The Education of Axel Heyst

[Frita]

@7W5
Interesting point that blending provides access, is different than blind conformity, and is necessary to mingle with different people/groups. I agree. For me, that is just the entry point and I am curious who these other people are beyond the initial impression. So often, there does not seem to be more than the veneer or clinging to the groupthink…and some passive aggressiveness (from repressed selves?).

For example, there are several local environmentally-oriented groups (SD green with blue dots) I belong to and volunteer with. I don’t wear makeup*, have hair down to my ass*, transport almost exclusively by foot/bike…look the part but I don’t gel. It’s the same conversations, the same thinking, petty and clicky. Asking questions, reflectively listening, and letting them do them are not enough. The expectation is that shame-based fear motivates me to clone myself into one of them. Ick.

* The same look also lets me blend easily with religious fundamentalists with a similar outcome.

A couple pre-insight thoughts:
1) Fitting in is different than belonging. For tier one SD, those seem synonymous.
2) Being yellow is lone wolf territory. As an ENTP (more entp/enXp at this point), that is hell. I need some social connection that is more than non reciprocal parallel play. (Yes, I am floundering on my inner path approach.)

[sodatrain]

1) Fitting in is different than belonging. For tier one SD, those seem synonymous.

Yes!! Fundamentally. I used to listen to Brene Brown a lot.* One of her bits that has been most influential to me was her talking about the difference between fitting in (Middleschool/Highschool ) and belonging (flying your freak flag and finding your people as a result!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZY9NjDma8U. (82 second video)

"True belonging never asks us to change who we are. It demands we be who we are"

I've had wonderful friends and community support over the last several years that has helped me embrace this at a deeper and deeper level. And it keeps paying dividends. I am more and more of who I really am, which is significantly easier than faking interest in some BS that I am not interested in, an it put me in many situations where I end up finding amazing new friends and community of people doing similar things. ERE forumites/fest as one perfect example!

*pre ERE, so I haven't applied my ERE lens to her work

[jacob]

Very interesting distinction between fitting in and belonging. Especially when they are combined.

Fitting in but not belonging depends on masking.
Fitting in and belonging is life on easy-mode.
Not fitting in and not belonging requires finding your tribe or playing alone. Your tribe may be very small, but the search is generally worth it.
Not fitting in but belonging depends on assimilation.

[7Wannabe5]

Being yellow is lone wolf territory.

I agree, but I'm experiencing "yellow" and/or "becoming increasingly old and jaded" in a manner such that "belonging" seems like the distant memory of wanting a best friend to hold my hand as I walked to kindergarten. I just totter along through the extra years, scratching down observations to keep myself amused, and occasionally rubbing up against another warm body.

[UrbanHomesteader]

My masking test results: 111, 38, 42, 11.

Still not sure what that means...

[Frita]

@7W5
You’re right that belonging shifts with age/life stage. My belonging now is more global. Like I feel belonging with humanity, kinship, nature, awe. Walking on the high plains, the blue sky, wagon trail, a semi-secret medicine wheel, knowing relatives (and who knows who else) may have been in the exact spot 150 years ago is an example of that belonging sense. Though I can imagine being on my deathbed, wanting my hand held, and finding belonging and comfort similar to walking to kindergarten hand-in-hand with the bestie.

[AxelHeyst]

It's interesting and a little surprising to read these posts and hear about your challenges/past....

<3 for the kind words. We need a 2x2. Actually I think we need 3 dimensions, which I'll just use two 2x2's to represent.





The Short Version:
I think I came out of the box with low NT social competence but a high drive for human connection and (luckily) a high capability to learn NT social competence. I'm not sure that I really 'mask' in the way autistic people do - I suspect that my learning process resembles masking in some way, but once I've achieved unconscious competence at social skill X it doesn't exhaust me to employ that behavior in the same way it would someone further on the autistic spectrum than I.

