I don't have much to add to this right now other than to say this is really fantastic writing. I don't normally enjoy "my journey" kind of blog posts, but this one feels full of valuable insights, and I'm grateful to the author for sharing. It's also just nice to read something written by a skilled writer.

I eat at Chinese restaurants where my waiter is a QR code. Please pour olive oil in my lap, hold my hands, and tell me I'm special.

Appreciate the writing and the author's fortitude in achieving their goals. While I never had friends, neither online nor in person, I cannot identify with this at all - it reads like a strange, obsessive seeking of external validation which I have never felt myself. Maybe I am just disinterested in people in general.

really identify. especially with the early yearning to connect and not having the skills. Learned sooo much over the years by being brutally rejected and eventually taking stock of what happened and extracting a rule or two. but then, yeah, next phase, rules don't matter (except when they do) and change moment to moment anyway.

funny to read this here on hacker news of all places, where I let my carefully managed, almost always inhibited, childhood nerd self fly free in the comments.

OP has definitely gone beyond me in many ways, with his talk about embodiment, and being able to be so empathic that he has elicited tears of gratitude. Enviable.

I wish I had the drive to do as much work as the author has. Instead I will live more or less where I am now, stably in social mediocrity, perpetually somewhat impedance mismatched with the people around me.

> I was probably the most severely bullied kid at my school.

> I was demonstrating my erudition

Those two things might have been linked. I wasn't there, but I'm suspicious.

Fortunately the author learns better by the end of the article, but it stuck out to me because LLMs have made people suspicious of five dollar words like delve so to use the word erudition in this day and age is a choice.