I overthink my social interactions a lot. Of course that's not important news, for me or for everyone else. I may as well say "fork found in kitchen."
In my asinine and incomplete attempts to read between the lines of other people's sentences, I've found a lot of patterns that make me behave in expected ways. If someone gives me two options and then moves on, I'm less likely to present a third. If I haven't done work on a project, and someone asks me about it, I'm eager to take suggestions over staying true to my preferences. So many patterns appear. They're all forgotten quickly, but my socially anxious brain quickly recognizes some hidden meaning that doesn't actually exist. My lack of faith in my own analyses is out of the scope of this post. The way my brain processes things is very different between "with people" and "not with people," enabling this heavy distrust of my own intuition from one side looking at the other.
With this catalogue of rules that don't really exist, I have to lug this shit around everywhere. I have to consult this useless rulebook whenever I think someone wants something out of me. I care what they think, so I try to understand what they're telling me.
Conversely, when I don't care about what someone thinks, this shitty rulebook rears its ugly head again, except now I see it in their hands, not mine. I assume they care what I think, and if they don't, no loss on my end.
Now comes the revelation that too many neurodivergent people have come to: I can be very manipulative. I understand the power people hold over me, every second of every day, unaware that I care so deeply about something so unimportant (and parasocial, no less). I also understand that this power is not theirs alone.
My point is that I know the rules to this stupid fucking game on a level that normal people don't even think about. People often don't examine their own speech patterns, body language, or other miniature (and usually benign) affectations. As someone who has overanalyzed everyone else's affectations, especially his own, I now know how to dance around these "rules" whenever I feel like it. I rarely ever do.
There are, however, people that I will gladly manipulate, given the right motive. I want something out of someone who has lost my respect, so I will purposefully lay cognitive bear traps for them to break their ankles in, and gladly pry their bloodied shins out of the twisted metal to paint myself as some sort of fucking savior. No, I don't feel good about it, but what makes me even less happy is how happy it makes me to fuck some person over as so many have fucked me.
To illustrate this point, I recently had a conversation with a classmate/teammate who has been slacking. I know he's done fucking nothing on either project we've been doing all quarter (I'm in two teams with him), so instead of leading with my work and how he can build off it, I ask how much he understands the paper we're reading. With his admission of "not having read the whole paper yet" (it's been eight weeks for fifteen pages), I tell him I want to take responsibility for two sections of the paper and give him the middle bit. I hate the middle bit and cannot find a way to present it cleanly, but I can just offload that shit so no one knows how badly I would have done it. The conversation went back and forth with me offering many more trap/rescue questions and him responding exactly as I intended and expected.
The worst part about all this is that none of this actually matters. I can paint myself as a "bad person," a "manipulative asshole," "forcing people to do what I want with just words," "covering my tracks so no one knows how much I just manipulated a dude," but yeah, none of that's real. I see this often enough online and in person about people worrying they're manipulating and abusing people. I have never seen a case where the self-aware person has actually done anything egregious. In every single (admittedly anecdotal, so take this "data" lightly) case, the person "at fault" is just... not providing the help they so desperately need from others. If someone's slacking, it's not manipulative to tell them what you need/want them to do. If someone forgot a thingy, it's not manipulative to remind them, whether it's once, twice, or ten times. People (again, anecdotally) tend to believe that their "victims" are just going to sit there and take abuse like the other person has been taught to do their whole lives.
Manipulation requires fear. Don't assume your friends are afraid of you. Don't assume classmates, acquaintances, strangers, etc. are afraid just because you did something you watched an asshole do to you. This whole self-aware-accidental-manipulator mindset falls apart the moment you realize the other person doesn't think like you.
If I insult you calmly in a language you don't understand, can I really say you understood? If I flip you off from behind a computer screen while typing normal messages, can I really say you got the message? I'm gonna steal a quote that I don't know the origins of: "Abuse survivors are fluent in a language no one else can understand." No one can hear your accidental undertones. Even if I'm wrong, and you find one of very few people who can hear the words you're not saying, this can be cleared up by calling out what you don't want them to hear. "I don't want you to think I expect ____." "Please tell me if you feel pressured to ____." Even I can feel the malice between these words myself, and I'm the fucking person who said them with the sole intent of not sounding like I'm saying something I'm not. There is no way to guarantee no one will hear words you're not saying. All you can do, and all I can do, is let them tell us when/if something's wrong.
I know I kept saying "you," but this is mostly just stuff I tell myself. It's just a lot easier to act like I'm talking to the reader. I kind of am. I don't know. I just have to remind myself every so often that not many people see the world in the same fucked-up obsessive/desperate way I do.
I hope this reaches everyone it could help. Simultaneously, I hope everyone this reaches doesn't need it.