(Or, possibly, I've been masking so hard and for so long that I've entirely incorporated it into my personality and can't see it. I don't think this is the case, but maybe!)

"I want to X, but I know that isn't NT-world acceptable so I'm going to Y" is not something I experience very much.

"I want to achieve social connection result X, and [*checks notes*] the best method for that is to run subroutine Y, so I'll give that a go" is a common experience, with my ability to pull X off ranging from conscious incompetence to unconscious competence.

The Long Version:
In my formative social years I didn't have abundant opportunities for human connection, AND I'm not wired for NT social competence. As a consequence I wanted much more human connection than I was getting for about a decade (13yo-23yo).

When I did have the opportunity for human connection, I often screwed it up by doing or saying something 'incorrect' or by failing to do something correct (lots of not knowing what to say, and when I did say something it Did Not Work. Also, especially when younger, my facial expression were very miscalibrated.)

My social incompetence made me fear that I was doomed to never get the amount of human connection I wanted. Every fuckup was evidence that I might be doomed to isolation for the rest of my life. I experienced this, on bad days, as crushing existential loneliness.

When not incapacitated by despair I studied books and media, observed real-life circumstances and ran experiments. The study and observation was necessary - my 'just act natural' actions were so far from NT social baseline that the results were useless. I had to study and mimic in order to get close, then experiment and tune from that point.

As my competence increased I began to collect evidence that I might not be doomed to isolation, and my despair decreased. I now am capable of enjoying long periods (weeks and months) of solitude because I know that I can and will go get the social human connection I need when appropriate. I haven't been alone and lonely since my early 20's.

This whole 'masking' framework is new to me and I'm not sure what if anything it means to me. The revelation isn't that I've put a lot of effort into figuring out how to get the human connection I want; it's how little effort most people have to put in to it. I figured I put in 110-120% more effort than average. If my masking score is accurate, I put in 150% more effort than average.

Having done a bit of reading about autistic experience of masking, a couple things jump out at me:

There are not things I'd naturally do that I suppress around other people. e.g. a lot of autistic people won't stim around other people, and having to not stim causes a lot of stress. I don't have stims (maybe a couple very mild ones, but they're so subtle no one would notice even if I did them while they were watching for signs of stimming).

Much of how I act around other people is learned: facial expressions, body language, turns of phrase, 'scripts' for different social circumstances, trying not to monotrope, etc. But it doesn't feel like I'd rather be acting differently. It feels like I came out of the box with no strong inclinations or intuitions about how to act socially, and had to learn everything from scratch. So it doesn't feel like I'm faking anything, it just feels like I had to consciously learn a lot of things that, apparently, come much more naturally to others.

Much of my social behavior is at the level of unconscious competence, but some is conscious competence (which consumes personal energy) and there are situations in which I'm not at all competent, and these circumstances are stressful.

I also learned long ago that it's not worth it to be social with just anyone, aka just to fit in. My motivation to exert energy on people who I don't want to connect is extremely low and I put in the minimum effort necessary.

Many autistic people experience masking as exhausting and have burnout (I'm going off of papers as well as reddit threads here). Employing learned skills to engage with other humans requires a certain amount of energy from me, but because I have a lot of control over how much and what kinds of social environments I find myself in, I don't experience chronic exhaustion. Because I employ my competence to get something I very much want (social connection), it is entirely worth it.

Regarding unmasking, this is a tricky one for me. I'm not sure what it'd look like. As I said, there aren't things I do that I suppress when around other people, so you wouldn't notice the presence of 'odd' behavior like stimming. I think if I 'unmasked' I'd just appear very flat, blunt, and either totally disinterested or uncomfortably obsessed with some specific topic or theme, with lots of staring into space lost in thought at NT-inappropriate junctures (e.g. while you're talking about something boring). I exert energy to stay external when my mind wants to go into an internal space to think something through.

[Jin+Guice]

Thanks for this description @AH, I've been considering doing something similar in my journal.

