Over the past few days since writing my last entry, I have been spiralling a little about why exactly it bothers me so much when people who don't know me pass judgement. The fact they don't know me is exactly why their opinion shouldn't matter. It really shouldn't be getting to me as much as it does. But I think it might be because it reminds me of how "intellectually alone" I am.

When I say intellectually, I mean how I think, not how well I think. I don't believe I'm smarter than everyone else, not by a long shot, but I do believe I think differently to most. Whenever I try to explain it, it just comes off as insufferable "not like the other girls"-type stuff, but I'm quite honestly not doing it to impress anyone because no one is ever impressed. Not even the pseudo-intellectuals who are doing it for the attention.

For most of my adult life, I've felt as though my brain runs on a completely different set of tracks to most people, even those with the same neurodivergences as me. My ADHD diagnosis gave me a very brief feeling of relief, knowing there was a neurological reason for it all, but then all of the people who I'd fallen out with over the hazards of difference all started getting their own diagnoses. So it wasn't actually the ADHD, I am still just weird.

Most people, in my experience, tend to work from a limited library of character types. I understand why they do it. Human beings are pattern recognition machines, even the ones that don't know they are. Indexing people based on what you know of other seemingly similar people is efficient and much of the time, accurate. However, this method leaves no room for outliers and leads to immediate rejection of people you could otherwise have built a great relationship with.

Everything you say or do after being filed is going to be interpreted through that lens. You could be completely agreeing with someone, maybe framed a little differently, but if they've already decided that you are in any way contrary to them, it's going to appear as disagreement. Even after clarification, you're always going to be wrong. You can't do anything about the gap between who you actually are and who they've decided you are.

I live in that gap. I know who I am. Very well, in fact. I just can't seem to get others to know me in the same way. I honestly don't think I've ever managed it. There are plenty of people who have come close, of course, but then I'll say something that makes total sense to me within my reality of who I am but somehow gives them the ick and we're suddenly no longer friends. This has even happened with friends I've had for decades.

I've considered that the problem is that I don't understand them, and by saying whatever it was that caused the rift, I failed to recognise something in them that an otherwise socially functional person would have noticed. I can't discount this theory because I am not them and I don't know what they are thinking, but my own pattern recognition suggests that they've always seen me as someone I'm actually not and all the explaining I've done over the years hasn't altered that view.

Hell, maybe I'm not as self-aware as I thought I was. Maybe the version of me I know so well is a blind spot and the people who've disappeared from my life are reacting to something real that I just can't see. This is something I can't really ever know though. You can't just go around asking your ex-friends why they suddenly dropped you like a hot rock when you weren't being anyone other than yourself¹. A person you thought they knew.

With each new friend I make, I put effort into getting to know and understand them so that I can give them as accurate and honest a version of myself as I can, without eventually giving them the ick. But what I really want is a friend who examines the ick in the context of who they know me to be before allowing it to ruin the friendship. But what I really want is a friend who doesn't get the ick at all because they know me exactly how I wish to be known, which is how I know myself.

Unfortunately, that's a huge ask for most people because they just don't run on the same tracks as I do. It's not their fault. It's not my fault. It's just how it is. Maybe one day I will find that one person that truly gets everything about me, but until then, I know I have to just accept that people are people and I'm going to be put into boxes I don't really belong in. I'll keep working on that.