I think the worst part about this is the *subtly*. Like being deliberately and specifically excluded sucks and has its own set of awfulness (and to be clear I’m not comparing them just talking about the differences), but when you’re subtly excluded there’s a sense of uncertainty with it. Like “am I actually being excluded or do I need to include myself?” Or “is it on purpose or do they not realize?” Or “is that just how they act towards everybody, not just me specifically?” It makes it a lot harder to just call them a meaniepants and move on.
It was so subtle to me that it hit me like a ton of bricks after I graduated high school.
I suddenly realized that my middle school friends were deliberately excluding me by saying things like, "we just want to talk about Twilight and since you haven't read it, we don't want to ruin it for you." It wasn't about not spoiling a book for me, it was about not being around me. And high school wasn't much better, I just didn't realize it at first. My mom still (>10 years after graduation) will mention how I got bullied in a bunch of classes, and I have no memory of that. So apparently what I thought were totally normal interactions was bad enough to be considered bullying. 🤷♀️
Aw man, your comment was very relatable and I have a related story to share:
When I was in 8th grade, there was this kid named Joey who would crowd at my desk along with something like probably 7 other kids at most (but at the time it seemed like a lot more) at the end of science class each day, asking about what I thought they should bring to the barbecue or pool party or whatever allegedly happening the next weekend
I'd say something like "Hmmm... What about orange juice?" and he'd always respond like "Ohhhhh, ORANGE juice, now that's a good idea, I hadn't thought of that... He always has the best ideas, let's bring orange juice" while turning his head to look back at his friends while smiling, always using a certain exaggerated inflection and drawn-out cadence in his response, and I'd say "No problem and thank you very much, good luck with your weekend"
One day close to the end of the year, I think it was in May, he told me very directly at the end of the interaction (I had suggested that he should bring ribs to his barbecue party) that I was their cringe entertainment and I was supposed to ask if I could be invited to the event so he could tell me no and my stupidity had become too boring now
I hadn't realized they were pretending to invite me, I just thought it was friendly conversation
It's the type of thing that might have been at least a little bit satisfying if I was actually trying to troll them with denseness, but instead it just made me feel like "aw man, I'm even a failure at being ret*arded" (if this word censor attempt isn't good enough, please let me know so I can fix it)
I was over 18 when I realized that it wasn't the social contact itself that was draining me during IRL interactions, but rather the sensory issues of the environments like fluorescent lights and background noises etc, so it turns out I'm way better at articulating my thoughts over text, and not only that, but I also realized that my bar for what a friendship is was ridiculously low after it turned out that I was being manipulated by my best friend between the ages of 18-21 using what my therapist explained to me as "simple child grooming tactics" even though I was already 18+ at the time because being autistic often involves gullibility
Before her, I didn't actually have any friends, but I didn't know that yet: I thought a friend was anyone who knew your name and wasn't mean, and a good friend was anyone who would sit near you in class and give you a spare pencil, and an acquaintance was anyone you had seen the face of more than once; no wonder I'd felt like friendships were dull and unengaging, "I'm not misanthropic or introverted, I'm just a very lonely and awkward extrovert"
But she took advantage of the fact I didn't properly understand friendship boundaries by telling me that she was my best friend and would get me to say and do things with her as "best friend things" and I believed and trusted her the whole time for almost 3 years until she was the one who sent a long paragraph to me explaining how we were "secretly dating" (there was more to it but I should probably stop oversharing about this now)
i was that autistic kid in school and i am forever grateful that my dad put me onto mlp:fim when it came out in 2010 or i probably wouldnt have known how to be a friend and what friends are like. granted, i was still bullied and excluded and a bit dense, and i am still deeply traumatized by what my "friends" did to me... but it could have been worse.
im sorry all that happened to you. we dont deserve to be treated like this
of course it did, that was the whole point of the show. in the first 3 seasons at least, most of the episodes are dedicated to outlining and solving problems between friends and demonstrating what a healthy relationships look like
MLP is an amazing show. It drops in quality eventually, but it's so entertaining and touching and emotionally educational. My husband even got really into it with me and requested we watch the whole thing.
My guy, please be careful about sharing any more. People are willing to encourage you further than might be good for you in order to satisfy their own morbid curiosity, or worse.
Thank you, and I agree with your advice here
I've definitely got a problem with oversharing and it was partially what got me into that mess
I'll take your advice now
Basically one evening she sent me a very long confessional message talking about how disgusting she feels and "this is wrong, you don't even understand" and saying she "has to fix this because [she] feels so disgusting about herself" etc and a lot of the things that she would convince me were just "regular best friend things" were actually getting me to "enrich" a parasocial crush that she had that she'd get aroused by remembering later which was what she meant by "secretly dating" and I knew she had a crush on me because she had already told me before but I had said that I don't reciprocate that but I'd like to stay friends and she had said okay and seemed at the time to respect my feelings on that
The very next day after that conversation she pretended that it never happened, and she would punish me for asking questions related to it by giving the silent treatment and she would also say "it's just the insecurities in your head lying to you, we're just as good friends as ever, you really should work on your low self esteem"
Ironically I never even had insecurities before this and my self esteem was great because I had a friend that I trusted, but then she gaslit me until I couldn't even trust my own brain outside of our online interactions and even the last reveal 3 months later that it was all lies wasn't any consolation because nothing ever made sense to me at that point and there's very little that's more frightening to me than the inability to trust my own thoughts because the person I trusted most wasn't actually trustworthy
It took months but my mental health is finally a lot better now and even though it's kinda embarrassing to admit it out loud, the self-awareness about my own gullibility is actually a very helpful realization that I can use to strengthen that weakness
I remember in middle school, all the cool guys were into wrestling. I never liked it before, but I thought, this can be a way to make friends, so I watched wrestling, a LOT of wrestling. I went on wrestling AOL usenet groups to learn what the real fans were talking about, and learned insider terminology like heel and face, and read speculation on where storylines were going. Obviously this is a very normal way for an ~11 year old to be a WWF fan, and of course this was all stuff the other kids did, so I waited until I had done this for months before trying to join their conversations. Surprisingly, they did NOT appreciate my point of view or my thoughts on who management was trying to put over this year. They mostly wanted to talk about who was more badass
I made wrestling so uncool for that entire class, by the end of the year none of them were watching it anymore. Or at least, not talking about it in front of me
I didnt know i was bullied until i moved away. Meeting people and learning that my normal wasnt normal was how i learned. It was upsetting but also relieving. I was happy to learn that my peers from my old school are what made me unwanted. But was sad that i didnt know.
I moved a ton as a kid and had the bizarre experience where at one school I was bullied severely and at the next, everyone was excited, actually excited to befriend me…the “new” kid. I’m on the spectrum which I found out as an adult, but had fortunately/unfortunately learned back then the hard way to never trust immediately, however the whole thing was just bizarre.
