𝔞𝔷𝔲𝔯𝔢𝔩𝔬𝔯𝔢 𝔤𝔴𝔢𝔫𝔡𝔬𝔩𝔶𝔫 𝔨𝔬𝔯𝔯𝔦𝔤𝔞𝔫 🕷️🍂

i am not a "confident" person. i have no sense of sureness or correctness or mastery. i'm not brave or secure. i'm very rarely optimistic.

what some may see as confidence is just a lack of awareness or understanding of the basic social assumptions i may appear to be flauting.

i'm autistic in such a way that i'm direct because it doesn't occur to me not to be. it doesn't occur to me to obscure things that i guess other people might see value in blurring or hiding, because it's so hard for me to understand the world that i continually need to explain it to myself.

i'm isolated enough, alone enough, so devoid of the options available to others, that i spend all my time in my head, spinning models, telling stories, running experiments. i write things down to give these thoughts structure and help me process them. i'm not talking to anyone.

what you may see as confidence is this deeply neurodivergent chick who doesn't have the mental wiring to consider the possibility that other people might attend to, engage with, or care about anything she says or does—and who is ever so startled and confused when they do.

i don't have much of a history of—like, i barely know what a social life is. i've never really had any in-person friends. the only family i ever had was two parents who made sure i knew in so many words that they didn't want me and didn't feel they should need to take care of me.

i've only ever really been alone, to amuse myself with the inner worlds i build. when i talk, it's to help me think. when i write, it's to help me think.

i just earnestly do not get it when people respond as if i'm performing for an audience, because—what audience? it's just me here.

it's not confidence when you have no clue what you're even being "confident" about or why. it's not confidence for me to fail to follow a convention that i don't know or to privately entertain myself with my words because i know nothing i do or say or think could be of any importance to anyone else.

it's not confidence to have never been a real human being until just recently, and still not really get the idea of being a person-around-other-people. it's not confidence to be some gremlin on the outskirts of town who has no concept of other life beyond their drafty cave.

i am not a confident person. i'm just azurelore. true i have recently learned to like myself, but beyond that i'm just this shattered oblivious wreck, trying to talk myself through a lifetime of trauma so that maybe i can salvage some joy from this half-spent life that nobody has ever wanted.