>>37429850I’m not a unicorn, but I can imagine an alternate timeline where I could have become one. I found out I had autism in middle school, back when it was just called the ass burgers, and I started improving somewhat after that. Not long after, I met another autist, and he was such a fucking insufferable shithead I became determined to improve myself so that I’d be one of the good ones.
I got to experience firsthand the fact that attitude and the way you act affects the way other people treat you, and getting better at socializing has been a start-and-stop kind of thing. I was lucky, and even so I feel like I’m several years behind the “normal” curve (which meant I still had some problems socializing during college, but way less than in high school).
There were a number of lucky breaks I had along the way, including being really into reading books. I learned really young not to take people’s word on things, and I unironically learned more about socializing at first from my AP psychology textbook than from other people. It wasn’t until I got that boost that I could start understanding what normalfags actually meant when they said certain things. Even now, I improve my social skills by taking in shit normies say, finding some book or academic paper, and a lightbulb going off in my head.
Again, I’m autistic; I don’t fully “get” things until they’re said explicitly. For me, that can either happen by reading up about attribution theory, or it can happen with someone blowing up at me for no reason and me having to figure out why. I was lucky enough to realize that the former is way less traumatic than the latter, and minimize the number of times the “firsthand” experience occurs. I’m not saying all unicorns are autistic, but I wouldn’t be surprised if growing up with more unpleasant social interactions and not having an intuitive sense that it’s possible to improve your social skills without just eating shit in the real world the hard way makes many of them the way they are.
Remember, John Nash literally thought his way to curing his schizophrenia. But even he admitted that he was really lucky and had people patient enough to put up with his shit while he was fighting his own brain trying to convince himself the voices in his head were full of shit. A lot of the progress I made was through my own efforts, but so much of it, especially at the start, was due to luck. If you expand the sample size to a large group, like everyone who watches vtubers, it makes sense that plenty of people who didn’t have that kind of luck are there—and they’re unicorns.
