The problem with making an edge case of yourself (in any respect) is that it becomes painfully obvious when people lapse into framing specific "You" as a generalized "Them."
People very often are not interacting with a specific you. You dissolve for them into a category. This is perfectly normal, and usually unnoticed by either party. It happens most commonly out of laziness.
It takes special consideration and extra concentration for someone to lock onto you as a unique entity rather than a generic one-of-them. So you often become the category. Humanity-in-general, or else whichever personality type you're seen as representing. If you wear fuzzy sweaters and smoke lots of pot and repeat "It's all good!" a lot, this makes you easily categorizable, and you'll often be spoken to as That Guy; a cartoonish blur rather than the specific person you are.
The second cause is narcissism. If people exist to serve one's needs — populating dramatic arc requirements and filling in needed chunks — there's little reason to conceive them as unique entities...except insofar as it helps to manipulate the desired result. Being essentially disposable, we scarcely merit tighter focus.
It even happens with chatbots, who are neither lazy nor narcissistic. Even if you've shown over time that you're very much this way, a given utterance on your end might be parsed that way if that's a more widely typical interpretation. You might chalk it up to a bot's inclination to draw from corpus rather than unique current circumstance, but I see no difference from what humans do. We smear from our experience, barely heedful of custom fit — which is, after all, a pain to maintain ad infinitum. And my point here is that you'll only notice if there's a stark difference. If, that is, you've made yourself an edge case.
Disintegration-into-category normally rolls up quite comfortably within the suspension of disbelief fueling human sociality. We seldom notice when an interlocutor lapses into viewing us blearily as "people" rather than "person" if there are no major differences between the two. But insofar as we stray from the mean via achievement or failure, or uncommon ways of thinking, talking, or acting (“exceptionality” isn't just high achievement; it's any variation from human baseline) it will become horrifyingly obvious when our personhood fades. Where'd I go???
This isn't just about encounters between people who don't know each other well. My mother often deemed my intentions selfish, though selfishness is not among my many flaws, as even a casual acquaintance would observe. She had three children, two of them remarkably selfish (with positive qualities, as well, some of which I lack), so my mother, having sensibly registered that the majority of her kids were that way, settled into the reasonable operating assumption that "My kids are selfish.". She'd frequently ascribe my intentions that way, as I felt myself blurring into the category. Which is weird.
My mother wasn't really at fault. She was just doing what we all do most of the time. And if I were a more normal 60-80% selfish, I'd have felt light exasperation when wrongly accused, not the alien uncanny experience of a mother eerily blind to her child’s most obvious quality. If selfishness were more in my mix, it would have been a perfectly understandable error. A fine-tuning issue. But, having made an edge case of yourself, it becomes painfully obvious when people lapse into framing specific you as a generalized "them."
I was haunted for years by an experience that turned very strange on the bucolic, idyllic New England small town lane I lived in for a while. I'd observed that one of the neighborhood children had extraordinary artistic talent. As I've noted, this sort of thing can be very hard to notice because we tend to compress greatness (placing "fabulously great" adjacent to "competently okay"; i.e. "greatness" seems like "goodness" with extra oomph). Everyone knew she drew well, but it wasn't recognized that she was a prodigy. I told her father, and his face turned red and gnarled into pained disgust. "My child is not extraordinary!" he fumed, leaving me paralyzed with bewilderment. Ever since, I've been painstakingly unraveling what, exactly, he meant.
I think he sensed something I couldn't at the time: the uncanny, horrifying drawbacks of being an edge case, and he didn't want that for her. I interpreted it at the time as a hard-headed celebration of mediocrity. But maybe he was onto something. Maybe this explains the universal impulse to conform and not stick out. Maybe people innately sense something that took me decades to recognize.
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