u/Herring_is_Caring

I have three trumpets, but it’s been five years since I last picked one up and really played it. I figured that since I know trumpet, I could participate in a local band that needs more of them, and so I pulled out my plastic trumpet a few days ago to start practicing. Right off the bat, I was able to play kind of like I used to (although I’ve only ever really played my metal trumpets, and I’ve never played with aligners on my teeth like I have now). However, everything started going downhill from there, and it started bringing up some bad memories and anger issues I used to have.

My tone is inconsistent, my embouchure is unreliable and fuzzy, and I can’t even really hold a buzz with or without the trumpet. As I continued practicing on my plastic trumpet, I was only able to hit a high E and a few times made it to a high G, and many of my notes sounded out of tune or jumped registers at the onset, which is when I realized that I couldn’t adjust the slides on my plastic trumpet like I can on my metal ones. This was mostly concerning because unlike many of my peers in the past, I had always adjusted the tune of my notes through my playing rather than the trumpet, and I found that I struggled to do that.

I started playing trumpet when I was nine years old, but I never really seemed to improve that much, even if I outperformed some people, and practicing only seemed to make my playing worse. I’ve felt like there was a problem with my embouchure for quite a while, but I struggled to find a solid instruction on how that should be arranged, because the facial tension displayed by examples of correct embouchure online as well as historical trumpet players doesn’t seem to always be consistent with what is described as most correct. Some sources seemed to provide contradictory information about how tense or relaxed different muscles should be, and just like with my phonation in speech, my air would get cut off at the strangest times. I used to turn bright red whenever I played, and people would tease me by calling me a strawberry.

I remember one of my teachers later on teaching that the lower lip should be more engaged than the upper one, and it made me feel very unsure about the way I had always played, because my upper lip seems to do almost all the work. Even when making facial expressions outside of playing music, my peers at the time seemed to have a level of flexibility with their lower lips that I didn’t, because their lower lips could fold down almost completely away from their teeth and toward the chin without them having to engage the upper lips and cheeks. My lips have always felt very limp. Back then, I couldn’t move my lower lip like that at all, and even now, my whole face has to contort for that sort of position. Those same friends had only started playing and were able to move to a more advanced band without me, while I had never even been in the same band as them because I wasn’t a beginner, so it was somewhat demotivating, and it makes me remember the other ways in which I didn’t quite align with them or their interests.

I can also play percussive instruments, which I did for marching band once because I wasn’t confident in my breath control for trumpet. Even then, I would sometimes get heat stress, so when I became lead snare, I had to alternate with others. Now, I am wondering if I should just stick to percussion and not go back, even if trumpets are more portable and I would have to borrow percussive instruments which aren’t mine. Right now, it feels like I’m playing trumpet to simply hear the notes, like pressing my fingers on a keyboard without actually knowing how to play. I can easily remember the fingerings and how to read the sheet music, but I’m starting to wonder if my execution was ever really worth it when I can play many other instruments I have nearly just as well on a beginner level.

I’m sick of always messing up endothermic reactions just because I’m strangely obsessed with being able to explain things in simple terms. It messed me up over and over again to believe that endothermic reactions feel cold as a result of heat transferring from the surrounding environment into the reaction, like I seriously believed heat transferring from my hand into an endothermic reaction would cause it to feel cold! But that is obviously not true, as reactions with hot products can still be quite endothermic, so I must reason that either the human body heat is negligible to the reaction or completely dispose of this explanation!

Now I return to the textbook definition and start forming an equation in my mind where reactants + heat = products, and if the heat is combined into the products, it would explain the heightened average kinetic energy of a gas produced from boiling a liquid. I had thought that the total heat of the closed system should remain the same from reactants to products, but maybe the classification of endothermic simply refers to how separated the heat is from the molecules themselves at a certain part of the reaction? If heat is fundamentally kinetic energy, would most decreases in density from reactants to products be the result of an endothermic reaction? Would an endothermic exergonic reaction represent the conversion of heat to a different kind of energy separable from the molecules of the reaction?