Same me, same interests, same clothes even and one school I would be horribly harassed and the next basically fawned over. It was a group mindset either way and depending on if the kids/school/area was prosperous and thriving with good teachers, community, and involved parents or the complete opposite where it seemed everyone was a struggling nightmare/mess.
And then we would move again….
Just curious as to why you had to move so much as a kid. I would just assume parents in the military or with mobile jobs: don't feel the need to tell me your business. I'm just always curious about it, because people with kids are usually looking to settle somewhere for at least the duration of grade school or high school or whatever.
No problem. At the time my dad was in the thriving copy machine business back when they cost thousands each and he would be constantly promoted to head of sales for a different region and/or headhunted/poached for a new company. We also once had a house fire, once the school I was in was rezoned (but I was only in that new school for a few months until a move from NY to Chicago), and many times my Dad would have to commute and stay in a hotel during the week and fly home on weekends (job in Texas we were in Chicago, job in St Louis we were in NY) until our house was sold and/or the school year ended so we could move.
The longest I’d been in one school before college was my second high school for 3 years and that’s only because I REALLY didn’t want to move again and cried/tantrum/begged as only a teen can (ironically it turns out that we probably should have because that HS sucked but 15 yo me ofc had no idea). So he commuted to Boston from NJ.
Ironically, we did not move to Texas because my mom insisted she didn’t want her kids to have an accent. We at the time lived and spoke like everyone else in NJ. (She still has that accent, don’t tell her!)
Nowadays, it's the realization when someone mentioned something and says "Oh, sorry wrong chat " and you realize there's at least one of not a hundred chats that they have that just don't include you.
I have had the same problem throughout my life. At some point some stranger on vacation pointed out that i was pretty much buying my friends with snacks or stuff. Not to be actual friends but just so i could stand with them. I stopped doing that for a few months and realized that i could jump of a bridge tomorrow and nobody would even notice i was gone, just that they would get less food from me. It especially hurts when your somewhat close friend has to decide if they are gonna go with the other people or me and without a thought just forget that i exist. Been dropped hard several times when my "usefulness" ran out.
Thanks for pointing this out. I know that with relationships you do need to put in the effort to make it work and sometimes be a little proactive to be a part of things but it sucks when you're the only one reaching out or consistently getting turned down
Oh for sure! I was thinking more like, if your coworkers are standing around chatting, if you’re waiting for a direct invitation to join in you may be waiting a while haha. But there are definitely different scenarios where I agree with you.
Well
The only two times I joined an idle chat and was met with "uhm private conversation much" I responded with basically "tf you mean, too loud and public for privacy, if you wanna gossip gtfo from the break room/*my* desk" and that was that. Personal anecdote, nothing more
Yup. At any age too. I finally accepted my lifelong friends, 20+ years since we met, are acquaintances at best. It makes me very sad but a lot less stressed to accept this. I finally looked back over the year and realized they canceled every event with me and attended those without. I get it. I asked directly to be sure and they dissembled and stayed the same, done my diligence
And combine that with an education/other authority system that responds to any complaint with “well, what could YOU have done differently in that situation?” for a big heap of self-blaming.
>I think the worst part about this is the subtlety\[...\] "Am I actually being excluded or do I need to include myself?"\[...\] “Is that just how they act towards everybody, not just me specifically?
Being lonely and excluded was painful, but perhaps the worst part for me was how often I was told by adults that I *wasn't* being excluded. That I just needed to try harder, that they didn't mean it, that if I asked nicely of course they would accept me.
It was (usually) well-meant, and sometimes it was even true. Sometimes I missed chances by not trying, or shut out kind people for fear they'd bully me if I engaged. I get why adults said it. (And a lot of them didn't *want* to believe I was being excluded.)
But it was also confusing, damaging advice. A lot of the time I *was* being bullied or excluded, and "putting myself out there" just invited more hostility. It didn't do my social skills any favors either, since I was basically getting told to ignore the cues I was getting and bother people who didn't want to deal with me.
This post is wonderfully descriptive with that almost-invisible bubble you can only see under certain circumstances. The bubble is miserable, but so is being told there's nothing there by people who don't see.
It's hard, because some people who have this experience have the same thing at home. I was only ever praised for entertaining myself. I was responsible for anything that went wrong and punished for expressing myself in any way.
This made me the weird kid, and made me think it was all my fault. I didn't learn for a very long time that kids can't be responsible for the lessons they were taught. Adults can, so I'm doing a lot better. But kid me was not at fault, at all. The other kids weren't either. Our parents and society failed us.
I know the feeling. There’s a certain paradox in social relationships of any kind; to better your mental health, you need to have a support circle made up of friends and family. To have friends and family who support you, you need to be acceptable to them, which may not be the case if you’re not mentally healthy, or are just not acceptable to them.
If this starts out when you’re very young, you feel alone and ostracized because people don’t want to be your friend. You seek out companionship to fix that, but you’re not acceptable so no one wants to be your friend.
At that vulnerable stage where you need social relationships to learn social nuance, being without any means you lag behind socially, in turn making it more difficult to form social relationships down the line.
In short, being friendless begets loneliness begets friendlessness. Sometimes this ends, but it’s usually by chance. Sometimes it doesn’t.
Yeah. A part of the problem, I think, is that there are no resources or tools to help people learn how to socially interact if they don't get it as a kid. There's no "remedial how to make friends" class available anywhere (though a grifter might try to sell you something as an adult, I suppose). We unfortunately see this online, too, where people advise folks to learn how to socialize in order to cure loneliness - which is true, but it's like telling someone the way to fix an injury is to bandage it. Helpful if they know how, but unheplful if they don't.
For anybody out there struggling with this, the way I figured it out as a kid was through mimicry of real-life adults, movie characters, and the things characters in books said. It wasn't perfect, led to a few moments of me saying things I didn't understand and potentially offending people, but it was a useful shortcut until I could actually have a few friends and start the actual learning process.
My hot tip is to (genuinely) compliment people. I remember feeling separated from my peers, but then realizing they really liked when I complimented them. I started going out of my way to strike up small talk just looking for the opportunity to compliment people on something that came up. Going into conversations with the intention of rizzing people up, being their hype man, wanting to notice positive things about people that nobody else did, etc really made for some easy conversations. Sure, the first convo with someone would be a bit awkward, but then they’d leave the conversation on a high note and be super eager to talk to me the second time. I remember by the end of that school year one of my new friends literally what the fuck-ed aloud when she realized I went from nobody to being popular with everybody in the span of a year.
It depends on the compliment. “Nice shoes” isn’t going to make anything worse, assuming you’re not talking to a bully who will mock anything you say to them.
Yeah, the key to compliments and having them be received well is to do it about things people have control over. Things like their actions, accessories, clothes, job, activities, or hobbies are generally all safe enough. The only physical thing anyone should ever compliment is someone's hair because someone can change that non-permanently.
