Ahaha, writing a post musing out loud about the apparent total disconnect between my inability to handle people enjoying my writing, and the joy I find in quietly watching as occasional people stumble across the mech pilot fics and spend a few days quite obviously working through the entire list and liking all the ones that speak to them, and I blithely choose one word that snags my own attention like a shirt on a loose nail:
"the compersive joy I find in quietly watching..."
There's an Asimovian directive lodged deep in my grubby brain that says You Get Nothing — that wanting, needing, having, enjoying things for myself is Selfish, and Selfish is axiomatically Forbidden.
But compersion is allowed.
So fucking much of me hangs askew on so few load-bearing hangups