My first five paragraphs are not quite on topic. I rant. But after that I'm spot on. Promise.
"If something is important to you, you will find that you are able to accomplish it, you will find a way, and since the entire class will all get the same grade for the assignment-ie-if everyone could do it-we would all get 100%.(...)"
This would have been two reasons for me to get up and leave that class right there and then. Even if my life depended on it.
Please note that by no means do I intend to rant about
you by the following paragraphs. I rant about the prof whose responsibility it would have been to not have their students perform deceitful pep exercises.
So: First reason to get up and run? 'If you really want it, then you can do it' - What about couples in love who want it to work out (you wondered about this yourself)? What about people wanting to survive cancer? What about starving children wanting to find food?
While that slogan sounds like good pep talk and I can see how it's easy to fall for it (that group task sounded like a hard exercise, but really, it were just 20 items for your brain and you had one whole week to memorise them plus up to 19 repetitions while each member performed in front of the group; you would have had to have some members with dementia to not get the 100%) - but actually it's blaming the victim and setting you up for either unnecessary self-doubt or an undeserved ride on quite a high horse.
The second reason would have been that I don't do group achievements; never have, never will. Group is the root of most evil because it kills individual identity to replace it by parasitic group identity. Everything that tries to strengthen this parasitic side of group freaks me out and drives me away so fast that I actually travel back in time and will never have gone there in the first place.
Here is where I get back on topic:
I found that most of my 'friendships' broke because the other party tried to make us two into a group, where you have to conform and take in a parasitic identity in order to be welcome.
It's a question of respect. In order to respect and like
me, you have to respect and like that which makes me
different from you. If you don't, you only want me as your parrot, clone or echo chamber, a mechanism of conservation for the status quo of your behaviours and experiences. And also, you want me to stay the way I am and not grow out of you - or out-grow you.
The third kind of friendship is friendship of virtue.
This is the only one of the three forms that I'd personally call 'friendship'. I need people to have 'virtues' - aka *speaks nasally and with raised eyebrows* be really intelligent, creative, integer and engaged - in order for me to not be bored to tears by them immediately. I know, I sound like an ass -.- But I can't cope with people as it is, and if they bore or irritate me on top of that, I quickly reach a state of mind that is unbearable.
I also wouldn't call myself a 'friend' of someone if I wouldn't be able to experience all those virtue interests for them. The virtue stuff really spells out a lot of what I called 'respect' some paragraphs ago. And, I mean, how can you call yourself the 'friend' of someone who you 'use' but don't also respect while you do it?
This may be ideo-syncratic with me.
Is it along the lines of 'You can't love others if you don't love yourself first'?
Maybe you're not so screwed up - maybe you are just somewhere along the Asperger's/Autism spectrum.
Yeah, I get that quite often and I continue to look into it every now and then because of that. But there is the fact that I am very able to pick up on non-verbal emotional cues and that I can fake empathy quite convincingly by reconstructing what others must feel with my rational mind; I'm not sure that there can be an Asperger's diagnosis without impairments in these two areas. Maybe I should see a specialist to answer this question definitively.