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holding chronic tension in the body produces nerd voice, nerd face, makes posture bad, and makes physical activity subtly painful and unpleasant, hence avoiding sports

("tense all the time" is a pretty succinct gesture towards what it feels like to have complex PTSD also, but we don't need to get into that here; having a story about where the tension comes from is less important than the raw phenomenology of it)

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· Jan 26

i don't talk in these terms often because i think a lot of people don't like the framing but in my own mind i am sort of a complex PTSD maximalist; i think almost every serious psychological issue is basically a subtype of complex PTSD pete-walker.com/fAQsComplexPTS

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(although otoh looking directly for the tension is complicated by the fact that at the beginning you'll likely have little access to a lot of it due to numbness)

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Visa

SF (Aug 2-14)

@visakanv

· Oct 13, 2021

i keep expecting to feel like I'll be "done" (stretching my hips and hamstrings) but every couple of days it feels like I'm finding some new tenseness and tightness that I couldn't even perceive before because I was too numb

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"look younger" is the one i feel the least confident about but vaguely speaking i think holding chronic tension diverts bodily resources away from the physical maturation process, especially during puberty. it may specifically interfere with sex hormone production, idk

there's a whole 'nother aspect of the nerd phenomenon that has to do with the particularities of nerd obsessions and nerd thinking; i have fewer speculations about this because it overlaps with autism stuff i can't claim to understand at all

but loosely speaking thinking and getting lost in thoughts can be a coping mechanism (i don't mean this as a criticism; coping mechanisms are good, they're for coping, it's right there in the name) enneagraminstitute.com/type-5

one version of what you could call my main thesis that i'm exploring on twitter is: it is possible to go from being a nerd to being a jock, to go from being tense all the time to not being tense all the time

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· Jan 25

guys can we talk about this completely insane thread where oxytocin nasal spray apparently makes an autistic guy not autistic temporarily? i'm gonna be fucked up about this for days twitter.com/punished3liza/…

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😻

cos i’ve been thinking about the nerd-jock thing lately. i think it was school and stereotypes that introduced the idea to me they were incompatible identities and i had to choose one. certainly this was enforced in my family.