It's very familiar. My father was abusive towards me and so I tried to disturb him as little as possible. He was extremely supportive of my younger brother, however, and we both turned out very differently. He turns to my parents constantly for help (and receives it) and the few times I have I've only been brushed off, and so I've always done everything myself, even if it meant spending long periods living in poverty with no footholds upward.

Years later I'm nearly 50 and have transitioned to female. My now divorced mother decided she likes having a daughter and so suddenly all of this support has materialised and with presumably less time to live the life I missed out on I'm making a conscious choice to start being a little dependent on it and shortcut some things that would have taken longer otherwise.

It's hard to describe but it feels like I'm living a more normal, less marginalised life now. I definitely have more friends, where previously I chose to avoid having any because I felt like having friends meant sharing burdens that were mine alone to carry.

I also see a lot of very similar behaviour in the wider trans community where most people's axis of behaviour revolves around some facet of not having support. We don't all handle it in a healthy way, but I now do my best to help my community find stability and adjust their expectations to having better outcomes.

It’s a blessing in some ways, I’m much more capable at doing difficult things without much help. But it’s also debilitating in significant ways, I constantly feel like I need to do incredible things to get love

It was to fit into HN's title limits. I tried my best to cut down and rephrase the title to fit the requirement, while keeping the original meaning as much as possible.

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the learned independence has gone too far

There are many reasons that might cause not having many close friends and independence is just one factor.

I almost spit chocolate milk out my nose. Not sure why I find this so funny.

As I said in another thread here, I did not feel the article was LLM-generated, otherwise I wouldn't have posted it.

Perhaps I've been desensitized, or the LLM have crossed my BS-sensing threshold, but haven't yet crossed others' threshold.

Psychology has a well understood metric for people who keep many shallow friendships vs those who keep a small number of deep friendships. Any article that fails to account for that doesn’t progress our thinking.

I did not feel the article was LLM-generated, otherwise I wouldn't have posted it.

Perhaps I've been desensitized, or the LLM have crossed my BS-sensing threshold, but haven't yet crossed your threshold.

> I feel pain reading these haphazardly strung together words.

I never though I'd read verbal diarrhea worse than the ones of french intellectuals but I gotta say LLMs are close to surpassing even these.