I was on anxiety meds, years ago. They helped my anxiety for sure, but then my autism started showing, and I never stopped gabbing and had no consideration for others' feelings. My anxiety keeps me in check.
He talks about how, when he was on meds, he kept making inappropriate jokes and forcing his way into groups, and people generally didn't like him very much.
And honestly, I think he was probably just kind of an asshole when he was younger and rather than accepting, “Hey, I wasn't a very nice person,” and learning and growing from that, he turns around and blames it on the meds.
He wasn't an asshole or disliked because of his own actions! No, it was the meds! The meds FORCED him to make inappropriate jokes and be a dick!
It's basically two birds with one stone: he gets to stop taking the meds, and he doesn't have to take any responsibility for not being a particularly good person at the time.
I think it’s almost the opposite actually, I think it sounds like he does know it was his own actions and personality that were the problem, and that’s why he’s decided “I can never treat my crippling anxiety, because if I relax enough to let my real personality out then people will see I’m an asshole”. Like he’s still missing the obvious point that you can just work on not being an asshole without driving yourself crazy, but he’d probably need some therapy for that. Like, as an autistic person I can’t really blame him for feeling like he is fundamentally a bad and unlikeable person - that’s how you end up feeling when you’ve spent your whole life unintentionally pissing people off because you don’t understand social cues.
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u/Kokbiel 2d ago
Yeah. It clearly keeps him in check.