For better and for worse, I am a difficult person. This is not an overstatement, and I would bet money every one who knows me enough would agree with this. As much as this may sound like a cliche, the truth is that often this boils down to being unusual and people expecting or understanding different things from me, and me from them. The purpose of this page is to describe some of the most important aspects of me that affect my interaction with other people, hopefully to help make that interaction work better.
I am going to be talking about personality traits, personality disorders, difficulties, tendencies, preferences and lifestyle choices here. I would like to make it clear that a lot of these are simple statements / acknowledgements of reality, they are not meant to be excuses. I am not perfect, and I know this. Some of the behaviours I tend to have are not ideal and I work hard to control them and reduce their effect. However, a lot of these are ingrained enough and difficult enough to handle that they will never fully disappear, and so understanding them and where they come from might help others have a less alienating experience with me.
A large proportion of my personality can be explained with a few words, which however I would like to surround by the adequate context:
I am mildly autistic. I was not diagnosed until I was 31, and I have always had a decent amount of masking and a lot of rational overcompensation. But I have a wide range of autistic traits, such as hyperanalytical thinking, tendency to obsession, difficulty perceiving some social cues, a strong proclivity to intrusive thoughts and a slightly increased sensitivity to some sensory elements. On the better side, I am highly rational, and consider myself quite immune to manipulation.
I exhibit a wide range of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) traits. These include a strong tendency to procrastination, a fundamental inability to work long hours, the ability to hyperfocus on topics (involuntarily), producing high productivity but not very targettable work, very low tolerance for boredom, and a need to always be doing something. This obviously leads to me being a slightly impatient person, in terms of not liking waiting.
I am an extremely honest person. Sincerity and straightforwardness are very valuable for me, both in being able to give them, and in people giving them to me. I understand the value of appropriateness and avoiding topics at times, but still sometimes struggle evaluating what is an adequate context. I can definitely come across as blunt or even insensitive, though I'd like to think I have severely improved in these.
I am a very expressive person. I often speak loudly, and doing lots of gestures. I've had people say they felt slightly intimidated by me when I was in fact not upset at all. This is almost always a product of my intensity and that of my thoughts, rather than a strong emotional reaction. I have had, however, to develop very strong self-control mechanisms, so losing control of myself is almost absolutely out of the question: this has never happened since I was a kid.
As mentioned before, I am a very intense person, for better and for worse. I feel strongly about all sorts of topics, personal, social, political, ideological, technical and artistic, and I like talking about them.Â
I believe over the years I have developed a strong sense of self-awareness. I consider introspection possibly one of the most important and valuable skills to have. I highly value people who exercise it regularly, and may feel slightly unsafe when close to people who show no self-awareness whatsoever. As a consequence of this, I have developed an almost learned sense of empathy: I will not necessarily empathize naturally with others, but I will constantly evaluate situations from as many points of view as I possibly can, which will often lead me to be able to understand conflicting points of view and have an easier time finding middle ground. I do have a tendency to be self-centred, which is a product in part of my intensity and its contrast with the intensity of most other people. It also stems from the fact that the main mechanism that I have to evaluate other people's positions is to compare their experiences with mine.
In close relation with my personality, is my lifestyle. My lifestyle is important for me, and I have put immense amounts of thought into it. Some aspects of it are by design, and some others are by necessity: I consider them to be pretty much unavoidable given my personality.
I suffer from Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder. This means that my sleep cycle is severely delayed from the standard and has a tendency to be longer than 24 hours. This makes me an extreme night owl. My natural wake-up time is somewhere between 12:00 and 15:00, and my natural fall asleep time is somewhere between 02:00 and 06:00. I believe (and I think some research indicates this may be the case), that this is in some way related to my brain's ability to perceive sunlight. On top of the delayed sleep, it is important to understand the evolution of energy throughout the day for me. Early birds typically have a pattern where they wake up with a lot of energy, which slowly fades throughout the day, until they fall asleep. Night owls, on the other hand (me included), typically have a pattern where it takes me very long to wake up, often not feeling fully awake until 4 or 5 hours after I've woken up, and energy slowly builds up during the day, peaking just a few hours before bed time.
All of this means that the most awake period of my day is usually in the evening (between 18:00 and 00:00), with the peak being closer to midnight. For me, participating in activities that require focus before 15:00 is difficult, and requires both an effort and also a price that must be paid sometimes the day before, but usually after (time to recover from the effort). I understand that, in a society, we all need to make compromises, and so I do not aspire to never participate in a 9:00 meeting or never have an early appointment. However, I think this compromise needs to come from both sides where possible, and most importantly, I am way beyond the point of tolerating people making fun at my expense for my sleeping patterns and shrugging them off as if it was laziness. I don't have strong boundaries around my schedule, but I expect you to be both understanding and willing to compromise when negotiating appointments and plans. Moreover, I strongly believe (as so many others) that society is built for early birds, and tends to make life as a night owl more difficult by way of putting obstacles and removing options. I believe this needs to change (gradually).
I live a happiness driven life (as opposed to, for example, duty driven, goal driven or spiritually driven). This often means a pleasure driven life. However, I'd like to clarify that this does not mean that I exclusively or mainly chase short-term pleasure, or that it is only my pleasure / happiness that I care for. Instead, I consider happiness and pleasure of many individuals (often more than just humans) relevant (though of course there is a prioritization here), in the long-term, to be the principal goal of what I do and how I evaluate other people's actions. Laws, morals, goals, systems, hierarchies, rules are all means to the end of increasing happiness (to me). This means I won't work because I feel I ought to, but rather because I think it is worth me doing it to increase my own and other people's happiness. I won't respect the law just because it is the law, but rather because (when) I feel it enhances people's happiness. I won't discuss policies or approaches to life from the point of view of a sense of duty or a religious or spiritual notion of what we must do, but rather of what I feel will enhance people's happiness.
Two particular aspects that, in some sense, emanate both from the previous point and from other aspects of my personality; and that I think are worth pointing out, are that I am a highly sexual person and that games (usually video games) are an extremely important aspect of my life (because of how they estimulate my mind, and analytical and obsessive tendencies, in a way that produces me great happiness).
I am polyamorous. I have and have had multiple partners (who of course I also expect to potentially have multiple partners). This is always enabled through three principal means: First, absolute honesty about what is going on with who. There are no important secrets with my partners. Second, strong and constant communication, allowing emotions to be expressed, issues to be discussed and compromises to be reached at multiple levels such as time availability, life plans or compatibility. Third, a fundamental understanding that different people offer different things. My partners are not comparable. I might share leisure tastes with some, lifestyle choices with others and a strong sexual chemistry with others; and all the combinations and variations inbetween (as well as a thousand other things such as political / social ideas).
My approach to polyamory is completely non-hierarchical. Relationships are obviously different, as expressed above. Sometimes, this will mean that some are clearly more important than others, and this is absolutely fine. However, there is no predetermined hierarchy between them or a particular role assigned to each of them. Instead, I prefer to let them grow (and disappear) organically. Obviously, this is easier said than done and the reality is normally a lot more complicated.