I don’t want to be diagnosed with some sort of chemical dyscalculia, so please assist if you can.

Sometimes when I suddenly feel an emotion, my mannerisms change to mimic the people who have previously made me feel that way. It’s sort of like experiencing vicarious karma for them, to see them have to respond to the situation they put me in. Except nevermind, it’s still just me in that situation again… I’m just acting like I think they would if the roles were reversed.

Maybe if I’m them, then it doesn’t have to always be me on the receiving end. I should be winning twice by getting out of it and getting them into it. Instead, people around me become convinced that’s just the way I behave… and because I adopted the most annoying features of those people, I actually lose twice instead.

In social psychology, people are purported to perform better on tasks they find easy while being observed, but the same phenomenon can also make them perform worse on tasks they find less easy while being observed. This is known as social facilitation.

I have many skills, and yet I seem to fail to prove that nearly any time I am around others. If I am not good enough even at what I have studied and practiced, there will be nothing to talk about with others. My time spent with others will be a wasted time of hoping I am not quizzed or tested, when it should be most efficient to spend time with them practicing and reviewing that which I already am certainly proficient in.

Instead, my competitors will be able to use their social times to improve skills while my social time will be used to hide and deny mine, and they will get further ahead than me because they never have to stop. Already, the inequality between us is putting them at an advantage to develop more skill inequality, and it’s all because the social psychological phenomena never seem to help me like they help others. Is neurodivergence interfering with the ability of social facilitation to make my social time a useful time or a commendable time?

I’ve been trying to organize my complicated thoughts concerning youth for a while now, and I think so much of the confusion I’ve felt is because of society’s obsession with binaries and contradictory ideas.

For instance, there are ideas that wisdom comes with age but also ideas that many children are “wise beyond their years”, especially in spiritual circles that believe in receiving the most essential truths “out of the mouth of babes”, despite their assignment of wisdom to others seeming mostly conditional on their own agreement with the assertions made. Even in societies which appear to value seniors over children, there is a certain fixation on gifted children who can outperform chrono-adults in specialized fields. The everyday lives of chrono-children also tend to be dedicated to learning, which increases their knowledge by definition and associates childhood with having an active and developing mind, while people continue to try and isolate a chronological age in adulthood at which the brain “stops developing”.

In literature targeted toward children or nostalgic adults, characters who think outside the box with their youth-given childlike wonder are often uplifted as superior to the stereotyped adults who focus on numbers and spreadsheets. While these adults are framed as individuals who lose the ability to think or be happy in the pursuit of survival thrust upon them with age, blamed for external factors that would make nearly anyone rush to Neverland if they had only known, child prodigies are established as having unrealistic sway over the unyielding conditions of the world that crushed maturing spirits. Even the children who do focus more on numbers and spreadsheets are portrayed as either more skilled than the adults with similar foci or at least redeemable for the youth their physical age guarantees them. Beyond that, these stories often fail to address the fact that nothing has truly changed about the world these children may grow up in, eventually dooming them to a loss of this wonder as well, which makes it even more difficult to ascertain whether adult audiences are wiping away tears of nostalgia or tears of grief.

Ideas that set youth on a pedestal include those of childhood purity. For many, the division between childhood and adulthood seems to be one of change and trauma. Positive depictions of children show smiling mouths and big eyes bright with wonder, open to new experiences rather than weighed down by insecurities. The self-doubt and fear that come from unintentional and uncontrolled change to oneself or one’s environment are framed as altering the free spirit associated with childhood into the receiver of conditions associated with adulthood, with growing up cast as a transition into a lack of agency as one is forced to realize the flaws of the world and ultimately give in. Since the change is often depicted as inevitable, growing chrono-children are expected to face it, even though change to the world around them is not considered inevitable in the same right. Bitter chrono-adults become set in their ways, continuously reaching for the incomplete memories of a better life “before everything changed”.

