-I've heard the quip -'Being considered normal just means you are as weird as the national average.'
when i get exhausted by it, i too can crack! luckily it's gotten better, and i now just kinda sit in my abuse response. knowing that keeping my cool is the only thing that can prevent my parents generational trauma being passed on.
it's exhausting, and you're doing a great job to be able to recognize it! i too started my journey with a list of situations in which i got shitty like you have, and ended it realizing i just need those in my life to give me the same pass i give them if i regress. good luck to you on finding a solution that helps!
I can't tell if the abuse was was made worse by my peculiar brain malfunctions, or gave me better skills for coping. I think it it might be both.
> all hell breaks loose
mean that you get angry?
It means the mask drops, and people see me getting angry, being less than composed, not being polished.. whatever it is I don't want them to see.
And that's not a truism-- people of all ages make the mistake of coupling the potential expression of some behavior X with an entire group of behaviors they are afraid they will catch like "cooties." Then they decide not to publicly express behavior X for fear of that.
Perhaps that's not what OP meant by "acquiring," but there's a high probability some HN'er read it that way. Hence, my comment here.
Which doesn't mean the example isn't fictional, it just means I would expect someone who's entirely comfortable with referring to themself in the third person to be considerably less likely than the average software developer to worry that a variable-naming scheme that amuses them might be seen as a bit odd by the rest of the team.
common.
conventional.
familiar.
normal.Aka, someone that’s homicidal is abnormal but not necessarily eccentric.
Absolutely. In life, most people are "normal", almost by the definition of normal, but there's a big penumbra of people who don't habitually and reflexively conform to normal. If you're a little bit odd, you spend effort suppressing it and actively conforming. In autistic circles, this is called "masking" for behaviors deemed autistic; in LGBT circles, this is called "passing", and so on. But once someone has fallen sufficiently far from the middle of the normal distribution that they can't pass, or can't be bothered to pass (it can be a lot of work), they stop trying to pass and you can spot all their non-normal behaviors.
(What is "normal" is of course culturally determined and varies by your local culture, social class, etc, and covers all sorts of things. Americans and Brits are told to hold forks differently, for example)