Living with Social Dysfunction

by advocateofentropy

Daily Prompt: Which emotion(s) do you find the hardest to contain? I’ll make this quick, because I still have to finish my seminar paper on “Terrorism in Europe around 1900”. But still I’ll try to give you my best. Let’s begin:

Containing emotions … it can be hard and it can be easy. Most times it is not really necessary, but on some occassions it should be considered a duty, more than an option. I myself have a positive social dysfunction: I am highly talented with an IQ higher than 99.9% of the average population. For most of you this might not seem like a dysfunction or even like I’m bragging, but I’m serious.

For 26 years I did not know that I was different from other people, I just thought I was strange and socially difficult, because I didn’t get along with most people and always felt left out. Sometimes because I didn’t understand, sometimes because I understood too much. Also many things I said were not understood by many people, even my own family reacted with incomprehension, what sometimes made me feel very lonely.

Today I know that how I see the world is just different from how YOU do. Many things bring up my temper, which other people don’t even think of as offensive or wrong. So it comes that for me the emotion hardest to contain is … *drum roll* … Disappointment.

Why you ask? When I say that I don’t understand many of peoples’ actions, I mean that it down to the bone disappoints me, how people act and talk. My very high sense for subtle messages, facial expression, verbal harmony and pragmatics/semantics is making it hard for me to NOT understand and recognize. In a few situations of course, this is a big advantage. But for your social life it isn’t. No friend wants to “know,” that you will know, when he lies; and this is only one of many examples. At this level observation skills become informational overkill and not always is it easy to hide that. So yes, I am very often disappointed by the humans around me, even if I don’t know them at all; strangers in the bus have disappointed me for days! And it really is very hard for me do contain my disappointment … all the time. But hey, at least I try.

Stay Alert and Hug a Friend, yours Advocate of Entropy.