Recalibration

[solarbird]

Look, it's a poll! About emotional crap. This is, of course, triggered by things which have happened recently, and, to a lesser degree, by things which have happened often over the last couple of years, and to a still lesser degree, by things I've been working on since forever. But it's been a while I've done any surveying like this.

These are all questions about how others see me and my attempts to communicate my emotions. I can't make polls anonymous, or I would. I hope you'll answer honestly despite that. No one who reads this journal is involved in the most recent thing which prompted this survey, so this isn't a SEKRIT MESSAGE to anybody.

[Poll #1745043]

Comments

[mistwolf.livejournal.com]

I do find you intimidating, but not, I think, because of anything in your base personality. It is more that you were/are a bit of an inspiration to me. Especially before my transition, you were the first person I watched deal with some issues that I could not.

I also know I made a lot of mistakes in early interactions and my own miscommunications and boundary issues, which has made me extra sensitive in regards to you and yours lest I tread that line again.

So, yeah, intimidating, but in good ways as someone I like a lot and don't want to accidentally push away. :)

[solarbird]

Thank you. ^_^

[lyonesse.livejournal.com]

zeros don't show up on these polls, it's really annoying!

[solarbird]

Wow! That is annoying! The zero answers are in the detailed responses, however.

[stickmaker.livejournal.com]

I don't know how much help my responses will be, since I don't understand humans, either.

[l33tminion]

Hard to say for most of those, since I only know you through this journal.

[solarbird]

I'm also interested in my impression online, since that's how I see most people.

[l33tminion]

Answered, then.

[solarbird]

Thanks. ^_^

[blues-kun.livejournal.com]

I don't know you that well, but you've generally given me the impression that you're friendly and well-intentioned.

You're strongly opinionated and sometimes blunt. Maybe that bothers some folks? I don't really mind either of those things but I've noticed people sometimes think I'm pissed about, or heavily invested in, a matter I may not even particularly care about just because I debate it with them.

[solarbird]

Oh I know that bothers some people. I have an unwillingness to keep my mouth shut on matters I see as critically important. I lost a lot of friends over being unwilling to go along with the various political shifts of the last decade, for example. So that's just reality.

[callibr8]

Good luck with the recalibration efforts. Everyone needs reality checks sometimes.

Please be gentler with yourself, though. You've structured the questions in an easy-to-answer-negatively way, and i hope you don't *mean* it to be so skewed.

Also, the "my music" topic needs more options. I find your music fascinating, complex, unpredictable (because i'm used to Western conventions of musical composition)... I enjoy the melodies, but I'll admit that sometimes I can't understand the words very well because they're shouted/belted rather than "sung". I can demonstrate the difference sometime, using a couple of Echo's Children songs, if you're interested.

As far as your musical "chops", btw, I respect them tremendously and have been delighted to see you venturing farther into the musical performance world, and finding success there.

[solarbird]

Well, I was querying about negative impressions; I don't think I was actively balancing towards the negative insofar as I was doing my best not to prompt for overly-positive responses. Of course, a lot of the people who are most likely to answer most negatively (based on other interactions) are also not answering this poll, so arguably the whole thing is a tad useless.

Still, it does tell me that even of those percentage of people who do have enough emotional engagement with me to answer, nearly 45% find me emotionally confusing and/or difficult to connect with emotionally. (Some of the people who selected "other" gave answers which I include in that percentage.) This is somewhat disappointing as this is the higher-connection self-selecting subset, which means that the actual percentage is likely even higher.

A bit of context: I'm an elf; I have to work very, very hard to translate my emotional signals into the signal sets humans expect, because otherwise the signals match up... poorly. So everything is translated, to lesser or greater degrees. And I have to do all the back-translation as well, since nearly nobody is going to try to reciprocate that and talk to me on my terms. (This is a source of no small resentment, and occasional disaster, but not doing it is much worse.)

The data are implying that I'm not doing as good a job as it as I'd hoped; honestly, I think I'm doing a worse job of it now than I have in the past. The data are also implying that the music, despite its non-customary form, is suffering less badly from this; that's very good.

(And I didn't give more answer options about the music because I'm investigating this specific property and don't want to distract from it. But if you'd like to volunteer other options, go ahead!

[maellenkleth]

Piling on here, since (for whatever reason of disorganisation on my part) I completely missed the original poll (at least **I** did) -- translation will always suffer from the problem of disjunct lexicons. If I try to parse your communications as being human ones, they come out muddled. That's an inescapable consequence of the human and elf lexicons' being noncongruent in detail.

If humans are absent from the interaction, which is a rare circumstance in my experience, then **yes** it's easier to leave the communication within elf terms, which map more directly. In elf terms, you're easy to read.

I have not thought-through the interesting side question of how the lexical noncongruence impacts human's reception of musical performance. Interesting question, for which I thank you for having inspired it however indirectly.

[tahkhleet.livejournal.com]

One thing comes to mind, Brad Hicks noted most people expect a sort of diminishing emphasis toward the end of a sentence, and to _not_ hear a steady or escalating level of conviction/emphasis over a sentence. He noted that this mannerism (steady/escalating intensity) _really_ distorted how people perceived what he was saying. You might experiment trying what he did (he gave up on it, too much of a nuisance) and force yourself to de-emphasize/half joking tone the ends of your substantive sentences.

A second thing is that you're very analytical and have a very good vocabulary. This often comes across as a social dominance maneuver. It doesn't matter that this is not your intent. This is how most people with average/slightly above average vocabularies tend to interpret it.

Moreover, there's people interested in results and people interested in process. People interested in results tend to favour strategies other than analysis because analysis is difficult to do, difficult to "sell", and easy to mis-communicate (as opposed to fail to persuade). Using a technique like that successfully would tend to pose a risk of making "results" people feel inferior. For process oriented people, analytical-verbosity is just going to remind them of a teacher or authority figure and depending what countervailing data they have about you could influence their impression of you.

Now, your general syntax in blogging is actually fairly informal (so you're not _emphasizing_ your vocabulary like I am here) which would mitigate this issue, but I doubt it would entirely reduce it.

Not sure if either really applies to you, but it might. Thought I'd throw that out there.

[tahkhleet.livejournal.com]

also, I'd read Temple Grandin's books Animals in Translation and The Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships. It may well apply to you (and if that seems derogatory, you _really_ need to read the books, since I'm sure you're rubbing shoulders with people whom these books describe even if you're not one of them).

[solarbird]

Temple Grandin is awesome! I've read some of her stuff, but not The Unwritten Rules of Social Relationships - I probably should get to that one, too. That said, I have, for the record, been evaluated and do not test anywhere on the asbergers/autism spectrum. I am indeed neurally atypical! But not in that way.

[solarbird]

A second thing is that you're very analytical and have a very good vocabulary. This often comes across as a social dominance maneuver. It doesn't matter that this is not your intent.
You mean intent isn't magical? XD