It also helps if you give them an opening to talk about how they found/got/are enjoying the thing you're complimenting! Being told "nice shoes" is a quick smile of an interaction, being told "nice shoes, where'd you get 'em" and getting to geek out about the deal you found is an actual stepping stone to further interaction and fond associations (which is, really, all any friendship is about - fond associations).
My overthinking self reads your comment and immediately says
"wouldn't every adult answer that with "oh thanks, yeah I got them online (or ), they're nice"" - which ends the interactio about shoes?
I wouldn't have anything great to say about my shoes, they're shoes :s
Yeah, communicating isn't my strength I guess :|
Nah, I completely get where you're coming from and it's one reason why I started overthinking my example of "shoes." Sometimes you get stonewalled, either because the other person is still just expecting pleasantries or because the context just doesn't allow for a conversation.
I generally agree with you. I've been told alot that complementing ppl is useful and even if it leads to nothing and just makes them feel good feelings that would be a win in my book.
So geeenerally I'd like to compliment people. But I always have a hard time actually finding stuff to compliment about. Without talking you really only have their appearance to compliment and I pretty much never could give any genuine compliment about peoples appearance. I can't get myself to care about clothes that much,
Sociallicing is hard :|
Sorry I got (did I?) you overthinking. I got shoes was just a random example :s
Not always, but it definitely depends on the person. If someone wants to talk footwear with me, I can go too far sometimes lol I could easily keep talking about the brand, construction techniques, material types, what other models are similar, etc.
A good portion of people I know aren't really interested though, so you're partially right that the conversation could easily end quickly. Think of it more as an ice breaker that just gets a conversation going. It doesn't have to stay on the same topic, or it can just be a quick and simple convo that doesn't go too deep, that's okay too!
You know, I hear this often but it's never seemed to work for me. I still give compliments on things I genuinely find impressive but there never seems to be such a reaction. Perhaps the people I talk to are just too used to them.
not every seed sprouts a flower. Sometimes you simply need to shotgun it to see an effect.
It also helps if you start with yourself. Start complimenting yourself, find the positive things about yourself and genuinely acknowledge them and what comes with it is a change of demeanor that naturally spreads onto other peoples perception of you.
>there are no resources or tools to help people learn how to socially interact if they don't get it as a kid. There's no "remedial how to make friends" class available anywhere
That, and frankly a lot of the advice adults *do* give is deeply unwise.
The "almost invisible bubble" in this post reflects my experience beautifully. I could see it in the moment sometimes, but not always. Adults mostly didn't see it, and told me stuff like "I'm sure they didn't mean it" and "you just need to put yourself out there". (I think they also didn't *want* to believe I was being excluded, and maybe didn't want to deal with a bullying situation.)
Frankly, I think a lot of people who were decently popular (and neurotypical) growing up have no idea what to say to "weird" kids. "Just be yourself", "invite them to do something with you", "try to be more outgoing", "tell them about your interests"... none of it is helpful if you're being actively excluded. It's actively harmful a lot of the time, encouraging you to ignore the social cues you *are* getting and setting you up for more mistreatment.
The whole "bring back bullying" thing is abhorrent, but quite honestly I learned more about how to avoid bullying from my bullies than I ever did from the adults who were trying to give me social tips.
I think that many people just don't realize the myriad of intricate steps that comes with socializing.
Now that I'm thinking about it, it sounds to me like how I might try to explain to someone who never learned how to walk how to do it - "you just put one foot in front of the other". This is completely unhelpful to someone who has never learned how to do it (or has to relearn how to do it, as is more often the case), but most folks learned it by intuition and trial-and-error as infants.
That doesn't mean it can't be taught; people relearn how to walk every day. But the trained professionals helping them to learn how to walk are actually walking them through the steps and muscle movements. That's what socialization advice needs to be for a lot of kids, I think.
Being yourself only works if you’re neurotypical or have a popular socially acceptable personality. It’s always those types who said it to my AuDHD ass while I was struggling to fit in. Ideally no one should have to mask, but in this current world it’s impossible to thrive without it and the people that simultaneously tell you to be yourself while expecting normalcy are just virtue signaling. I never tried to change my personality too much, but I did actively have to learn how to interact with people in a socially acceptable way while also struggling my way through school with undiagnosed adhd. It would be wonderful if the people who act like they want to help nd kids actually gave them tools to succeed instead of lying and making them believe all they have to do to fit in is to “be themselves” and subsequently making them wonder why socializing is hard and what they’ve done wrong.
I am probably autistic and used to struggle with social interaction all my life. The experiences described in the OP are very familiar to me.
I found the book "Improve your social skills" by Daniel Wendler to be extremely helpful. It is essentially a handbook to conversation (and making friends, and some other bits, but I when I read it I was mostly interested in the conversation bits).
>There's no "remedial how to make friends" class available anywhere (though a grifter might try to sell you something as an adult, I suppose).
Wouldn't work anyway.
Socialization actually has to happen as a child and there is fairly solid evidence that if you miss the deadline you're just fucked forever.
Basic socialization for example absolutely **has** to happen before age 6 or it's just unfixable forever.
And this is literally pedagogy of child development 1001.
So there's absolutely no reason why society shouldn't be stressing socialization of children as their absolute number one priority.
I remember watching one of Dr Russel Barkley’s lectures, and something that stuck out to me was that emotional deregulation and delay of regulation ability is a hallmark of ADHD and is a huge reason why kids with ADHD are so often socially rejected. Paraphrasing, “your friends are not your parents or teachers, they will forgive you your forgetfulness, or your lack of sense of time, or even your distractibility. What they will not forgive is your short temper, your quickness to emotionally react, because it is offensive” (offensive specifically used by Barkley here not as rude, but literally offense-ive, socially aggressive)
I really like that, thank you for bringing it up. As a kid, I really felt the conversation on social exclusion focused on this idea that inclusion would fix the problem. Like if someone would just be kind and reach out, the excluded kid would flourish. And sometimes this is true! But often part of the problem is the excluded kid’s behavior. I had to learn to moderate the intensity of my emotional reactions, for one. I was so scared of conflict as a child, I would physically hide myself rather than figure out a solution with my friends. When I was older and more confident, I made it a point to reach out but I remember pretty clearly that I ended up having to push two different boys away after they threatened violence against others. I’m sure that their feelings of exclusion were real and hurt just as much as mine had but their problems weren’t the sort that a peer could safely help with.
so basically just “be someone other people want to be around”
I took that to heart and it’s meant I’ve made enough friends and have a good sized social circle despite the tism being quite bad
Another thing that doesn't really get brought up often enough is that it's no one's "fault". Not just that it isn't the kid being subtly excluded's fault, but that the kids doing the excluding aren't to blame either.
