Disclaimer: I don’t take credit for the translations. These are from the official Milgram account and put on the comic for a more friendly viewing experience.
Watching the Dr. K interview with Toast was a trip because I felt like I knew intuitively when he was barking up the wrong tree or was reading the clues wrong. I will now project my own agenda onto Toasts words.
Dr. K thought that he was running into a censored version of Toast, and in some ways he kind of was, but Toast genuinely leans on being emotionally reserved in most aspects of his life. It takes a certain amount of mental ‘quiet’ to unpack his feelings, kind of like having to be in a quiet space to hear a soft sound. Basically he’s not the type who can open up on a twitch stream, but he wanted to be able to talk with Dr. K as equals about something interesting, which Dr. K kind of wouldn’t let him have (wah.)
‘I didn’t speak to anyone for at least a year’ Christ, what a mood. I have to disclaim that I’m relating my own experiences to his before I say this off-the-wall sounding bit, but I’m willing to bet that he didn’t feel like a ‘finished person’ at that time in his life. Dr K trying to find the door beyond Toast’s performance was a sound intuitive leap, but Dr K wasn’t ready to remove ‘the mask’ and not find a 'normal' person underneath. Before Toast committed to performing and being in the world as a kind of hyper-deliberate achiever type, he probably felt like he was nothing—a pre-linguistic, pre-ego, pre-emotional being, withdrawing from everything and effecting nothing.
Toast probably is afraid that that is what will happen to him again if he ever stops working as hard for a place in the world as he does now, but ‘being that person’ doesn’t feel like being a person, it feels like being an underdeveloped naked snail who doesn’t have any power or ability to survive the world. This sounds really intense but I’m going from experience here :p. Dr K was right in that Toast is afraid of backsliding, and may not have fully realised that he’s a different person now even when he lets go, but he wasn't about to start experimenting with that on camera because it still would've been very vulnerable.
“Fives are introverts” is kind of common knowledge but there are slightly more specific factors that play into what makes being with other people tiring. There’s a line that gets passed around that Fives tend to agree with reflexively, that “the world takes more than it gives.” It can be hard for Fives to get more energy than they're using from interacting with other people, even situations that are meant to be received as ‘help’ and ‘care.’ Processing other people with the level of focus and depth that he kind of can’t help but give to anything that automatically gets his attention can be very draining, especially when they’re fishing for a reaction, even if it’s supposed to be a ‘helped’ one. Fives can feel very easily invaded under certain circumstances, so the reflex soon becomes “don’t worry I’ll do it myself.”
He knows that people can and will do nice things for him so he’s not resentful or ungrateful, but it explains a part of why he sees relationships with others as a duty to perform instead of the ‘give and take’ model. Toast has actually taken on a resilient attitude to this dynamic, probably identifying that the ‘problem’ is himself and taking ownership of that. He’s okay with being with other people on the terms of output, performance and helpfulness because that’s just part of the deal in his mind.
This is actually the secret ingredient as to why Toast thinks that it’s inevitable that he’s going to break up with every girl he dates. He doesn’t expect or often have experiences where he feels purely rejuvenated by his romantic relationships, and he eventually hits a breaking point where he needs to re-establish his space to feel okay again. This setup is extra deadly in a normative romantic relationship because couples are ‘supposed’ to be close most of the time and have the fewest boundaries between them, wearing him down the fastest.
With this in mind, he doesn’t want to hurt anyone and feels like it’s his sole responsibility to balance his own emotions, on top of being considerate of the other persons. He’s also gotten into thinking that he’s insensitive and will hurt people just from being himself, which he will take responsibility for in terms of guilt but feels like he can’t fully stop because it comes from who he naturally is. Stack this on top of the fact that he prefers to have a utility role in the lives of the people he dates and you’ve got one man who exhausts himself by trying to manage two people.
Toast wants to be good and strong for others, but he also knows that moral posturing is annoying, so he plays it down. Him liking to stir the pot and skirt the edge of acceptability really is his idea of fun though, that part isn’t a coverup- he just likes intensity too.