My understanding of Autism is it blocks the capacity to move social skills to unconscious competence. My understanding is that an autistic person can learn them and perhaps even has extra capacity for remembering, but one always has think, which ultimately sucks a bag of dixxx.


On the other hand, I got bad training, but I can re-train.

For me it's pretty much everything you said, except the origin was parents who aren't very socially skilled and were emotionally immature, which gave me a combo of some light trauma, emotional immaturity and lack of social skills. I find my usual problem is that I'm not experiencing some emotional signal that most people experience, I'm not experiencing some social signal most people experience or I don't know a particular social script.

I did not fit in where I grew up and part of my identity became not fitting in. This was disadvantageous as one will eventually want to find a group to fit into, even if it's not the socially average group.

As part of my re-training I spent some time with people who are very good at fitting in. Being that I'm not in the socially normal group, these were people who were all somewhat good at being themselves or at least belonging to an out-group, but also fitting in, aka charming weirdos.

I found pretty much ubiquitously that the people with the highest skills were also the people who had the most anxiety about fitting in (but not always anxiety about fitting in with everyone). Underneath their charm there was always a hint of desperation, like if they hadn't learned how to be charming they no one would like them for them. To varying degrees they all struggled with deep relationships (although maybe this is just everyone/ most people?)

I'm often envious of people like this, but they often confide in me that they are envious of my ability to not care if I fit in (of course I want to fit in with some people, but I don't need to fit in with every "cool" person I meet).

Anyway, it's just interesting to me that this effects people at the opposite end of the spectrum, those who are very good at social stuff. I think those skills often start with insecurity and desperation, but grow into real skills with real rewards. The tricky part is then escaping the insecurity.

[Scott 2]

You've built a life where it's possible to center on object based communication, focus conversation on your interests, limit the social duration, etc. It's possible that work was already creating space to partially unmask.

The other factors you describe, could be further unmasking. That, in a word, is tricky. I've purposefully put myself in places where the NT rules don't apply. Only, every ND person has their own preferences. So new norms have to be negotiated. And now they don't follow my practiced rules. Not easier.

I found discovery to happen in layers. I was convinced I had no stims. I even looked up lists and tried them. Cause hey, if other people benefit, maybe I will too. They didn't click, but over time, I caught myself doing. The catch was - they are a form of self regulation. So they only present when I need regulating.

Part of my masking, was also a habitual disregard of internal signals from my body. So I couldn't fully recognize the price. As I've gotten better at reading internally, I can see a nearly constant impact. Something as simple as a hand rubbed across my chest, means ignoring my default response to light touch. Cause hey, who wants that barrier to connection? But the load accumulates.

That's also a case where the masking remains adaptive. The juice is worth the squeeze. It lets me more fully embody the overall existence I'd like. The connection is worth it.

[jacob]

What is "NT social competence"? A special version of "social competence"? A subset?

[AxelHeyst]

NeuroTypical social competence, although I'm not certain that's precisely what I've gotten good at. Along the lines of what Scott2 said, I've been doing environment design for a long time now to preferentially be in situations where it's okay to unmask/be ND, and also the majority of my friends aren't neurotypical either. So what, precisely, it is that I've gotten good at I'm not sure. But the result is that I'm capable of getting the human connection/engagement that I want, from the kinds of people I prefer.

I guess that's what I should have labeled the 2x2 with: "Social competence with the people I want to cultivate connections/relationships with."

It's possible that I actually still really suck at getting along with most neurotypicals, but I can't tell and it doesn't matter because I'm only around NDs (neurodivergents) 98% of the time anymore. (This seems related to @7 accusing me of being in denial about being >average intelligence. I don't feel very above average, but I also consider 98% of the people I actually spend time with to be of high intelligence, so...).

