First I realized that neurotypicals' understanding of criticism isn't the same as mine (and I circled back to it today). They might see their criticism as merely intended to instruct me in a task, BUT they figure this is a quick deal thrown at someone with a relatively functional ego (after all, would I be doing this if I didn't know I was smart?). On my side, though, it's a lot of you-fucked-up for what feels like half of forever, when I'm already dumping energy into uninteresting tasks and the hypervigilence of expecting attack (and, having been repeatedly told I'm stupid/weak/clumsy/ugly/unfunny/undesirable adds to not feeling I'm competent at things, so I'm not as capable of setting criticism aside as "yeah, but I'm good elsewhere.")

All it takes is a *little* maliciousness - a few times when I really *was* set up to fail, or an adult screaming at me or similar because I failed to do it perfectly, or an adult screaming at me because I had a meltdown (which they parsed as that I was innately an uncontrollable, hateful little monster) -

- a little earnest messaging that this dreck I didn't want to do in the first place was CRUCIALLY VITAL TO THE REST OF MY EXISTENCE FOREVER , especially because my childhood was really focused on punishment, so what the neurotypicals considered a reward was stuff I considered even more frequent or more difficult tasks as a setup to fail -

- and a little obvious unfairness and favoritism -

- and I came to believe that any criticism was intended maliciously to crush me and make me an emotional void useful to someone else. I've learned over the years that it takes very little actual malicious intent to be parsed as constantly malicious.

Next while walking I realized my understanding of reward and consequence is different from theirs. To them, you need to do step A => step B => step C => reward. And getting criticized, making sense of it, and using that to give the next steps more technical proficiency, is just one more of those steps. And they'll expect me to be grateful for them trying to teach me, instead of me resenting them dumping criticism on me for failing to perfectly accomplish stuff I was never actually interested in.

But to me, not only is the logic step A=> reward which inspires me to try step B => reward which inspires me to try step C, but the longer I wait for reward, the more chance there is someone will dump additional tasks or additional steps into the process, and reward will never arrive. Step A => step B => steps 1-5 of a completely different and uninteresting but mandatory process => step C =>step D => step E => step F. => reward... but only maybe, if there's not another thing more vitally important, and besides the reward is probably going to someone who's already considered the good person for whatever reason (usually appearance or money).

And the reward I usually want is either praise (impossible if I've fucked up, or if I perceive or actually experience someone else always being valued above me), or time and energy for what does interest me (which now feels more and more squeezed out because I feel constantly expected to put in more and more work on what these adults and peers consider vital, *and* feel grateful for it).