i feel like i'm starting to get a better picture about the differences between me and a lot of other people, why i seem to do things slower but feel like i understand them better, why i'm less afraid but incredibly anxious, ect. i think generally speaking, i end up understanding things at a greater depth and am utilizing a distinctly different level of abstract thinking than a large number of people do. many still only utilize this kind of thinking in very specific circumstances, such as remembering social code, understanding rules/technical stuff for work, ect, but end up applying it to a lot more things in general. so because the rest of the kids in school are engaging with math on a much more surface level, i have the best understanding of math in the room minus potentially the teacher, i finish the test last and get the highest score in the class, nearly always 100's unless i didnt show my work out of spite. but i was really always almost the last person finishing the test. i'm not quite sure where i learned to think like this but if i had to guess it would be under the critical eye of my dad, not wanting to look foolish, and in doing so figured out how to be "more correct"/coherent than him. if my focus remained intact i suspect i would have been a savant at anything i dived into. there were a lot of signs of this, the most prominent one being how my family and others reacted to me learning the sax. but in that example also lies the mechanism by which i learned to obliterate my attention. you're never allowed to not want to please others so all you're ever able to do is make yourself disappoint them so they fuck off. we're all born into a prison that they keep you in with eye contact, attention, and incentives and something in me wanted to escape. i started getting uncomfortable if they could hear me, getting distracted by other things so much so that now if the link is made in my brain between doing something and someone possibly being happy about that, if they're not around it is significantly more difficult for me to do the thing in general unless i'm consciously using them wanting me to do the thing as a motivator, which seems to only go so far until i find a way to get lazy about it again. this is why using smoking as a motivator has seemed to be incredibly effective at getting me to do shit i consciously want to do.