ETA: To clarify, I think I spend time with a fairly broad range of neurotypes. It's not like I'm only competent at a narrow slice of neurotype, although I'm 100% positive that certain neurotypes require less effort from me than others. For example, I just spent ~30days in close daily connection with Bicycle7 (more on that soon!) in a variety of circumstances ranging from 'fun and easy' to 'the hardest shit I've done in years', who is an INFJ, and relating to/with him took very little effort. Spending time with my ~ENFP and more ADHD friends is much more effortful.

[AxelHeyst]

That's also a case where the masking remains adaptive. The juice is worth the squeeze. It lets me more fully embody the overall existence I'd like. The connection is worth it.

Insofar as the 'real me' feels completely internal, total unmasking seems like I'd just reduce to a guy-shaped obelisk. That's what's tricky about the masking concept to me - it's not like masking is necessarily bad, at a certain level it's just 'behaving in certain ways that other people will understand so we can get along'. It's just a language, a way to convert internal experience (desire, aversion, thoughts, will, consciousness) into symbols (words, body language, facial expressions) that can be interpreted by others, and a way of converting received symbols into translations internally.

The trick is if you're not wired to naturally calibrate, it's hard to tell how much is too much masking (you lose your identity and 'authenticity'/integrity becomes murky) or too little ('why are you fat?' / going offline in the middle of a conversation). You've got to make conscious decisions about how much to mask.

[Scott 2]

I like the "double empathy problem" perspective on it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_empathy_problem

The people in my life, who care about me, work to meet me halfway. A full unmasking, asks the opposite party to do all the work. Not fair either.

That's something interesting about attending autism events. Some people don't have the capacity to mask. In some respects, their social traits are more intense than mine. So I get a taste of what it's like for an NT, to receive my unfiltered communication. It's a lot. I can see why someone who defaults to the dominant norms, might not be willing to meet me, where I'm at.

I wonder if the "real" Axel is completely internal, or if it's simply a case of preferring deep processing of ideas? As in - you're going to respond, but the other party needs to allow a few minutes for consideration? Listening to the divergent conversations podcast, the pace of discussion is infuriating at times. I have to 2x or 2.5x it, because they're both deep processors. But what they finally offer is wise, because it is deeply considered.


Another side of the masking, at least for me, is the gradual escalation of reciprocal disclosure. Want to hear about private detail X? I figure - sure, what's the harm? We just met? Whatever. It's all the same to me. That's very much against the rules. Even if someone is cool with it, it implies a high level of intimacy to the relationship. One I'll then fail to meet, because those rules don't apply in my head. Then too - if we don't talk for years, I'm ready to resume at the exact same level. For an NT, that relationship is essentially restarting from scratch.

Those aspects are much more nuanced. I didn't fully appreciate them until reading more about the communication patterns. Interestingly, some of the reciprocity divergence, is also common for people with ADHD. So you'll see easy connection between the neurodivergent thinkers. Because the same friendship norms feel good.

[Jean]

i always assumed that people who dislike me are idiots. This removes any impulse to mask.
But i always to my best to be polite and not be a nuisance.

[jacob]

ETA: To clarify, I think I spend time with a fairly broad range of neurotypes. It's not like I'm only competent at a narrow slice of neurotype, although I'm 100% positive that certain neurotypes require less effort from me than others. For example, I just spent ~30days in close daily connection with Bicycle7 (more on that soon!) in a variety of circumstances ranging from 'fun and easy' to 'the hardest shit I've done in years', who is an INFJ, and relating to/with him took very little effort. Spending time with my ~ENFP and more ADHD friends is much more effortful.

In terms of translation, the biggest bridge is between N and S. It's easy to forget [or even be ignorant of the fact] that N is usually abstract and figurative whereas S talks in literal specifics. The more cognitive functions you share, the smoother the conversation is. It's best if you share at least one extraverted cognitive function in your top 3(*)(**)---this so you can communicate---as well as one introverted cognitive function in your top 3---this so you have some alignments to communicate about because you focus on things in the same way. Otherwise, there will be very little rapport... at least in my experience. Sharing two is even better. I'm surprised you find that ENFP (NeFiTeSi) takes effort. They're like my favorite people.

