One of the things that I decided to start doing at the start of the year was leaving situations that made me feel uncomfortable. This occurred when I decided to step away from the re-AOL project, although that happened for more than one reason — one of the members of the project, and a staff member at that, became an unhinged lunatic in my direct messages, and that made me feel extremely uncomfortable (as did the prospect of having to work with him on the project in any capacity) — and when I decided not to come back to a friend’s Discord server after a friend, as per his own attestation told to me by my friend the server owner, got drunk (“he’s drunk”) and began acting aggressive enough and rude enough (muting me when I asked a question, then banning me when I told him that I didn’t want to be treated like a child due to being autistic and that I didn’t want to be treated like his child) that I was again uncomfortable. So, again, I left.

To me, the easiest and wisest thing to do in both of these situations was — and is — to excise myself. I don’t take chatting seriously enough to meet very many of the people that I do chat with in person, so it might very well be that it’s easier for me to excise myself from situations like these than it might be for others. The last time that I met someone from the Internet in person was decades ago, and this was the person whose mother I had to turn in to her home state for felony-level food stamp fraud. I also had to turn him in for the theft of narcotics, as he was doing “favors” to get the brother of a friend to give him some (I had absolutely no idea that he was an addict, and I would never have known he were one had he not told me as he was that skilled at hiding it… until his supply was cut off, although this was well after I had come back home and let his friend, the sister of the person that he was stealing from, know that all of this had been taking place).

At any rate, I don’t have any regrets about excising myself from these situations. I’m making progress.