I can't include everything as it's too long and often don't receive much response, so here are some of the main points.
I struggle with motivation, but I don’t think laziness completely explains it. I can understand why I need to do something, recognize that I’m capable of doing it, and even imagine how it could benefit my future, yet still feel little desire to actually follow through.
Most of my motivation comes from curiosity or the fear of immediate consequences. If something interests me, I’ll explore it until I’ve satisfied my curiosity, and then I usually move on. If something has consequences, I’ll often put it off until those consequences feel close enough to matter. Long-term rewards, like having a stable future, make sense to me intellectually, but they don’t create much excitement or motivation.
Sometimes I think I’m just lazy. I know I could complete an assignment, but I don’t feel like doing it, so I find an easier way to get it over with. Other times, I wonder if it’s because I don’t see much of a point in doing things in the first place. I can imagine having a successful, comfortable life, but I don’t necessarily imagine myself feeling fulfilled by it.
I’ve also spent a lot of time thinking about the meaning of life, identity, and whether anything is genuinely worthwhile. I don’t know how much that influences my motivation, but sometimes ordinary responsibilities feel insignificant when I consider the bigger picture. I can recognize that I need money, education, and some form of stability without feeling particularly driven to pursue them.
I don’t feel like I have a consistent passion or goal that gives me direction. I mostly follow whatever interests me in the moment, and when that interest fades, I often stop. I’m also somewhat detached from my surroundings and from the idea of my own future, which might contribute to why things don’t feel as important as I know they are. I don’t know whether this is laziness, difficulty initiating and sustaining tasks, a lack of purpose, emotional detachment, or some combination of those things.
I don’t actually know what I feel toward my parents most of the time.
Not in the dramatic, continuous way people seem to expect. I can say I don’t want them harmed, that part is solid enough, but beyond that it gets thin. If they’re just living their lives, doing whatever, existing in the same house or the same world as me without anything urgent happening, they start to feel like… people. Just people. There’s no automatic pull, no constant undercurrent of warmth or dread or attachment that stays switched on.
The only times something sharper shows up is when one of two things is true: either they’re in some kind of danger or emotional freefall and I feel the old reflex to keep them safe, or they’re actively giving me comfort, fun, or that familiar sense of being settled. Outside those windows it fades. I can be sitting right there with them, even feel something in the moment, and then it’s like I blink and the feeling is gone—replaced by this clinical distance where I’m just observing the interaction instead of living inside it. They start to feel more like a memory I’m still near than people I’m currently bound to.
I stick around because it’s what I’m used to, because the routines are known, because on some level I still want them to feel okay. But if I’m honest, a lot of the time it doesn’t feel like love in the continuous, self-generating sense. It feels more like response. Like I react when the situation calls for it, and the rest of the time I can turn my attention away without much internal resistance. I’m not sure whether that means the feeling was never that deep, or whether it just got worn down into something quieter and more conditional. Either way, I can’t pretend the steady, always-on version is there when it isn’t.
The sexual version of the domination isn’t some separate kink I can cleanly label. It’s the same need for asymmetry and consequence, just running hotter and more specific. With men it usually starts from a baseline of discomfort—especially faces with facial hair, the ones that read as authority or threat. Being alone talking feels off; the body registers them as something that could dominate me socially or physically, so the fantasy flips it. Reduction, emasculation, forced reframing, watching the role collapse. It’s rough and concrete. Sometimes I’m the one imposing it, sometimes I’m the one under it, but either way there’s an ideal woman running in the background of the scene, like the real target of the desire has to be held at a distance while the male body supplies the friction and the stakes.
With women it’s different. The charge is less about neutralizing a threat and more about possession and directed access. Knowing the body is under control while the mind might still be separate. Changing someone’s trajectory, especially if they carry some weight of purity, strength, or narrative importance. Ordinary mutual desire often feels thin or unavailable, so the erotic charge shifts toward power and reaction instead. Physical pleasure is there, but it’s rarely the whole point; the point is that something is happening *to* them and I can feel the shape of it.
None of this is something I act on. The restraints are practical and immediate; consequences for me, consequences for the few people I actually protect. The fantasies stay internal or fictional. But they don’t feel disgusting the way they’re supposed to. What registers instead is interest, intensity, sometimes pleasure. The moral framing other people treat as automatic just doesn’t light up the same way.
That’s the same pattern that shows up with empathy outside my immediate circle. I can understand someone else’s pain intellectually.
I can even behave compassionately when I’m in the room and can’t leave, or when helping lets me feel like I’ve altered a trajectory. But the visceral, continuous pull that seems to drive other people is mostly absent. Distant victims often leave me indifferent. Strong moral language from them can even irritate me, because it feels like they’re being handed a ready-made narrative and a community of support that never quite arrives for the way I experience things.
Stories of harm, especially sexual harm, can register as charged or interesting in the abstract; the same events happening to someone right in front of me usually just produce the socially expected performance or a quiet urge to leave. Unless it's an emotional reaction I register to that of a wounded animal, in which case empathy may arrive as all other justifications have been vacant, replaced by the immediate thought of "this hurts, make it stop." But even then, it may or may not show up. In older men and women it may arrive, but with those my age or younger, it's not much of a detractor.
Inside the small circle it’s different. Protectiveness shows up. Softness shows up when the distress is raw and adult and stripped of justification. Outside that circle the default is thinner: limited feeling, mild irritation at the scripts, an absence of compulsion. I know how that reads; It reads like coldness, like narcissism, like something broken. I’m not sure it’s any of those things in the clean diagnostic sense. It’s just what the internal machinery actually does when the person isn’t already inside the narrow set of people who still register as real to me.