As part of my transition and HRT journey I’ve found myself being much more interested in people. The inner lives of others are so much more appealing and interesting now. I often find myself deeply wanting to learn the specific texture of how someone functions, what drives them. What it’s like to be them. A feeling and mental process has grown and come up more and more over the last half-a-year.
And along with that there is now more social processing happening: one example is that I’ve been working with someone who’s had a lot to do over the last few days. As we talked, the conclusion came that she is probably stressed. That she’s carrying some strain from all of this. That reducing it would be good; perhaps by giving her a chance to vent and let little frustrations and stressors out, to feel heard.
I didn’t quite find the right words, but nevertheless managed to steer the conversation in that direction. Maybe there’s much more that could have been considered, better and more refined conclusions to be drawn and for sure better phrasings be found, but having these thoughts come up naturally is a leap forward already.
I don’t think this purely stems from the increased interest, but also from having read more examples of social skills in fiction, characters laying out their reasoning on the page, the things they consider and why they phrase things one way over another. How they read another person or analyse a social situation. In this way, the right kind of fiction can help with some social skills by giving good examples of what this looks like, making it easier to replicate the same principles and mental steps.