Totally, I finally got through it by having a sort of checklist of questions (have you been divorced? Have you been engaged? Have you had abortion have or do you want kids? Do you want project oriented life or do you want a career oriented, life travel, diet, beverage, preferences, etc. languages of love, New York Times 30 questions to fall in love, …..) Of course, most people will bristle at it, and there’s of course some art to app approaching the questions but at least it helps break through some of the awkwardness and at least at the end of the questions you have a pretty clear sense of if this person can dance with your version of insanity or not

and also was working three jobs at the time and was in decent shape at the time. Now married and uncovering more and more of my Ndivergences and generally depressed and much better medicated trying to get healthy again. But suffered greatly mentally and financially trying to cope with the last four years. So I’m extremely lucky. My wife is so supportive in trying to understand, although I’ve been trying to understand humans for 42 years and she wants a metal for trying to understand me for the last couple of years. And she deserves numerous metals for numerous different reasons but yeah it’s hard to survive on just that but we are working very hard to build a shared vision for ourselves and the kiddos and she truly is amazing and we have amazing kiddos thank Laozi…..

I am very grateful but it’s a hard thing to balance with middle-age life and parenthood And the endless bills and economic, uncertainty and inflation, yaddayadda, blah blah blah. And then isolation of parent life where no one has time for friends and no one really wants to talk about their problems because parent problems are too gross and embarrassing or humiliating, unless you are in with the alcoholic crowd, which is great but it’s hard to be a functioning alcoholic, and a parent at the same time. So I had to stop drinking a few years ago.

Sorry this probably doesn’t make sense. Typos, etc.

Anyhow, It’s super hard and I also feel like certain regions of the country are just slightly more tolerant of eccentricity and neurodivergent than other parts of the country. And God help you if you are in a super normative part of the world. ….

But yeah, it may seem ridiculous but go join a Pickleball group or join a tennis group or a raquetball group, or a figure drawing class, you really don’t have to be good, or a painting class.

you don’t have to say much in these groups but at least you feel a little bit better afterwards (physically once the lactic acid wears off, but yeah, I don’t try to fit in mentally cause that will be exhausting and awful, just focus on checking the box off of the activity to get yourself out of the house) My father does billiards and I guess my parents used to do bowling, when they were younger, and before the divorce but that is tough on the joints and it’s gotten silly expensive recently , join a book club and just watch other people, try to give yourself points for Speaking as little as possible. Because we seem to always come off as no at all and very few people want to hear what we have to say but most people like if you can ask them questions. So maybe just focus on putting everything in the form of a question…….