This blog post is going to be every blunt. I have tried to write this post multiple times over the last few years with the crippling fear that I would lose friends over a few truthful words. So here is my story, one that I won’t regret writing, because no one should ever have to keep how they feel quiet.
For years… (probably since middle school) so close to twenty years I have had issues making and keeping friends. This seems to have followed me into adulthood seeing as I will be thirty in six months. Elementary school was easy everyone was friends and it wasn’t difficult to fit in with everyone. However, once middle school hit, my friends from elementary school just seemed to become popular while I had not many people. I was bullied during gym class for how I looked, was called monkey girl for not shaving my legs and having absurdly dark and thick hair and I was also asked if I had an eating disorder because I was small. It hurt and I don’t really talk about these things to anyone, I still am self conscious about these things and lack a lot of confidence. I continued through middle school feeling like I never fit in, which followed me into high school.
High school was the worst, I had friends but never fit into any groups of people. The only time I ever really talked to anyone of my friends was during school and pretty much no other time. Like a month before sophomore year started my mom passed away. I took it pretty hard which most of the hurt I internalized, until I opened up to one of my closest college friends. But after summer ended and school started, not one of my friends would ever ask me how I was, in fact my friendships got more strained with people. I once told one of my friends how I felt about the way I was treated by classmates, they told me that I should speak up and put more effort into trying to push myself into groups. What they obviously never saw was that every single time I tried participating I would literally be closed out of the conversation, I was never invited to do anything which led to arguments with my dad. So I eventually just stuck with spending all my free time either in the art room, in my bedroom doing art, or occasionally doing after school theatre. When it came time to apply for college I decided to not pursue art but instead wanting to major in Equestrian Studies. I decided on a tiny school in Bristol, Virginia. It was a clean slate that I wanted, it was not without its challenges. I made friends quickly with some people in the Christian Student Union, within my first month of school I had a group of people that for once I felt accepted. To this day one of these friends I made that first month I can comfortably called a best friend. During my first semester I had a difficult time making friends within my major and decided that was not how I wanted my years to be, so I talked with my freshman advisor about my options because I didn’t want to go through the challenge of applying to new schools, so I switched my major to Photography which in the long run would have more career options after graduating. During college I made a decent amount of friends but still had the feeling a never really truly fit in and felt like I had to invite myself to things and that I was never really wanted. The first group social group I left was the Christian Student Union because it was no longer a healthy group for me to be a part of, the sad thing is they saw it coming. The positive part of that I got out of college besides a decent education was that I learned to love dancing. But even over the years I have felt as if I was kind of pushed away from that group as well. The worst part is in all this people feel as if the easiest why of interacting with me is to pick on me, and trying to talk to people is nearly impossible because I also am constantly being corrected and told that I am not right, even when it has been a subject in which I have a decent amount of knowledge.
So why were all these words necessary? Well it comes down to a conversation I had with one of my former employers. One day a couple of years ago my boss pulled me aside to talk about something he had observed. And after he mentioned it I realized that was he not only correct in his observation but I could immediately tell him what the cause was and that it was something I could fix, but would take a long while. I have a difficult time having conversations with people. The cause: I spent so long trying to force myself into conversations and forcing people to get to know me by only ever really talking about myself. Over twenty years of having to do this ruined my ability to actually be able to talk to other humans. It has been a difficult thing to work on, but I am making progress… I hope.
My mentality going into this year is to be myself, to feel as if I fit in while fighting with my anxiety and sometimes depression, to not take my work so personally and just to have more fun. Thank you for reading you beautiful humans!
PaperDaisyGirl 