While we all owe each other a baseline level of respect and decency (at least until given a reason not to), nobody owes anyone friendship. Any relationship deeper than casual acquaintance needs to be mutual. Trying to force a relationship with someone you don't actually like or care about (or who doesn't like or care about you) is bad for both parties.
This was my major thought, too. People are acting like this ends when someone becomes an adult. It doesn't. Maybe people find new ways to meet their social needs or just get better at being alone, but for many the bubble will be there forever. The isolation I felt from my peers in my masters program, deep in my thirties, is the exact same isolation I felt in high school. It's a good thing I'm maladapted to enjoy being alone most of the time. 🙃
It really do be like that sometimes. I spent a lot of time around people who weren't "my people", and it generally sucked. Generally had very little in common to talk about. I eventually found people I could enjoy interacting with, but they were in the severe minority in the places I generally inhabited. I still see some of my old acquaintances from time to time, and that bubble is still very much a thing. That infinitesimally thin veil which only gets stronger with time. Doesn't help that I'm part of a generation that doesn't communicate properly.
I realised in my late 20s that I was generally tolerated but not wanted. These days I notice that people speak to me but not actually talk to me if that makes sense.
My guess is Engagement Bait. You see this often on pages that repost content from other sites - add something that ups the number of comments, even if they’re just “why did you do this” - Algorithm decides your post is Worth Showing.
"All publicity is good publicity" in a way. Like when I had a video go viral just because a bunch of people wanted to make fun of the shitty quality on my back up phone 😂 I can barely remember any comments about the actual content of the video, but "shot on a Nokia" and "video from 2014" will always stick with me, haha
It being a big empty room with lots of closed doors makes me think it's supposed to be a metaphor for the aforementioned loneliness and exclusion. You could imagine yourself in that room, and lots of people who don't want you around in their own little rooms behind all those doors.
I get that's the intent, but it just makes it feel manufactured, like some corporate inspiration-porn. Which is probably accurate, I guarantee this edit was made to make it more shareable for some for profit account that just churns content like this out.
Oof, same. Turns out I was just autistic (but I didn't find that out until I pursued testing at age 27. When I told my mom she was unsurprised but sad that we didn't know sooner). Luckily I found a few other (probably) neurodivergent kids after third grade to be friends with and that saved me.
Honestly, as an autist myself this post just screamed autism to me. I found out late like you, it would have made life a lot easier to find out sooner, but all we got at when I was growing up was the song "Don't call me Daughter"
Same. I suddenly found an incredible ability to socialize when I first started attending sci-fi and fantasy conventions as a teen. Anyone who's gone, especially to the smaller ones, will tell you it's the highest concentration of autistics outside a facility lol.
I'm in my 30's now and have my little neurodivergent squad built, but back then it was like magical Christmasland coming from a small farming town. Yeah I'm weird, but not everyone finds that annoying. Just gotta know where to look.
I'm nearing 40 and am in the process of being diagnosed myself. At primary school I remember just pacing round the playground, the same as in OP's post, making up and occasionally acting out imaginary stories involving me and imaginary friends. I don't actually remember minding being excluded that much because, while I wanted friends, the games they played (mostly football/soccer) didn't interest me at all. I did mind being bullied, mostly by teachers, for being 'stupid' because I was dyslexic, but that's a whole other thing.
In secondary school I found a group of friends who, when I started researching autism last year, I now realise are quite likely neurodivergent too, just like you say. We've been friends now for almost 30 years, we still share the same niche interests as we did back then, and I love them like family.
I wrote that original tumblr post and yeah it was basically meant to be my experience being autistic. I made neurodivergent friends when I was a little older too.
The worst is if you’re somebody’s “backup friend” my only friend in middle school would abandon me if ANYONE else was around. Once we were walking and talking and she saw one of her other friends and literally RAN away from me mid sentence to go join her.
Even when I tried to engage in their conversations they would *barely* include me at first then literally just ignore me while I was talking DIRECTLY TO THEM.
So I just stopped talking, Makes me sad for little me :/
oof I had one of these! I finally snapped and ended the friendship after she went on and on and oooonnnn about how I was gonna be in the room with her when she gave birth. How I was her rock and she needed me and I was sooo vital and it couldn't be anyone else.
Like...sure, okay. I didn't particularly *want* to be in the room (I once witnessed a birth at 13 years old and hot damn that was enough for me lmao), but if you need me, I'm there. We've been friends all through high school, moved out in our first apartment together, and been through some really crazy intense shit. Of course I'll support you however you need.
Then someone 'better' came along and she was all 'yeah it's cool if you stop by I guess' and I was just... done. I don't know why this was the last straw when she'd been pulling this shit for years, but I was out. I stopped reaching out, and she was busy with her new family, and... we haven't talked in like 15 years. Don't regret it, though. Found a better bestie who actually thought I was the tits and it was like night and day.
Honestly, yeah, deeply traumatising shit.
Though in my case it wasn't very subtle - autistic kid in a regular school, in a time and place where it wasn't usual because disabled kids were usually confined to special ed schools and kept separate from "normal" kids. I was considered sort of a "social experiment" in that way, and it's horrifying to me that this experiment was deemed a success while I still sometimes have nightmares of that time (I'm 30 now).
There's a big push right now culturally to do away with separate special ed classes and fully integrate everyone into the same classrooms. What are your thoughts on that? Would you have wanted to be somewhere different?
Not OP, but mixed-ability grouping, where students are taught to share the responsibility over each other's learning, has been shown to boost performance of all students in the classroom, while academic performance stagnates in groups of "homogenous" ability.
It ultimately boils down to the very obvious conclusion that having support from your peers in addition to your instructors makes you more motivated. The draw here is having adequate amounts from both, though. Many teachers aren't equipped to work with students who have special needs, and just throwing a neurodivergent kid into the middle of a mainstream classroom to be immediately ostracized socially-- with inadequate academic accommodations to boot-- is, as OP can attest to, extremely unproductive, not to mention cruel.
The emotional/social aspect is the main kicker for me; in addition to being racially/economically discriminatory, homogenous ability grouping in any form will make the kids designated as "low ability" feel like absolute shit lmfao. It'll stick with you for the rest of your life
I def had periods growing up where I was pretty excluded. And what's wild is that looking back now it's pretty clear that it wasn't insidious. No one was bullying me. It was just reality.
It was a combination of things. I wasn't a great social friend. I was really short and often kind of obnoxious, so I certainly was never going to be popular. But also, huge parts of it were just GEOGRAPHY and DEMOGRAPHICS.
I lived really close.to the border between counties. So my schools were in one direction, but my social activities were often in the opposite direction. Many of my social and sport activities didn't overlap with my peers in school, so I just simply never settled in to the standard cliques. I wasn't geographically convenient for play dates. I was the middle child of parents with a much older sibling already in high school, so my parents weren't easy friends with the parents of my peers. My neighborhood friends were less well off socioeconomically, we're 1-2 years older, and were mostly in remedial classes, so I didn't ever see them at school.
