fix this. I do know that it will steadily improve with skill investment (neural enmeshment of ideas in the brain, eventually converging on the desired skills, is Really Cool in general), but I'm terrified that I'll make those wrong rolls before the situation improves, obliterating my progress and leading me down a road from whence I shall not recover. Despite what people seem to think about me, I do care about them, very much in fact, and it would be a crying shame if I were forever lost to them due to the 1 side of a D20.
Compounding my problem is the fact that I'm in a situation where demands on my time are so astronomically high that I cannot easily seek the best help that I desire. I'm lucky if I get a few hours to myself anymore, much less a single day, and that time is spent recovering my energies, reconstructing my internal mental context, and avoiding people. I'm topically aware of the issues underlying my current class of disorder, and I would like to seek someone analytical and professional enough to not dismiss me out of hand or force me to withhold information for fear of bias. After all, being unable to talk about my own beliefs and draconity is actually a big confound, because it's part of the complete story. Transparency of information free of manipulation is also very important to me as a scientist, and I would implicitly distrust any information borne of even the slightest observed social manipulation on my part.
So, I guess I'm otherwise out of ideas. Do you all have any? The low cost solution, in the form of reading and self-practice, is available and something I already intend to pursue. The higher cost solutions, involving professional help that I'm not wholly convinced will help, without high searching costs or straddling the uneasy lines of cognitive biases, isn't nearly as accessible to me at this time. I'm curious if there's some middle ground, some way to get this out of my system and get myself onto the road of recovery, without watching my dreams, ambitions, and pretty much everything I care about continually shattered over critically failing on stubbing my own toes.
I'm not one to complain often about fairness. After all, every outcome has some element or set of elements that, in their composition, led to a perceived lack of fairness in one view or other, despite being part of a more complex and nuanced whole. But, this feels incongruent and so completely wrong relative to the amount of effort that I've put into it. I'm trying, sincerely and honestly trying to better myself, and to put myself in a position where I no longer feel as if my existence and well-being are perpetually endangered by lingering threats and that there's no Plan B. I'm a planner. I'm a security professional. I'm an engineer. I'm a dragon. And dammit, I'm going to build some semblance of security and some small flickering of firelight for those that I care about. That is, quite simply, the person that I am right now.
I just wish that I felt I could anymore. In weathering it all, my abilities to adapt circumstances to help people and change things for the better are what I value the most. I build because, in doing so, I feel that I might be able to keep the darkness out for just one more night. That together, it'll let us see just one more dawn. And that through patience, vigilance, and ingenuity, we might be able to span that out into infinity.
I live for that dawn. I know that, in spite of my best efforts, it won't always be me. But I take comfort that it'll be someone, so much so that it's the message that I've chosen to weave as my purpose in this life.
And, I don't want that spark to go out. So, I ask questions. Incessantly. Because it's what I know works. It's one strategy that's allowed me to see more than one new dawn. But, now I need another one that I'm uniquely incompetent at, and I suppose I'm terrified of the ramifications of failure. Help?
Common and semi-irrelevant disadvantages aside (really, who didn't take Fear of Spiders at the first available opportunity?), I'm realizing that Social Aversion and Lack of Empathy have seriously been harming me. These were required to attain high competency in the Video Games and Game Design skill branches, but what I didn't anticipate was the additional penalty to all rolls when determining the intentions of others. Indeed, I completely missed these rolls' full ramifications.
See, I'm not especially bad at what I do. Quite the contrary: given how I've invested my skill points, I run the gamut of competent to relatively (or in rare cases, extremely) good. But, because I cannot determine the intentions of others in conversation, I'm currently the perpetual butt monkey. I read emotions and meaning just fine, but intention, not so well. Unsurprisingly, I'm also flagged as an extremely bad listener, and not for lack of trying to learn, perpetually, over the course of my entire lifetime.
As a result, I ask stupid questions. A lot of stupid questions. An insane number of stupid questions. And the net impact on my friends, my family, and my coworkers is people either don't understand me or build very low respect in my abilities over time, because this communication carries tremendous up-front costs. It also erodes my confidence and weathers the quality of how my work is presented, eventually giving me an (undeserved?) aura of well-meaning incompetence.
It nearly goes without saying that I can't interview competently, either, and that's harmed me at varying intervals for my entire career. Socially, I'm pegged somewhere between jovial-but-incoherent and an intellectual social pariah. Internally, I have anywhere from middling to extremely low self-esteem as a result, and it's only through investing heavily in will saves that I don't fall into a yawning pit of depression from whence I will never emerge.
Bluh.
This situation, to put it bluntly, sucks. I'd like to fix it, because hovering a scant two or three rolls above crippling depression and self-harm isn't a very nice place to be in for even a moment, much less a lifetime.
Other than reading books on the subject and trying to digest several lifetimes worth of qualia and communicated experiences (which I intend to do as soon as feasibly possible), I don't know quite what else I can do to work around or fix this. I do know that it will steadily improve with skill investment (neural enmeshment of ideas in the brain, eventually converging on the desired skills, is Really Cool in general), but I'm terrified that I'll make those wrong rolls before the situation improves, obliterating my progress and leading me down a road from whence I shall not recover. Despite what people seem to think about me, I do care about them, very much in fact, and it would be a crying shame if I were forever lost to them due to the 1 side of a D20.
Compounding my problem is the fact that I'm in a situation where demands on my time are so astronomically high that I cannot easily seek the best help that I desire. I'm lucky if I get a few hours to myself anymore, much less a single day, and that time is spent recovering my energies, reconstructing my internal mental context, and avoiding people. I'm topically aware of the issues underlying my current class of disorder, and I would like to seek someone analytical and professional enough to not dismiss me out of hand or force me to withhold information for fear of bias. After all, being unable to talk about my own beliefs and draconity is actually a big confound, because it's part of the complete story. Transparency of information free of manipulation is also very important to me as a scientist, and I would implicitly distrust any information borne of even the slightest observed social manipulation on my part.
