I'm a shut-in. This is my story

I read this and had this small voice in the back of my head translating what I read into "Look at me! I'm special! I'm a shut-in! I do it because I'm special!"

In reality the author is just alike everyone else, with fears and emotions which caused him to shut himself in and rationalize it with some meditative jargon.

This comes up as porn for me... (work filters)

I used to shut myself in a lot of time when I was playing poker avidly. Instead of going to parties, bars, socialize with friends, there were always tournaments to grind. Putting in more hands meant cutting down on variance, meant being able to deal better with bad luck and facilitating a more consistent winning playing style.

Obviously it was the thing I loved at that moment, the riches allured to me and my friends didn't "Get" the amounts I would be playing for anyway. They also didn't "get it" why it sucked so hard to end up 11/1500 in a big tournament. (Hey you still won right?).

You're right when you see relationships don't work when you always have a communication problem.

Usually though, the problem is not that people don't understand you - (sidenote: i know there are just stupid people who don't, or don't want to. You don't need them anyway). The problem is you won't let people understand you, because you are ignorant, arrogant and self-righteous. No offence but, if you were such a genius you wouldn't be working on Ruby projects (no pun.) People probably would understand you, and you would probably have better socializing experiences if you tried.

Seems you sucked at this stuff when you were a kid, and now when you've grown up enough to be able to understand yourself and put everything into words, you still decide its the best route to go.

Well die lonely then if you like it. It's not for me.

> "University of Oxford". (Uh, that's not "Oxford University" or any of the colleges.)

The University of Oxford is indeed the ancient and well-known university informally called Oxford University.

Funny how many things are similar in my own biography.

OP: chess, checkers - me: school olympics, chemistry, math, physics

OP: tour trauma, when asking tour guide a question, everybody laughed - me: tour trauma when tour guide played naughty joke on my mom and everybody laughed

OP: abusive dad, divorced early - me: no dad, left at birth (fortunately awesome grandpa that taught me Ohm's law, how to drill, solder and lots of other stuff)

OP and me: interest in psychology (for me ended with learning what Freud was saying, I have no business in branch of science where name of such clueless bent puppy is remembered)

OP: crappy kindergarten experience, me: spent few hours in kindergarten, don't remember anything but I never went back there, I cried too much when they tried to drag me there

Fortunately, I had (still have) great, stable mother, I had close friends (full honesty with them, nearly kind of mind melt) until I was 17 or so (OP had some till 12).

I'm 34. My true self kind of melded with my fake self. They switch in seconds. When I'm interacting with acquaintances I still fake it. Often I fake amusement because I want to come off as cheerful, but I'm rarely truly amused. Pretty often I fake quite well which makes me proud. But I don't have to fake with few people that are close to me. I just have to restrain myself from exposing full me in some cases, but I guess most people do that even (especially?) with their loved ones.

I went different way than OP, I was madly in love two times as a teenager, now I have de-facto wife. She's awesome. After 8 years or so of the relationship, from time to time I feel that I love her and I feel the urge to tell her that. Not sure if that's unusual but I think it's a good sign.

But I know I chose one path. And sometimes I long for the other, for being a shut-in. I hate going out. I hate meeting people who are not my closes friends. I don't eagrely await meeting even my closest friends. Social interaction exhausts me. I used my relationship to shed off almost all of my friends. Still I think living among people takes at least 80% of my energy. I have only 20% left for doing the stuff I actually care about.

As they say, grass is always greener on the other side. I'd probably be same looser with too high IQ and too little motivation if I were a shut-in. But one can dream.