Not to be like a patronizing son of a bitch here but:

that you choose to be kind does not make you less kind. that your emotional intelligence was learned rather than instinctual does not make it less real. that you willingly exhaust yourself exercising those skills is absolutely the opposite of being an asshole.

As I said, I can pass. My point is that other people making me put in the work to pass are being assholes. The irony of them doing so in the name of diversity and inclusion is not lost on me.

> that your emotional intelligence was learned rather than instinctual does not make it less real.

That is a rather technical statement, that would be dependent on exactly what you mean by "emotional intelligence". Relying on general intelligence to do tasks that most people accomplish with more specialized brain power is certainly different, regardless of if you want to classify it as emotional intelligence or not.

Word for word, what you said here is extremely valuable to me. I hope that this isn’t seen as the typical guideline-breaking +1.

Sometimes I resent the patchy compensation mechanisms I’ve built up. It’s almost impossible to explain the frustration, the exhaustion, of choosing to be kind in a fashion that differs from my own understanding of kindness.

I am inherently kind, and I don’t have to choose that. I am confident in that statement. What I do have to force is mapping my default expression of kindness to the norms that friends, family, and acquaintances will understand. This is so important, because failing to do so means pushing all those people away. I feel like I can never let my guard down.

Then I remember to stop talking about myself; cue flash of (rational) anxiety; catch myself from a mental break; go and take a 50 minute long shower.

I’m so thankful for the people that give me a chance to reset, learn, and grow from these iterations.

And god, it's so exhausting.

I have a generic model and I develop ones for individual people too, what one key find normal another will find distressing - and none of it makes any sense to me at all.

I would say the point is that it's extremely easy to unwillingly appear as an asshole if you have to put an extraordinary amount of effort into not appearing as one just because you don't operate based on the same social constructs as most of other people do by default.

The current push-back isn't about that conflict. (If we're talking about the same conflict, I agree with your assessment.) It's about everything else.

So much this. Thanks for putting it in words better than I would have