So, I'm autistic+BAD(+possibly ADHD) and my parents were both idiots when I was a kid.
They both thought children only take making right choices from their parents, not parenting work. Or only surgical excessive parenting work where they thought it was important (which wasn't always good too).
With my mom it was her NPL and the fact that her parents were both not very responsible, with my dad - I think he secretly knew he's autistic, but was terribly afraid of that and thought only autistic kids need parenting and I'm normal or something delusional like that.
So they picked a school with a not very good kind of people being prevalent, children of government workers mostly, and not the lowest caste of those.
Somewhere around 16yo I had learned nothing of substance other than drawing dungeon plans and reading fantasy and sci-fi and fan-fiction on those, and I was trying at computing things, but it was hard and mostly imitative talk, like you'd do imagining a sci-fi story. At the same time sometimes quite pretentiously, while feeling myself mentally impaired (couldn't concentrate or keep myself on actually learning things). And I felt like in prison in that school, and the worst was the feeling that I might become one of those kids (this wasn't possible, was probably a trap and so on).
So I'd intentionally try to distance, sometimes via actively insulting that whole layer of society and their idea of authority. The paranoid idea is - that the little bitches and some of their teachers recorded my words and used them as a prank on someone quite respectable from my point of view. Possibly even real-time. Say, a person big enough to be present in some BSD Unix manpages. And a few other such pranks, with the overarching goal of somehow hurting me. And a few of the people around that man decided to take revenge without checking.
What's important in that paranoid idea is that those people might have had different reactions and done different actions. Some might have done pretty bad things until realizing that they were wrong. Some might have behaved right from the beginning. Some of those might have been sorry upon learning that, some not. It's as if this story were slowly traveling behind my back and people would first start telling me something with indignation against me, and then decide it shouldn't be told to me.
And I have a habit of insulting people in the Internet.
So - my progress since then might have seemed like a flat line (even though it wasn't), and I'm both worried about that being known to the people who've reacted properly, upsetting them, and about the possibility that I, with my habits, might have insulted some of them.
And it sometimes feels very needed to reach some of those people and check that they are not too disappointed and this is not such a big deal.
The question of whether it's a psychotic idea or gaslighting is important because of executive dysfunction and having yet achieved far less than I would want to have.
In general this fear becomes weaker every time I have something like a hyperfocus, but that happens rarely and usually involves exploring something for a token toy to keep, and not learning or doing anything further in that area. In very rare bursts, most of the time is wasted.
It's a bit like vibe coding inverted (and not just in coding, but in making POV-Ray renders, drawing, writing poetry, making themes for FVWM, generating ambient music, whatever), where with vibe coding the process itself doesn't matter, while here the functional result matters less than the vibes of a working program or a configuration or a rendered picture (I think with renders this isn't different from the mainstream though).
So, to partially close such a gestalt, I'd have to do a useful project, but that's the thing - I have done toys complex enough (though messy and ugly) and requiring understanding of the tools and the problem. But I have never done useful and conformant things of the same scale. It's as if I physically couldn't do big things that are work, only big things that are play.
And probably to really reach some of those improbable people ; which doesn't seem a good idea both if it reminds them of something bad and if it doesn't.
So. No question, though advice is welcome. Just learned there's a community with such a name and decided to share.
EDIT: FFS, feels like exhibitionism.