Not knowing how to be good

It's hard for me to tell the difference between being a doormat and being a good person. Obviously, I am not God so I am not going to be entirely successful at being a good person, ever, but as I try I become closer to God. Or I would, if I understood what it actually meant to be a good person.

First of all, like a lot of "special needs" kids, I grew up feeling bad about needing things that other people didn't need. I felt like an inconvenience. Also, when people rejected me, or got mad at me, I equated that (often correctly) with my unusual ways of relating to people and my poor judgment, but I also saw my differences/challenges as bad, in a moral sense. I thought that cutting down on them would somehow be a moral act.

This has led to some really strange habits. For example, I have two really nice, not at all challenging to answer, YouTube messages that people sent me about my AS videos. They would probably appreciate an answer. But I haven't answered them. This is because I had a lot of trouble, when I was younger, with being an obsessive friend. When I really liked someone, I wanted to hang out with them all the time, or talk to them a lot online if that wasn't an option. This sometimes led to the person being annoyed or angry. Even when it didn't lead to that, it did lead to me being hurt when the person waited a long time to respond to my email, didn't make an extra effort to eat lunch with me, etc. As I got older, I didn't just feel hurt, I felt guilty and angry at myself for being hurt, because it wasn't ordinary to feel that way.

Also, I was confused by people who didn't immediately respond to emails. I didn't think it was hard to respond to my emails. I remember being annoyed, and thinking that other people must have really slow brains if it actually took them a lot of time to answer an email.

But at the same time, this was how most people were. So I made myself feel the same way. Even though I used to be a person who sincerely didn't understand how answering an email could be a difficult task, I have now trained myself to feel vaguely anxious when I get an email, and to "save it for later" as if it's some big challenge, and end up putting it off for a long time. (When I say "email," I also mean comments on message boards, and YouTube messages, and Facebook wall posts--you get the idea.)

So now I take a long time to reply to messages, which is a more ordinary thing to do, but also probably a worse thing to do in an absolute sense, because when a friend emails me, they would probably enjoy a reply, and when a person asks me a question about AS, the answer is probably important to them. So I am actually making life a little bit worse for the other person, by making them wait for something that would make them happier.

A habit I have that's even worse is making fun of people, invading their personal space, and interrupting them. I originally approached socialization from a very rule-based perspective, and didn't understand why people who were obviously more successful than I was were actually more thoughtless and hurtful than I was; I thought the rules for socializing with people were trying not to hurt them, and trying to think about their feelings. This didn't seem to work, so I started to imitate the negative as well as the positive behaviors of successful normal people.

I'm not saying that I never jokingly insulted people before, but I now experience this weird compulsion to do rude things like take people's food without asking, make affectionate but unflattering comments about the way they look, or interrupt what they're saying. I don't think I even realized how bad I feel about this until I wrote it out. It is another example of something I think of as a "right" thing to do, which is actually morally wrong, because it makes people feel hurt, unimportant, or unsafe.

This isn't actually what I intended to write about, but I got distracted by something else. I guess I'll have to write about the other thing later. The point I have turned out to be making with this post is: as I have tried to become more normal, and beaten myself up for things I did that weren't normal, I have actually started doing things that I really should be beating myself up for more, if I'm judging myself in terms of being kind and making the world a better place, instead of in terms of being normal.

I'm not saying I haven't changed for the better in other ways, but in some ways, I have definitely changed for the worse because the goal I've been working towards is normalcy instead of goodness, and not all of normalcy is good.