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I'm realizing that in most of my life I'm not very responsive to external motivation, but in software development I absolutely am. Or maybe it's just that the flavor of external motivation I respond to is "this has a concrete benefit for someone" and not "someone is asking me to do this".
trauma from growing up neurodivergent
This might be an adaptive characteristic based on teachers frequently asking me to do things that I found practically impossible. If I weren't able to disregard them, it would've destroyed me.
It might also be where I learned to accept my experiences as real, even if no one else seems to get it or believe them.
In certain ways, adults trained me from an early age not to trust them.