(*) IOW, you don't want your most used cognitive functions to be part of their shadow or vice versa. Also, if the only match happens over the inferior function, the connection (one of you is talking to a figurative 3 year old) might also be "unspiring". For example, people with a Ni in the 4th are mostly focused on superhero movies or conspiracy theories

(**) Note how extroverts have twice the chance of making a "talking"-match compared to an introvert. Conversely, introverts have twice the chance of having a "focus"-match.

Keep in mind, though, that [overmatching] can be exhausting if your extraverted Judging function (T or F) lines up with their extraverted Perceiving function (N or S), because all the structuring of the information will be done on your (J) side, whether you're sending or receiving. This might be more a problem of "talking too much" though

Add: That's not to say that it's impossible to connect with other types. However, this is where masking, compensation, and assimilation enters the picture. As someone who has a low desire for human connection, I've just learned a bunch of talking points for the finite set of known "unmatched" people I have to talk to on a regular basis. This is a lower effort (higher ROI) method than figuring out, running, and maintaining a more generalized socialization "engine". Having tried that a few times already I don't find it worth the cost.

[AxelHeyst]

I'm surprised you find that ENFP (NeFiTeSi) takes effort. They're like my favorite people.

Oh I *like* ENFPs quite a lot, I just need to soak my head in a bucket of solitude after. The tone of my comment might have had more to do with having dated and lived in a 68sf microhouse with one for three years...

[AxelHeyst]

What'd I miss?
In the WL Thread I asked about speedrunning and more or less got my ass handed to me, which was nice. (Not sarcasm) imo I phrased my question clumsily and didn't represent how I actually think about it accurately*, but that's fine. I didn't get the answers I wanted, but the answers I did get triggered some solid self-reflection.

One reflection was "what less developed frameworks am I dragging behind me?" or put another way, what skills or competencies did I rush, skip, or miss entirely that are now a source of friction or dysfunction in my life, potentially holding me back from moving forward in the direction I want my life to go? (I resonated with BSOG's North Star idea).

That being said, at the level of implementation, there is a certain mandatory time component to just letting the system equilibrate and establish the balance that it is going to establish. At best, that can be sped up with careful attention to starting conditions or perhaps more careful monitoring of the roll-out, but it can't really be forced. This is how I interpret the idea that 'steps can't be skipped'. There are a million ways to slow down the progression of a forest to "old growth", but there isn't really any way to dramatically speed it up. Roots need to get established. Species need to balance. Seasons and cycles need to pass. If I really want to be abstract, I might say: the possibility space needs to be more fully explored. That just takes time. The parts of the system need time to interact with each other in different contexts so that everything may adjust/balance out accordingly.

My bolding: A possibly better way to phrase my original question might have been "how to identify and avoid ways of slowing down the process of self-actualization, so that the system isn't inhibited from progressing at a healthy natural rate?" Put another way, "In which ways am I unknowingly hobbling myself?"

Somewhere east of Hell's Backbone in Utah a couple weeks ago I hit a major wall on a road climb section. It felt like I was riding on peanut butter, not asphalt. I actually got off my bike and manually span my wheels to see if they were spinning free because it felt like the brakes were stuck on at 20%. Once we got to Boulder (Utah) I went into the Hell's Backbone lodge office to see if they had snacks for sale. The woman said "no, but before you do anything else drink that lemon water water, have a cookie, and take this electrolyte packet." Five minutes later I felt my body *pop* and I nearly sprinted the next few miles.

I concluded that I'd ran low on electrolytes and that was the cause of me hitting that wall earlier. I hadn't brought any with me, and a few hours previous I'd camel'd a liter and a half of water at a source, flushing any electrolytes I might have had in my system out.

