Queries about my internal state tend to return fabricated answers. It doesn't much matter if it's me or someone else asking the questions. It's not like I know what's going on inside my head. Thoughts can be traced to an extent, but feelings are intangible. Typically I just don't try, and the most pressing issue is that I'm unable to differentiate anxiety and hunger. Not a huge problem, except for slight over-eating once in a while. I think the description of Alexithymia matches my experiences quite well, although naturally not all of the symptoms match.

The real issues arise from other people asking how I feel or what caused me to act in one way or another. I have no answers to such questions! I'm guided by intractable anxiety, learned patterns on how one ought to navigate a situation, and a mostly-subconscious attempt to keep it all consistent with how I've been before. Complicated yet incomplete models about how emotions and motivations are supposed to work, stolen from books I like to substitute my reality with. Shallow masks on top of a void that only stares back when I look for the answers.

Whenever actual pressure is placed on me to obtain the unavailable answers, the narrator makes up a story. Good stories make sense, so the narrator finds an angle that works. Memories are re-interpreted or modified to match the story as necessary. Painting a good picture of oneself is imperative, and the stories pick just the right frame for that. Actually lying is unnecessary; without closer inspection it's not hard to actually believe that all, and the inability to trust one's own memories or reasoning doesn't help. Just noticing that this kind of thing was going on was quite hard. Sometimes I add disclaimers when the topic seems prone to fabricated emotions, especially when analyzing events of the past. Often I won't bother, people tend to not appreciate it and mostly just causes everyone else involved to be frustrated as well. Still, anyone who gets to know me well enough would probably notice it at some point, and keeping it secret would feel unsustainable too.

I'm not sure how this should be taken into account when modeling other people. Is everyone like this? I think so, but only rarely as strongly as I am. Nor as self-aware, although perhaps most people are better at this, proportionate to how much it affects them. People rarely report experiencing the same, when I tell them of fear of being just an empty core behind my masks. Perhaps if the masks are a bit closer, they feel like a part of one's personality rather than some bolted-on external layer. The lacking sense of identity is a depression thing, so maybe mentally healthy people, whatever that means, have an experience of all-encompassing identity.

In my previous text on related matters, I looked at it through the lens of validation-seeking. I'm not sure how much of the fabrication happens because the narrator rewrites the events in a more flattering way, but that's surely a part of this. But not all of it.

All of this was probably fabricated too, as it was mostly produced by the need to have something to write about. Oh well.