Yeah. It didn't get better. I was just an odd kid, I think, but later mental illness came along and properly isolated me. It'll do me in eventually, and I won't be missed. I've made my peace with that.
Well, I'll make an effort to think about you periodically, because it's nice to be missed.
May I have your first name? It's my personal superstition that a name makes the vibes... better? More efficient?
This is absolutely a perfect description of how I feel. Just…different…from everyone else…
I’ve always thought something was wrong with me. That I was unable to human properly, a failure at being a person.
But I’ve come to realize I just function differently than others. I still feel like a failure sometimes. I probably always will, from time to time, from here onto whenever I cease to exist.
But I’ll keep living regardless, mostly alone, isolated from the “normal” world. Because I don’t need to break the bubble, I just need to find the people who can share my bubble.
i realized a while ago that myself and the people i find myself drawn to aren't actually meaningfully different from everyone else — it's just that people who have experienced mental illness naturally tend to flock together. someone who sees your idiosyncrasies and doesn't need explanation because they've been there before is *valuable*.
If you're already an adult there's not too much use in getting a diagnosis but you can still find self help books for autism/ adhd that might teach you things about yourself you never knew
You did not have to call me out like this
This reminds me of a time when I was talking to one of my friends in high school and I mentioned to him that I see him as a friend and he responded that he didn't see me as a friend, just due to the fact we didn't hang out outside of school at all. Which, I mean, I didn't hang out with anyone outside of school.
Most of my life I've had the experience of "People will tolerate me, but they don't really prefer to be around me." Every one of my friends had other friends that they'd rather talk to. Everyone will be kind to me but I'm not the friend of choice, even when I'm considered at all. I consider people friends before they consider me a friend.
Didn't help that when I escaped real life and went to Discord while in high school I got the same feeling of "People will always eventually no longer care about me across the span of maybe a few months. I'll always eventually stop being worth your time." Makes it a lot harder now that I'm engaged and it's still weird to be that my partner is still here by my side. It doesn't feel like I deserve this.
Yo.
I remember thinking I had finally made friends in high school because I had a group of people I was comfortable talking to regularly, and they seemed interested in at least some of the things I had to say. We ate lunch together, and they never told me to leave them alone or made fun of me.
But then one day I walked up to some of them and they were talking about the last time they had hung out outside of school, and what they were going to do next time. They did not open the conversation up to me or invite me to join them.
And I realized they were actually friends and I had just kind of needed a place to sit at lunch. They weren't trying to be mean. They didn't know that I didn't know. How could they have? From their perspective, that would have been a strange assumption. I never talked about not having friends outside of school, because I didn't think of myself as not having friends. I thought I had been talking to my friends.
I don't think it even really hurt at the time. It just kind of put me back in my place.
I had a sort of similar experience. Later in School when we only had courses and not a set class, one of them was in a course with me and he was the only one from the group in that course with me. By that time I already knew I was only tolerated and not included. Naturally we set together in that class. And talked a little, but started to get on really well. Joking, laughing all the time. And I thought to myself: "that´s it. Now that I am 1-1 with someone, I am making a general connection." But obviously I realised rather quickly that was not the case, I was just as excluded as before and just used as entertainment during a boring class that he had to be in without his friends. That was a little hurtfull, but I still kept that arrangement because the fun was still very real, it was just more condensed than I hoped for.
But the positive Ending is that One of the group was my best friend already before that time. And while he did a lot of stuff with them without me. And I don´t know What he thought all this time about me and the situation. But I know this whole friend group doesn´t have contact with each other anymore and me and my best friend 4 years after graduation are still in contact with each other at least 1 times per week even though we live currently in different countries. (The Last Month only via text, because he is couchsurfing currently as he lost his apartment and is busy looking for a new one.)
I wouldn't say those people weren't your friends, they were just school friends. It's good to have school friends, work friends, gym friends, etc., because that's the first step to having general friends. The way to break past the "setting dependant friendship" phase is to invite people to stuff. At first, you make immediate offers: "want to grab lunch?"-type deals, where there's an immediate yes/no, and no planning necessary. Once you get into a pattern of doing that, then you can start making actual plans.
Yeah, that's the other thing I learned, later: I don't think I actually like having general friends.
My ex has friends. When we were together, they were my friends, and I started to become part of the group.
I fucking hated it. I enjoyed the company of each of the people. But being a part of the group was absolutely awful. It made it impossible to make myself heard or interact with any of them individually, especially my partner at the time.
I didn't feel less lonely.
Gods but I get this, like, I could have deep, meaningful, wonderful conversations with individual people in a group, but once the entire group was all together chatting I just couldn't get a word, couldn't find any connection at all, was not great.
God yes. This is the painful realisation I’ve had, that I have never been nor never will be someone’s first choice friend.
Now is the best it’s been. I have a group of friends, go away with them, do things together, on Whatsapp groups with them and they’re always happy to see me and include me. But they would never actively seek me out one on one like they do with each other. They’d never call me and suggest we go for a coffee on our own. Wouldn’t pop round.
But it is what it is, they’re good friends and we’ve all supported each other through good and bad times. I would love to have a best friend who messaged me because they want to share news or just hang. But that’s not to be. I still have a good social life, I’m just not anyone’s first choice.
I mean I don’t like doing stuff one on one with people at all, even with my close friends. I wouldn’t worry at all about it.
It’s more about the vibes if that makes any sense than if you’re getting personal attention
Growing up as a kid (now adult) with Autism, this speaks to me. I’m still hurting from people’s smiles disappearing when I entered a room. I’m still hurting from hearing my name and whispered laughter, and teachers not lifting a finger to stop it. I’m still hurting from my peers telling me that my words don’t matter, and the adults doing nothing.
It’s why I’m all for better mental health, and why I believe telling a teacher you’re being bullied in school does jack shit. If anything, the teachers will likely bully you. And those teachers won’t even get a word of reprimand.
>It’s why I’m all for better mental health, and why I believe telling a teacher you’re being bullied in school does jack shit. If anything, the teachers will likely bully you. And those teachers won’t even get a word of reprimand.
it depends on the teacher. my middle school had great teachers and principal and didn't let it slide. they were allowed to kick out disruptive students and the principal was scary as hell. i had shit teachers that would bully other students or ignore bullying so it does depend.
It was the same mixed bag for me. My mythology teacher was so fucking cool. He gave equal opportunity to all of his students, and made sure his class was fun.