This is an example of something simple I didn't do that was slowing me down. It isn't overly achievy to consume electrolytes when bikepacking in the desert, it's called 'not being a dumbass' and allowing your system to function the way it's supposed to. "Don't forget the electrolytes and if you flush, re-up' was a competency/skill/step I'd missed in my bikepacking system, and it slowed me down and made me more miserable than I needed to be.

A couple fundamentals I've neglected that I need to work on:
Stuff management. I have piles of stuff to sell, piles of stuff to drop off at the goodwill, piles of unorganized stuff that doesn't have a home, piles of stuff I haven't decided what category of thing it belongs in. Admittedly I don't have that much stuff because I'm only working with about 200sf, but my space constraint just makes good stuff management that much more important. A week or two of inattention and my space looks like a bomb went off in it.

I don't think poor stuff management is just an aesthetic/status issue, either. There are other real negative first and second order effects of "Have a shit stuff management non-system":
-Depreciation of unused stuff. e.g. I have at least a few hundred dollars of value locked up in a stack of books I've been meaning to list on ebay for ~2years. The value of those books isn't going up.
-Damage of useful stuff. There wasn't anyplace for my floor pump except under the studio. And then it got a little wet when snow blew onto the dial, which then melted and dripped into the face, and then froze, busted the dial and the seals, and now it's trash.
-Time spent digging through stuff looking for specific stuff.
-Time and money spent acquiring new stuff because I can't find old stuff I already have or forgot I have.
-etc.

A less obvious but more important negative effect, though, is that I suspect personal stuff management is a prerequisite skill for other, higher-level skills and projects. I want to develop QH into something like a makerbase with space for a group of people to live and work on projects. And how well do I think that's going to go if I can't handle even 200sf of personal stuff management? While workawaying I've seen group-scale situations that lacked good stuff management, and it's a mess. The problems I listed at the personal level scale up to the group level and the friction sucks, to the point that projects grind and people don't want to be involved and leave. If I want to pull off my solarpunk makerbase dreams, I ought to become unconsciously competent at Stuff Management in my personal life first.

So "create a stuff management system and get unconsciously competent at it" is now one of my explicit projects.

--
Another obvious fundamental skill I'm weak on is money stuff. I backburnered this for the past two years because I haven't been earning. Now that I'm earning again, it's time to habituate my money education process.

....
I also really liked xmj's link to Walking Through Walls was great - my takeaway from that was to add "what games do I not consciously realize I'm playing? More specifically, what rulesets do I not realize are just made-up?"

*for example, achieving personal mastery isn't my highest ideal - I see increasing personal effectiveness as a process in service to other values and ideals.

[black_son_of_gray]

My bolding: A possibly better way to phrase my original question might have been "how to identify and avoid ways of slowing down the process of self-actualization, so that the system isn't inhibited from progressing at a healthy natural rate?" Put another way, "In which ways am I unknowingly hobbling myself?"

Is it fair to say that "identifying and avoiding ways of slowing [yourself] down is the process of self-actualization"?

Your framing reminds me in chemistry of the concept of stoichiometry. Specifically, it sounds like you have a big stew of reactants (i.e. a system/WOG), and they all react with each other in different ways, and they make products, which themselves may react with other elements within the stew, and so on. And the way you've framed your question sounds a lot like trying to figure out and deal with whatever happens to be the "limit reagent" for the particular stage of the reaction you find yourself in. Is that correct?

I'm not sure exactly sure if/when this chemistry metaphor starts to not really translate to the real world, but it might at least offer some conceptual starting points. If I had a beaker with a solution of, say, 20 reactants in it, and I was looking for them to produce more of product 'X' or more of product(s) of type 'Y' (which is maybe more appropriate), what would my options be? Well, one option is to try adding more of the reagent that you think is limiting. Another option is to add a catalyst that boosts the rate of reaction. Yet another option might be to remove reagents that interfere or compete with the reactions that I want to happen. Then, of course, there are combination approaches.

