melannen: Commander Valentine of Alpha Squad Seven, a red-haired female Nick Fury in space, smoking contemplatively (Default)
melannen ([personal profile] melannen) wrote 2017-09-28 01:40 pm (UTC)

Complicated question! I am definitely super introverted (I have learned through experience that I need to at least say "hello, please and thank you" to another human being in person at least once a week or my brain will start going out of calibration, but I only know that because left to my own devices I won't remember to bother with even that much.)

I am also ace as hell, and Murderbot reflects my own experience of aceness better than any other profic protagonist I have read so far. Especially the "oh no, I am feeling strong positive feelings toward another human being, and everybody will expect them to be romantic/sexual which they will never ever be, MUST FLEE" bit, which is basically my teens and early twenties in a nutshell.

I don't have PTSD in the lifelong way that most people on DW describe it, but there have probably been a few times in my life when I met the clinical definition for a time after a specific trauma and then was mostly recovered in a few months with community support but no clinical treatment, which I understand is way more common than chronic PTSD (and is probably mostly because I've been lucky enough that it always *was* things where there was built-in community support afterward instead of, say, gaslighting, or repeated traumas.) But one of those traumas happened in last November and is still sort of ongoing so I was still really feeling it the first time I read Murderbot.

Socal anxiety/ASD/other neuroatypicality I'm also in that place where I don't match the usual experience strongly enough, or experience enough disruption to my life as a result, that I don't feel like even a self-diagnosis would be particularly beneficial... but I have a lot in common with people who are diagnosed and tend to find their metaphors and stories and coping mechanisms really useful. And that's a tough space to navigate socially online in the current climate, and so I tend to mostly talk about it through fiction. (Which is another thing Murderbot and I have in common!)

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