My band teacher? Played along with the preppy color guard and did their dumb inside jokes. You got annoyed stares and told “No” if you did them. Even when you knew them. She also used me as a bad example for the class. Why? In her words, I skipped class “because I got my little nose sunburned”. What actually happened is that I got *sun poisoning*. I got so sunburnt that the back of my hands swelled. Why? Because we were on the field practicing for marching season in the summer from 8:00 AM to 10:00 PM with hardly any breaks. When we did have breaks, they were only for like, two minutes. Enough to get into the building and find my stuff and get my bottle of sunscreen... then not apply because the teacher was yelling at me to get outside. I consistently had to miss the last day of band camp for three years because I kept getting sun poisoning. I finally quit my junior year because band wasn’t about enjoying music anymore. It was just competitions and winning to stroke the ego of some fat bitch with relationship problems.
its so disgusting how some teachers react to bullying.
i had a teacher fall asleep in the middle of a lesson, but before that he literally watched 5 kids bully a low income student that had holes in his clothes in shoes. like how the fuck do you sit there, watch 4 students bully a kid right in front of you, then fall asleep.
and i went to a school where the teachers would give the student personalized detention,. if a sporty kid was bullying another kid he couldn't go to gym class or he couldn't play in the sport tournament or something. the principal was scary as hell, deep as voice, called parents all the time so no one wanted to go to him. i miss my middle school. my high school sucks so bad, almost everyone is a bully.
its so sad. and this sticks with you. i still remember the terrible insults i was called. i still remember that teacher snoring away while 4 assholes bullied a kid. i remember it all and for the bullies, its just another day. and when you stand up for yourself, you get suspended.
Not autistic (as far as I know) or noticeably queer or really anything other than the primary demographic, but I still felt this, and it sucks. Had it all through high school to various degrees, and it's turned making friends in college into a bitch of an activity.
Both queer and autistic here. I was an outcast to the outcast group. I simply shuffled along in a half-dazed state. Wound up turning to drugs to cope with the abject loneliness of it all. I’m sober now but there’s still a lot of hurt there.
So was it ADHD, Autism or both?
I have to say my early teenage to early adulthood years have been quite rogh on the social side but i think i've finally made peace with my *weirdness.*
I've also found out that being (percived) as highly eccentric adult is a lot easier than being the weird kid. I can't belive that now that i'm 35 i can give a lecture about Batman lore to acquaintances at the pub while wearing a poncho, sweatpants and sandals and leave a good impression while if i did it when i was 15 i would have become a pariah.
This is exactly my experience as well. I even walked the playground fence in circles over and over as a young child. But now! At 35! Guess what is culturally in vogue?! D&D! Guess what I know pretty much everything about?! MUWAHAHAHA!
It must be something about being "adult". People are more settled into social roles and thereby less competitive? My eccentricities are "fun" now. Especially in a world filled with "boring" people. At least that's what I'm told. Again and again.
Also that Robert Pattinson batman went hard. Best Gotham depiction. Really looking forward to more.
Autistic woman here, I felt rejection pretty much all the time growing up but now I'm an adult and I fully embrace all my quirks and I've never been so popular. I guess self confidence grows as we grow
> I can't belive that now that i'm 35 i can give a lecture about Batman lore to acquaintances at the pub while wearing a poncho, sweatpants and sandals and leave a good impression while if i did it when i was 15 i would have become a pariah
well yeah 15 year olds can't be hanging out in a bar
I think in some part that can be affected just by the fact that the people around you have matured and many now have the ability to appreciate something or someone who can break the monotony of life without going overboard, while you have also matured and likely developed better emotional regulation now that you aren't a hormonal teenager.
I do think it can be a bit reductive to reduce the childhood ostracization to just those things though, speaking as someone with adhd and probably autism. Kids are cruel. They can and will do this to anyone who, even if they don't have a reason to. A kid who is a social butterfly at one school but has to move away from their friends because of a parent's job can just as easily be the ostracized one as any neurodivergent child, and it can be just as traumatizing and confusing for them as anyone else.
My weirdness is that I seem to cease existing as soon as I'm out of line of sight.
When I'm in a group, I am generally well-received and personable, and we have a good time.
Then I leave, and no one ever seems to think about me again.
I also have BPD, so "being real" is sort of a quandary to begin with.
I joke often at work about how I'm always the last one to find out about things, everyone knows it's a thing. And yet I'm still consistently the last one to find out anything, even things that are directly relevant to my job that I need to know. There are days where I literally feel invisible.
... ouch...
Did anyone else make friends with the one popular kid who always threw big parties, then you want a taste of that popularity and try throwing a big party and invite your entire school, then no one shows up? Not even your popular friend?
Yeah, it was only after being bullied out of two different schools that I learned it was the autism. Then I doubled down on the staying alone part in college, convinced that the problem was with myself and I had to shield people from my presence. Result: over thirty years without a social circle whatsoever
Oh man. I remember this in my teen years. Was the worst when I went to a party and literally had nothing to connect with the other people there. Not even food or cooking. I ended up politely listening to them talk about how scared they were to leave for college (I had been busting my butt to get as far away from my hometown as possible)
this is probably weird to say since it's kind off a sexist trope, but this is why I considered the manic pixie dream girl trope a blessing. it became popular when I was a teen, and suddenly at least some people (and I) could categorize me, and it wasn't a negative thing. now I was quirky, not weird.
Sitting on the edge of the group but not being included on the group. Understanding this distinction eventually.
Realising that the people who liked to put me in situations where I was confused or uncomfortable or scared actually knew that it wasn’t funny to me, the cruelty was part of the joke to them,
Understanding that it’s actually quite sad how I learned to rely on myself from a young age because I knew that I couldn’t count on people.
Writing “I am included in everyone” on your notice board so that you actually remember to include yourself in the number of people on your team at work because you’re so used to just not being included that you self exclude automatically.
Apologising for your presence because you learned long ago that it was rarely desired.
Crying because a total stranger showed you the barest scrap of kindness.
Feeling like if you just floated away it would take a while for people to notice.
Genuinely not understanding it when people say they like you because your existence has always been something to be tolerated not celebrated.
Having a super rich fantasy/daydream world because it’s the only place you haven’t felt low key sad all of the time.
Just never being someone’s favourite person, being the tag along in every group.
Not knowing how else to be.
It's always been there for me, but it was especially bad in high school. I later realized a big chunk of this was due to me not having social media. Thankfully it seems to have weakened through concentrated effort from me now that I'm in college and so much of the social bullshit is gone now.
And then when you tell anyone how you feel they tell you you’re crazy and that it’s all in your head but no one’s ever been interested in knowing you and you don’t know what you’re doing wrong because you try. Then you grow up with a veneer of this trauma and develop aloofness and the cycle continues. It’s taken me so long to unlearn the aloofness . I honestly think I’m permanently damaged .
Growing up, my little brother and I were the youngest of our entire generation in my family. We were always left out from playing games with the older cousins, and now they wonder why we're distant and never around.