One commonly-discussed instance of trauma coinciding with the end or destruction of childhood seems to be puberty. It’s a situation of changes to the body having more sway on how someone is viewed than changes to the mind, a change that supposedly happens to their “self” without their own control, and someone’s mind can become locked in place trying to preserve what personhood and identity was seemingly forcibly stripped from them by flesh. It’s a stage where people are expected to become more aware of their bodies rather than continuing to live in them happily without concern or insecurity. Even the way someone uses their body becomes less confident and caring, especially as it continues to develop health issues while routinely failing to represent oneself properly. Once the body has begun to prioritize one’s reproduction over their own wellbeing, society seems all too content with following suit, and in a world that believes innocence is bliss, sometimes the belief that you are no longer innocent removes the obligation of others to keep your life blissful. Mature conversations are shared with someone and their appropriate participation expected, even if they do not have the capacity to engage appropriately. The enforcement of binaries blamed on the body puts additional social pressures on people that only worsen their ability to perform well or feel well about it. Even though I never went through puberty, just being treated as an age at which I shouldn’t have been thought to experience that would improve my efficiency and state of mind by further distancing the idea of me from a time period where chrono-children are expected to diverge into objectifiable biological roles.

Due to how society juxtaposes young and old, growing out of childhood into anything that isn’t seniority feels in many ways like a step down. At that point an individual is expected to take on responsibility and be held seriously accountable for any shortcomings, but their autonomy to make decisions and express themself is not respected. The individual is replaced with a category as their biological development becomes confirmation of additional stereotypes that can be applied to them. They are not considered to have the crystallized intelligence of a wizened elder, but they are also no longer considered to possess the childlike wonder of those who are “the future”, already feeling so old that their lives are over and no longer the topic of plans or improvements. Even though how wise someone is believed to be also depends on how much people agree with them, a chrono-child who isn’t believed to be wise can still seemingly change to eventually acquire virtues and progress that chrono-adults are thought to be stuck lacking.

The association between youth and intellectualism or skill is part of what drives me to cling to it. I want others to believe I am still growing and that there is much more I am capable of, surprising others with how much I know instead of how I don’t know everything. That association inspires my interest in immortal childhood as well; it’s the perfect idea that a child can live for centuries or longer, acquiring knowledge and power over that timeframe that far surpasses what most human lifespans enable, while still possessing the youth and youthful, androgynous appearance that allow them escape from mature categorizations and topics, sympathy and pity for their suffering, grace for and growth from their flaws, and low-commitment expectations that they can surpass in a time of need or want. At least if I already feel isolated from and critical of greater society, I should have the diplomatic immunity to pass through it without being snared.

When people say they used to believe something or do something and then “grew up”, or when people say “you’ll understand when you’re older”, what does that actually mean? Is it simply the passage of time that changes how people view the world? Is it the collection of additional experiences? Is it the kind of experiences? Is it the pressure to meet expectations or desire to conform to some idea of maturity? People of all ages seem to say this.

This might seem like an odd question for this community, but I think it’s pretty important for me personally that I live WAAAAAAY longer than everyone that claims to know me now, for no reason in particular. With that in mind, I want to protect my brain especially and train it to resist memory loss and maintain focus. Searches have informed me that some “brain-training” exercises really only make a person better at that exercise itself rather than improving the brain in general.

There is also the fact that I’ve always been a bit of a sore loser even if I hid it, and I know “logically” it shouldn’t matter whether someone wins or loses, but does it *actually* not matter? Some people find it boring to win or lose all the time, so they stop playing with you, don’t they? Also, I see increasingly that people gender competitiveness and success, so would they judge me based on how hard I seem to try to win and how successful I am at doing so? Further, when someone wins, people call them smart. Does that imply the loser is dumb? If I lose enough or if people remember my losses selectively enough despite the times I did win, will they feel more justified in thinking I’m too stupid to attest to having any knowledge at all, even about myself? Will they feel more justified in not calling me “they” if I don’t win every game?

If I worry too much about these games, will the resulting stress cause me damage over time so my chances of living way longer than everyone else or staying smarter than them for decades worsen? I don’t even believe in the idea of people being inherently smarter than others, so how do I keep up appearances?