Purpose.
When I was young/in my teens, I found that I often didn’t understand the world. I didn’t understand people that well, or their intentions. I found why people did the things they did, confusing - illogical even. Today, I know that is exactly the case. But for the longest time, I stubbornly refused to accept that.
So in response, my goal was to constantly absorb as much points of reference, reassurances from people, information, any causalities as I could. If I could not directly read people, I would painstakingly pursue reconciliation of the external state of the world, to my internal model. I ingested anything that could provide some dimensionality to help me understand people better. I listened more than I spoke initially, before I flipped over to asking more questions.
I often wanted to ask them the same question from multiple different angles, which I sought to find exceptions, outliers - something that could affect where they were in my internal model. I wanted some sense of understanding - that they probably got effortlessly. I needed to know answers to almost every twist-and-turn. What could be the outcome(s), and how which was the more likely to happen for each and every situation?
I slowly refined more elegant ways to invite this information, without appearing weird. I had become “normal”, often to the point where it became effortless. I managed to learn something so apparently second nature, in a way that I jokingly refer to as:
People already have these understandings natively compiled, effortless. Whereas, I just found a reliably way of performing JIT on the fly for understanding social situations and how to blend in. But it wasn’t exactly effortless. It felt second-nature finally, but at a great cost to my mood and mental health.
Though it became easier to do whilst on ADHD medication.
Straining, Masking.
As you can probably tell, the sheer level of reconciliation requires a lot of mental compute, and time. When the deep illogical nature of social relationships presented a genuine situation with clear no answer - I often exhausted a lot of energy re-examining my conduct, theirs, and trying to seek reassurances from people by having them run through the situation and give me their answers. Dating was largely the same - but with an added complexity that the more questions you asked, the less success you observed (for now seemingly obvious reasons.)
Then, I came across someone that I was romantically involved with for awhile. She was confused, I was confused. And this confusion prompted a complete meltdown of my world model. I tried to find some rubric to measure where I was, some calculation of what the length between messages meant - whether she was truly busy (what excuses could explain absence this long.) When I had finally reconciled that she wasn’t interested and I should move on, she would reply in bulk - completely making me not trust the information that I had settled on.
I was unable to reconcile the external world to my internal world, and I was no longer able to focus on anything else. I needed to understand, and close this out. After 3/4 weeks of complete mayhem, she closed it out - citing that her previous relationship she was not entirely over.
I didn’t really enjoy life for the weeks that followed. It took me about two months to find some catharsis in all the unanswered questions: “did she like me?”, “who was I to her?”, and others.
In essence, I found a flaw to this mechanism that I learned to cope with social situations: When a answer is in flux and truly has multiple different reasons and outcomes - you can’t find a definitive reason, only a reason you can comfortably walk away with.
Releasing the pressure.
About a day before she decided she did not want to continue, I went to Ina coolbrith park at around 5:30pm, after spending the whole day vexed by just how upset I was, and whether any of it was real. I brought a journal, and just tried to release the feeling of all this pain.
Something completely magical happened here. I felt at peace. It was a really beautiful August sunset. I took a photo for a tour group, visiting from overseas. And watched the many tourists also enjoying the scenery.
I realized something so obviously fundamental, that it hurt that I was so oblivious to it:
Not everything is worth the trouble of reconciling to your internal model. You can still “compile” it, just with some placeholders for people and events that don’t exactly need to be top-of-mind. They should only start to matter, once they’ve also shown some equal care and attention.
So not everything is worth laboring your mental time on. I became a passenger on a never-ending recursive reconciliation. When someone new entered my life (friend or romantic interest,) I over-indexed on them. I didn’t consider that frankly - they weren’t exactly a big part of your life just yet, and I focused too much on trying to fit them into my future. I got excited about the potential without really validating that they were able/wanted to meet that potential.
Peace.
As part of this realization, was finally accepting that you can still reconcile your world model with incomplete information - if that information itself isn’t really that critical. Giving up this trust was initially sort of hard, in the sense that It requires some trust that it’s okay to not seek to track everything in your life.
Regardless of my initial reasons to act in this way - being too pragmatic about these things you can’t force or control exerts a lot of effort and suffering that you can could have simply avoided.