So, I guess I'm otherwise out of ideas. Do you all have any? The low cost solution, in the form of reading and self-practice, is available and something I already intend to pursue. The higher cost solutions, involving professional help that I'm not wholly convinced will help, without high searching costs or straddling the uneasy lines of cognitive biases, isn't nearly as accessible to me at this time. I'm curious if there's some middle ground, some way to get this out of my system and get myself onto the road of recovery, without watching my dreams, ambitions, and pretty much everything I care about continually shattered over critically failing on stubbing my own toes.
I'm not one to complain often about fairness. After all, every outcome has some element or set of elements that, in their composition, led to a perceived lack of fairness in one view or other, despite being part of a more complex and nuanced whole. But, this feels incongruent and so completely wrong relative to the amount of effort that I've put into it. I'm trying, sincerely and honestly trying to better myself, and to put myself in a position where I no longer feel as if my existence and well-being are perpetually endangered by lingering threats and that there's no Plan B. I'm a planner. I'm a security professional. I'm an engineer. I'm a dragon. And dammit, I'm going to build some semblance of security and some small flickering of firelight for those that I care about. That is, quite simply, the person that I am right now.
I just wish that I felt I could anymore. In weathering it all, my abilities to adapt circumstances to help people and change things for the better are what I value the most. I build because, in doing so, I feel that I might be able to keep the darkness out for just one more night. That together, it'll let us see just one more dawn. And that through patience, vigilance, and ingenuity, we might be able to span that out into infinity.
I live for that dawn. I know that, in spite of my best efforts, it won't always be me. But I take comfort that it'll be someone, so much so that it's the message that I've chosen to weave as my purpose in this life.
And, I don't want that spark to go out. So, I ask questions. Incessantly. Because it's what I know works. It's one strategy that's allowed me to see more than one new dawn. But, now I need another one that I'm uniquely incompetent at, and I suppose I'm terrified of the ramifications of failure. Help?
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\0x0
Date: 2013-01-28 12:58 pm (UTC)I am by no means a substitute for professional counseling, though I would like to share some observations and personal experience.
People are horrible at communicating. They make noise, more often than not, that noise meets syntactical rules, but its semantics do not truly reflect their thoughts. If you've ever had a woman tell you "I don't care, just do whatever you want.", you should have an idea of what I'm talking about.
Through a somewhat pragmatic process, I've found that asking completely reflexive questions does little to solve this communication problem. For instance, in response to the above example, "I can do whatever I want? Are you sure?". You're just using the same words that your conversational partner is using, and that doesn't help expose the latent disconnect between speech and thought. Instead, I try some other approaches, depending on the situation:
* Make an assumption. Go out on a limb and use intuition. This path by far carries the highest risk of loss of face (generally mine), but in informal social circles, a small error caused by a bad assumption is easily overlooked. In a forgiving environment, this approach is great for fine-tuning intuition.
* Explain my understanding and intentions before taking action: "I'll summarize what we've discussed in a change request and get that back to you in an hour for you to review.". This is geared more toward a work environment, where mistakes carry a bigger penalty, and ass-coverage is absolutely necessary. In this approach, I'm now in control of the communication and can be as precise as I need. If there's a difference in understanding or my intentions turn out to be wrong, no worries. Nothing bad happened yet and since no damage was done, both parties get to save face.
* Get to the root cause: "You need the root password? What are you going to do with it? ... Oh, you just need to change a configuration file? I'll show you how to do that without the root password." This approach is also more geared towards a work environment. People will sometimes (often in my line of work) come to me with a solution to their problem. That solution, however, does not account for a whole slew of factors that they are not aware of. Sometimes I have to prod a bit and find out what a person's real motivation is, often using one or both of the other two approaches. The trick here is asking precise questions that do not belittle the respondent or make them defensive. I've yet to master this technique, as I first have to get over intimidating people with my mere presence.
* Do something impulsive and make a mistake. Sometimes I'll just end up saying or doing something completely inappropriate. It happens to the best of us, and it's not the end of the world for all cases (minus epsilon). Aside from their obvious pragmatic value, small mistakes are still beneficial -- they show others that like them, I have flaws, and that I'm not too proud to hide them.
People are also proud, sometimes overly so. They have this notion of "face", which can be thought of as the antithesis of weakness in a social context. You may have seen me use the term "saving face" -- or in other words, "not looking like a dumbass". While it sometimes feels good to squash a person's ego, it's almost always in your best interest to set up a situation that lets them save face. That satisfaction of figuratively rubbing someone's face in the dirt lasts for a moment; the misery unleashed by a butthurt person can last a lifetime. Even if ego-squashing isn't your intent, certain pointed questions can feel like a setup for humilation. I don't know what sort of questions you ask, but if they fall into this category, that can certainly cause negative feedback, more so than the process of providing an obvious answer.
Finally, I find some comfort in precision. When I know exactly what a person wants, I know exactly what they expect of me and I can either meet their expectation or work on lowering that expectation into the grasp of reality. There's little to no risk of being wrong and disappointment is almost always mitigated. As a technical person, you're probably of the same mindset. In some cases, seeking precision is perfectly reasonable, such as in a work environment, where surprises are a bad thing. In social circles, not so much. There's no time to work out the specifics, but plenty of room for ambiguity and improvisation. Try to make a distinction between the two, and when the situation permits, take advantage of that freedom to express your relevant interests to the group, and see what lies outside of your comfort zone.