::: spoiler The dormant feel, to me, is like a feeling of a task well done, or a well drawn map.
OP sounds like they type of person I struggle the most to understand with creative writing and character development. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to develop roleplay contexts to understand people that make and seek out connections like this or various other ways.
Just for contrast. I do not generally think of other people like this. I have empathy, and I care, but my primary functional thought is very abstracted. My mind is kinda like a roadmap that is driven based on curiosity and intuitive thinking. One of my major outlier traits is that my sense of justice and moral compass exist in a third person like perspective. That perceptive/judgement aspect is rather brutally applied to myself and everything I encounter, but it is not part of my core sense of self. This is the mechanism that gives me mobility across different concepts and ideas in ways other people seem to struggle with. I’m always questioning the status quo by looking for the lowest level biases to question, and this is what drives me to be so detailed in my interests. I’m extremely curious about everything, but mostly I’m like a cartographer developing a map of all kinds of roads, trails, and interesting features. I really enjoy sharing the experience of navigating that edge of the map with others. I take deep dives into niche communities and tend to make a footprint in them, but I have never experienced another human or community that is on a similar overall map of exploration like myself. I’ll comment on and share my past mapped experiences, but I stopped letting others hold me back from my explorations a long time ago. You would likely struggle to connect all of my profiles and interests in digital footprints going back to the late 90’s, but I’m still around chugging along. I greatly value the people that want to explore with me, but I don’t care to stick around in one interest at the detriment to my other curiosities and my desire for independent introversion.
I struggle most to understand boundaries that other people have. I try not to pry, I speak in general abstracted terms, and put myself in the conversational context to avoid asking people uncomfortable questions that are inline with some simple abstract curiosity but might come off as personal to some people. I having no clue what level of information other people are interested in or at what level they can engage with me. I’m extremely aware that the edges of my map are poorly grounded and subject to revision, like I’m actually quite insecure in myself and knowledge in an absolute sense, but in aggregate I can come across as arrogant or pedantic. Anyone that is close to me knows better, like I want to be told I’m wrong in a way that lets me make corrections on my mental map.
That is like my surface world view, in my idea of a nutshell, and why you might find a person like me that leaves a mark then disappears.