This is maddening stuff, though, because as the number of reactants goes up, the straightforwardness of any attempted solution likely plummets. Then the approach becomes, unfortunately, "tinker, then observe". Unless, perhaps, there is a really fundamentally limited reactant that is way too low and is holding just about everything back. I would expect the addition of that reactant to the solution would show strong, step-wise results.

A week or two of inattention and my space looks like a bomb went off in it.

Same!

I ought to become unconsciously competent at Stuff Management in my personal life first.

So "create a stuff management system and get unconsciously competent at it" is now one of my explicit projects.

It sounds like you've identified Stuff Management as a rate-limiting reagent. But I wonder if your current Stuff Management situation is more like a habit that your current system allows you to get away with vs. say a skill that the current WOG relies on? Allow me to point a finger at myself for a minute. My workshop space is almost always a mess. Ditto, desk. Ditto, nightstand. My partner looks at these spaces with a little sigh and perhaps a shrug, which is to say she definitely wouldn't let that happen to her spaces. But these are my personal spaces, and the clutter so far--which I do clean up from time to time, but which always eventually slips back to where it was--hasn't caused me any functional problems (i.e. I don't miss paperwork deadlines, I can find stuff in a reasonably timely manner, and so on). That said, I am neat and tidy and clean up after myself in all of our shared spaces because I want to hold up my end of being a good partner, etc. I pay more attention to maintenance/upkeep of shared items which we both use. [When working as a scientist, it was the same: my lab notebooks were very ordered and detailed, my computer files were organized and annotated so that anyone in the lab could easily understand them, and I was very methodical in how I stepped through my lab experiments...but still my desk was a wasteland of journal articles and manuscript drafts and so forth.] Which means I do actually have decent skills in Stuff Management. I actually do like tidy and clean spaces. Yet, at the same time, I just don't put much time and effort there, until it matters. When it comes to other people/shared spaces, the question of finding out what 'matters' to all stakeholders does become quite important, and it is enough motivation for me to make the effort without complaint.

This is a perhaps a long way of asking, if you went ahead with your QH plans, would your Stuff Management naturally rise to the occasion (because it would have to), or would it actually be holding you and others back in the implementation/execution? How was your Stuff Management when you were w*rking with others on shared projects?

[mountainFrugal]

My workshop space is almost always a mess. Ditto, desk. Ditto, nightstand. My partner looks at these spaces with a little sigh and perhaps a shrug, which is to say she definitely wouldn't let that happen to her spaces. ... [When working as a scientist, it was the same: my lab notebooks were very ordered and detailed, my computer files were organized and annotated so that anyone in the lab could easily understand them, and I was very methodical in how I stepped through my lab experiments...but still my desk was a wasteland of journal articles and manuscript drafts and so forth.]

I feel deeply SEEN and UNDERSTOOD! Lol. Current home work desk in image below while reading this thread. Razors, tape measure, gouache, cords, receipts to enter into business account, cash to deposit into business account, lens cleaning wipes from friend, scientific papers, zine drafts, business cards to follow-up with, thumb drive with my linux system on it, flower pattern coaster that never gets used as a coaster... endless fucking clutter to an outside observer, but I call it my works in progress. Late DW would get mad at my messy personal space when she knew how organized I was with science projects. "Slob" was thrown around a lot. Lol. For me my spatial memory is really good and I know where most things are in my personal realm/desk corner.

You will figure it out and potentially having a space that you can do whatever you want in (i.e. your 200 sqft studio) does not need to be a reflection of the larger project. The art studio is very tidy and it is easy because there is social pressure to do it. .

[Jean]

i tried to have a clean desk, by having a desk that is only about 4 inches deep, but i just have my mess on the floor around it now.
Less annecdotal, I find it very hard to acquire skills if they are not being used directly in a project.
Maybe you should start a project that requires good stuff management if you want to learn it.