explaining to my friend that i have a deeply ingrained fear/anxiety of playing guitar around ppl, not because of performanc fright,
but because of being exposed at a formative age to the trend of hating on "guitar at party" guys, and my easily-traumatized autistic brain internalizing all that hatred into "if i ever play guitar within hearing range of other people without getting the explicit enthusiastic consent of every person who might hear, they will all think im annoying and trying to be 'cool' and read motivations into it besides 'she likes playing the guitar' and they'll all see me as being secretly self centered and sleazy and that i'm trying to 'pick up girls' and that im overconfident in my abilities and they'll all desperately want me to stop"
for similar reasons whenever i play guitar for basically anyone outside of the handful of ppl i feel at ease around, i preface it with a diatribe of how im not a good guitar player and im sorry for playing guitar, sorry i suck at it, sorry you have to listen to me try and fail to sing and keep struming rhythm at the same time, sorry if i mess up
being autistic its like u just build up a surveilance state in your mind that is hypervigillant about every possible way people could misinterpret you or be angry at you and shutting the machinery down once its built and operational is very difficult
this shit is so fucking toxic. when you hate on "acceptable targets" for their innocuous hobbies, consider it may ricochet and hit your friends who ALSO enjoy that thing!
You don't even realize it's happening until you're mid-diatribe and somebody stops you to say, "Hey, you're fine, you know that right?" and you realize that there is a serious edifice of thought and feeling you'd felt the need to invisibly build up--and lordy, is it easier to build these things than to tear them down...
Learning to let yourself exist genuinely is so hard.