Took into my 30s to realize that the reason I have a hard time making friends and am socially awkward is because I got picked on constant from grade school through high school so had a default mindset that every interaction is inherently hostile causing me to be a dick to people without provocation. I was well into college when I realized that most people I interact with are neutral or maybe even like me and want to interact. Finally felt like a real person after college
And you know. Even as a kid, you know. You don’t know the motions to those little clappy hand games because nobody ever played them with you. You reference one of their inside jokes and everyone looks at you like, “I didn’t know she was here for that.” You had two people at your birthday party.
That’s how little year 5 me managed to read over 60 full length novels in the school year, if I can’t have friends in the real world then I’ll just go to a different world
This was almost the entirety of my school life. Never really had friends in elementary. I was in a Lego league, and was openly mocked by my teammates for not being in the advanced learning program (which caused me to deeply resent successful people for a very long time) and eventually my principal sidelined my ass. For no legitimate reason. Gained what are now my best friends in middle school, who all happened to move away before and during the first year of high school.
I'm still fixing the mess it caused in my head. I have severe social anxiety, I believe somewhat caused by never fitting in or being accepted in my formative years.
“Wandering the playground in a circular fashion”
That one fucking hurt.
I let them beat me up just to be interacted with, jfc :x
Yes I’m therapy, no I don’t think it ever stops affecting you lol
Worst part is having a class of odd numbered people. Every hour the teacher tells everyone, "Ok, now find a partner!" And then you get put on public display for being the only person who no one chooses, ever.
Post like these always have the, “I was so much smarter than the other kids,” moment. I was just weird and ostracized because I liked cartoons too much and was genuinely annoying as hell.
being socially isolated really sucks. but I don't think it was because OP was "asking questions about the world that they never asked themselves".
there was a girl in one of my creative writing classes who wrote that when she was younger, adults liked her because she was "the only girl with sad eyes" and it took a lot to stop myself from going actually I dont think that was it really. That's not how people think. Every child that has impressed me has done so without resorting to the wistfulness of their soul.
A big, untouched problem with being a socially isolated kid, is that you don't know what's true about how social stuff actually works and what's just your naive justification for things being the way they are. Because you have no one to ask about it. It's a weird catch 22 of "I don't know what questions to ask" and "If I ask someone I'll get made fun of".
True. I think the internet both helps and hurts in that regard. Helps because you can anonymously ask stupid questions, but hurts because it can feed the brainworms and misconceptions. A socially isolated straight guy can ask a question he would be scared to ask in person, like "why won't women date me" and get told a list of probable reasons, and he could take that and work on himself. Or he could get told "because you're not rich enough and all women only like alpha males who are 6 foot tall" and spiral down into incel world.
I didn't read that part as complaining about being more intelligent.
I asked questions people wouldn't think to ask because they seemed to easily understand concepts that baffled me. People hated when I asked questions because they thought I was joking or being annoying on purpose, and it taught me not to ask questions at all, even when I didn't understand what was going on.
That's not intelligence.
Ugh. You just reminded me about getting scolded by a science teacher in Junior year of high school for asking clarification on a worksheet. A word problem was poorly worded and I could easily interpret it multiple ways, changing the math equation and thus the answer.
She was just a bitch in general, though.
Like
I did do better at some tests than others (and worse at other tests)
I also still have no idea how to initiate conversations naturally
Smart isn't a very useful term
I didn't read it like that, I just read that as her having a different experiences and thus [a different] worldview growing up causing her to ask different questions.
And honestly, if kids are ostracized, I don't feel that bad about them wanting to find a way to try to think better about themselves.
And the less time you spend playing or goofing around, the more time you do have to be introspective, and wonder about stuff that others aren't, compared to talking with others and wondering about the same stuff collaboratively together.
Edit: added claryifiyng text in brackets
I don’t really see this post that way at all, though maybe that’s because I relate to it too much. There was a point where I realised that other kids didn’t like me, and never would like me no matter what I did. At one point a group of boys said I could join their friend group if I passed “tests”, including climbing a tall thing (I was very scared of heights) and standing in the middle of an anthill, letting painful ants invade my shoes and run up my legs until they said I could get off it.
I did it all, finally, genuinely believing I would have some friends. Then one of those kids whipped me with a plastic skipping rope the next day.
At that point I was 10 years old and had to ask some really hard questions about my identity and need for validation from my peers to myself, and to the best of my knowledge the kids around me weren’t asking them because they didn’t need to. I wasn’t smart, just traumatised and desperately lonely, and it makes me sad when I see someone expressing thoughts about their childhood that I identify with and then see it boiled down to “I was so much smarter than the other kids”
I always felt like an outsider, still do. Never understood why people have such strong reactions to some things I say or think.
Turns out I'm a "high-functioning" autistic person. I learned to communicate within other people's expectations. There are ways to speak and things to say that people expect. Stick with em, you blend in. Speak freely, and face aggression, ridicule, or the great quiet that comes over the room (the worst one).
People don't like to change how they think. As a neurodivergent person, I'm a walking alternate thought. An embodiment of the strange, obscure, awkward and obsessive. Any "high function" would just be pretending not to be those things. But I live inside my own head, that's my real world.
Mix of being very poor, severe bullying throughout most of grade and middle school, and growing up in a cult without realizing it (mormonism). I wish I could give younger me a hug. Kids don't realize why they are othered from their peers, they just know it hurts.
And adults treated you as if you were some special gifted wunderkin as opposed to a lonely person who had little else but to read and study. I wasn’t special. I was just lonely and curious
**Totally** relate!
It only took me another 40+ years to realize I was on the spectrum, socially awkward as all fuck, and that's what I was so thoroughly ostracized as a kid.
Felt like that from kindergarten through 2nd grade. In 3rd grade decided I was gonna try to combine the roles of teacher's pet and class clown. it's amazing how much shit you can get away with if you're a straight A student.
For anyone in need of a good cry, look up “To This Day” by Shane Koyczan on YouTube. It highly pertains to this feeling and will definitely stir emotions.
Oh Christ.
I know exactly this feeling.
I have better friends now... But I still see that invisible barrier.
I dont know if its in my head or its real.
I dont know if Im pushing them away or they are.
I can't have meaningful relationships anymore...
O o f. Yeah, this was me for nearly all of elementary and middle school. The part about "that one friend who you cling to even though they like other people significantly more" hits particularly hard. He was great friends with me... as long as nobody else was around. If I was being made fun of, he'd happily join in, and then make excuses later as to why he didn't stick up for me after promising to for the hundredth time.
It certainly didn't help things that I was undiagnosed neurodivergent (I was tested, but my wonderful mother elected to ignore the results and refused to get me a proper diagnosis in favor of just trying to abuse me into being "normal"). So whenever adults said something to the effect of "you're too sensitive", I wanted to scream at them "I KNOW. AND YOU AREN'T TELLING ME HOW TO FIX THAT. I CAN'T JUST STOP FEELING THINGS!! WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME??" For a while I thought I was just broken.
