As a support provider (think well-trained best friend), I have been working with people with typical and divergent styles for a long time, and have developed friendships at many different levels and in many different ways with the people I work with. We have the luxury of spending significant amounts of time together over several years. I get the chance to really KNOW the people I work with. If there is one thing I wish everyone, typical or not, understood, is that EVERYONE has social anxiety of some sort, to some degree. They have different ways to navigate that anxiety, with different results. I find that the key to being with other people is to be able to recognize their anxiety adaptive strategies, and to be able to tell, in the moment, how they are feeling, as evidence by their non verbals. For what it’s worth, I hope anyone here can take some of what I have said and put it to use to develop success in their own social endeavors, or simply navigating everyday life. It is a life-time work to learn, and there is always something more to add to the body of one’s personal knowledge and understanding, but the key point of understanding that anxiety is an overriding and underlying process that is ALWAYS present in social interactions can be a helpful starting point. This is a subject that is dear to me, so if anyone has any interest in talking more about this, please respond! 🙂

Yep.

Honest question: are you a bot? 'cause you sound like one

I pay for that infrastructure when I register my car. As in, I pay easy more than an ICE car does. Way more. There is no freeloading going on. It is just a propaganda point used by oil interests to discourage people from adopting evs. The freeloaders you are looking for are the corporate interests who are using my lungs to clear the poisons they are spilling into the air with their diesel engines. Those are the freeloaders you are looking for. Protip: you can spot the freeloaders in a crowd real easy. They are the ones pointing their fingers and yelling “freeloaders”. Projection is a powerful tool