Philosophy

I like to hear autistic people’s perspectives on the inner workings of social interactions, because I can seldom discuss them with allistic people for whom these things are often subconscious.

Aw, yay! Then hopefully this won’t be annoying. I came back to this part after the rest of the comment, because my ADHD meds kicked in it while writing it and it does get long-winded and navel-gazey. Tl;dr: I get the distinction and I think I do mean kindness, but it’s hard to be certain. I think it’s related to the attribution error, where I would call anyone else who behaved like me kind, but because I see my own thoughts, it feels weird to say it about myself.

As for putting on kindness, I usually call that “niceness” to distinguish it from kindness.

I honestly think I’m just describing a combination of autistic overthinking, impostor syndrome/catholic guilt, and behaving with everybody (at least upon first encountering them), even at personal cost and against social norms _kind_ly with people, without being too much of a doormat. I’m nice to customers, but I’m also kind to foreign/handicapped/lost/lonely/elderly/child customers, if that draws a finer line. When

I just also have shitty judgmental thoughts about people that I don’t share that make me want to reject it when people call me kind: I’ll think customers are stupid or that someone looks awful in a certain outfit or something like that, though I’m having trouble thinking of specific examples now, and I wonder if maybe I’ve matured and not realized it. Most of the things I can think of recently don’t strike me as judgmental exactly, more just psychoanalytically theorizing about people’s emotional states and motives. I was just a bridesmaid in a really extravagant wedding for a very Catholic friend in her mid thirties who waited to have sex until marriage. I get why she and her parents wanted to go all out, and while I intentionally chose a very different kind of wedding, I didn’t think badly of her for hers. I’ve been an atheist for as long as I can remember, but I was raised catholic and I really appreciated priest’s delivery of the wedding mass, the beautiful church, and even felt nostalgic about the rituals of the service itself. Another bridesmaid whom I’ve been good friends with since high school sat next to me during the service and made several rude comments to me throughout. I didn’t enjoy it and stopped responding after the second one, but she’s in a personal crisis right now and has just fallen in love with improv, so I mostly thought that she was trying to strengthen her connection with me and relate to a new situation in a way that feels comforting to her.

I’m getting my masters degree right now in German as a foreign language instruction in Germany, and during observations/student teaching, I’m almost universally described as an especially empathetic teacher, even though I don’t know what people are seeing that causes them to say that (and German teachers/classmates don’t always say that out of politeness, nor do they have nothing else positive to say). Before I started, I would have bet anything that I didn’t have enough patience to be an effective teacher (I just really like the German language and wanted to pay forward the particular value I got from learning from nonnative speaker German teachers), but in literally the first class I taught, I got super invested in my students’ success, and tapped into a well of maternal feelings I didn’t know I had.

I do struggle with giving too much of myself, but it’s generally a conscious choice, based mostly in my personal understanding of utilitarianism. I tend know my limits pretty well (but not perfectly, especially since I moved to a new country and have to exert more brainpower to exist in society), and I find that actively caring for and helping others is a net positive for the world, even if it’s a negative for me. I don’t lend more money than I can afford or get into abusive friendships, but I’m likely to help an acquaintance move or shop for an elderly neighbor even if I’m exhausted or have a paper to write.