About life and feelings, gloomy and private
The feelings we get from the activities we do could be classified as neutral, positive and negative.
Let's take developing #Gentoo as an example. It's something that makes me happy — but you can't (or at least I can't) just get the happiness and reject everything else. Most of the Gentoo work is basically neutral, even bland — a duty that takes a lot of time and effort, and probably a little of your health. It's statistically probable that you're going to get some positive feelings out of it — the joy of success, satisfaction, appreciation, awareness that you've done something good. But you also get negative feelings — from failures, frustration, negative interactions.
My hiking trips are like that too. My family believes that "I do it for pleasure" — but it's a harmful oversimplification and it only tells me that they even aren't trying to understand me. In fact, it's mostly a necessity, a way of solving specific problems that works for me — halting diabetes-related problems, coping with emotions. Of course there's a positive side to it — good mood, energy to survive another day, something the joy of visiting a new place, seeing something beautiful, finding a solution to a vexatious problem, positive interactions with people. But there are also negative feelings — anger and sadness from failure, stress from problems, negative contacts with people. Sometimes you end up slowly charging your social battery for a whole week, just to have one person destroy it all.
If you think about it, life's something like that. It's mostly a bland effort to survive every following day, sometimes interspersed with positive or negative moments.
#ActuallyAutistic
@BootsChantilly@mstdn.social