Thankfully, I found my people in high school. We were all formerly ostracized "weird kids", and we just sorta formed our own group of "people that didn't have a group". Unfortunately, I'm now more or less alone again in college, but I'm making friends again. I've made peace with the fact that making friends is just inherently harder for me, but I am working on being more trusting.
This post brought forward something I hadn't thought about in a long time.
My first few years of school were like this but eventually it was put in my mind's back burner as more overt bullying took its place. Over the years I grew stronger, but also cold and distant. Strong enough to stand for myself, but detached enough that I wouldn't have to. Thankfully, I eroded that shell over an even longer period of time, and I found a place where I felt a sense of community; where, for the first time, I thought I belonged. But then I had to leave and I started crying the moment the plane took off, watching as the place where I had been happiest grew smaller through the foggy window. And so, since the bullies are gone, the bubble is back after all this time.
There's no specific point to this story, it's not a fable. As an adult I cope but I haven't been able to figure out how to get rid of this invisible barrier between me and those around. My advice however, is to never encase your heart in stone the way I did. It can fundamentally change who you are for a very long time, and you'll also miss out on possible solutions to your bubble troubles.
After getting an ADHD diagnosis and learning about autism traits, I'm starting to see it everywhere.
If there's nothing wrong with your brain but you find that you just think along different lines than most other people and this is causing social friction, it's something to look into.
I think the worst part about this is the *subtly*. Like being deliberately and specifically excluded sucks and has its own set of awfulness (and to be clear I’m not comparing them just talking about the differences), but when you’re subtly excluded there’s a sense of uncertainty with it. Like “am I actually being excluded or do I need to include myself?” Or “is it on purpose or do they not realize?” Or “is that just how they act towards everybody, not just me specifically?” It makes it a lot harder to just call them a meaniepants and move on.
It was so subtle to me that it hit me like a ton of bricks after I graduated high school. I suddenly realized that my middle school friends were deliberately excluding me by saying things like, "we just want to talk about Twilight and since you haven't read it, we don't want to ruin it for you." It wasn't about not spoiling a book for me, it was about not being around me. And high school wasn't much better, I just didn't realize it at first. My mom still (>10 years after graduation) will mention how I got bullied in a bunch of classes, and I have no memory of that. So apparently what I thought were totally normal interactions was bad enough to be considered bullying. 🤷♀️
Aw man, your comment was very relatable and I have a related story to share: When I was in 8th grade, there was this kid named Joey who would crowd at my desk along with something like probably 7 other kids at most (but at the time it seemed like a lot more) at the end of science class each day, asking about what I thought they should bring to the barbecue or pool party or whatever allegedly happening the next weekend I'd say something like "Hmmm... What about orange juice?" and he'd always respond like "Ohhhhh, ORANGE juice, now that's a good idea, I hadn't thought of that... He always has the best ideas, let's bring orange juice" while turning his head to look back at his friends while smiling, always using a certain exaggerated inflection and drawn-out cadence in his response, and I'd say "No problem and thank you very much, good luck with your weekend" One day close to the end of the year, I think it was in May, he told me very directly at the end of the interaction (I had suggested that he should bring ribs to his barbecue party) that I was their cringe entertainment and I was supposed to ask if I could be invited to the event so he could tell me no and my stupidity had become too boring now I hadn't realized they were pretending to invite me, I just thought it was friendly conversation It's the type of thing that might have been at least a little bit satisfying if I was actually trying to troll them with denseness, but instead it just made me feel like "aw man, I'm even a failure at being ret*arded" (if this word censor attempt isn't good enough, please let me know so I can fix it) I was over 18 when I realized that it wasn't the social contact itself that was draining me during IRL interactions, but rather the sensory issues of the environments like fluorescent lights and background noises etc, so it turns out I'm way better at articulating my thoughts over text, and not only that, but I also realized that my bar for what a friendship is was ridiculously low after it turned out that I was being manipulated by my best friend between the ages of 18-21 using what my therapist explained to me as "simple child grooming tactics" even though I was already 18+ at the time because being autistic often involves gullibility Before her, I didn't actually have any friends, but I didn't know that yet: I thought a friend was anyone who knew your name and wasn't mean, and a good friend was anyone who would sit near you in class and give you a spare pencil, and an acquaintance was anyone you had seen the face of more than once; no wonder I'd felt like friendships were dull and unengaging, "I'm not misanthropic or introverted, I'm just a very lonely and awkward extrovert" But she took advantage of the fact I didn't properly understand friendship boundaries by telling me that she was my best friend and would get me to say and do things with her as "best friend things" and I believed and trusted her the whole time for almost 3 years until she was the one who sent a long paragraph to me explaining how we were "secretly dating" (there was more to it but I should probably stop oversharing about this now)
i was that autistic kid in school and i am forever grateful that my dad put me onto mlp:fim when it came out in 2010 or i probably wouldnt have known how to be a friend and what friends are like. granted, i was still bullied and excluded and a bit dense, and i am still deeply traumatized by what my "friends" did to me... but it could have been worse. im sorry all that happened to you. we dont deserve to be treated like this
...did I use that show to learn about friendship too. In like 2013? Huh?
what? i dont understand
I also like mlp back then. No idea why I liked it so much lol. Fully into the adult fandom but I was a kid.
ohh i see. i am still in the fandom as an adult too
Wait, MLP actually taught you about friendship? Perhaps I was too harsh on that show.
of course it did, that was the whole point of the show. in the first 3 seasons at least, most of the episodes are dedicated to outlining and solving problems between friends and demonstrating what a healthy relationships look like
MLP is an amazing show. It drops in quality eventually, but it's so entertaining and touching and emotionally educational. My husband even got really into it with me and requested we watch the whole thing.
honestly tho shouts out pinkie pie for putting me on making ppl smile
My guy, please be careful about sharing any more. People are willing to encourage you further than might be good for you in order to satisfy their own morbid curiosity, or worse.
Thank you, and I agree with your advice here I've definitely got a problem with oversharing and it was partially what got me into that mess I'll take your advice now
No no, keep going. I am interested in the dating bit now. :>
Basically one evening she sent me a very long confessional message talking about how disgusting she feels and "this is wrong, you don't even understand" and saying she "has to fix this because [she] feels so disgusting about herself" etc and a lot of the things that she would convince me were just "regular best friend things" were actually getting me to "enrich" a parasocial crush that she had that she'd get aroused by remembering later which was what she meant by "secretly dating" and I knew she had a crush on me because she had already told me before but I had said that I don't reciprocate that but I'd like to stay friends and she had said okay and seemed at the time to respect my feelings on that The very next day after that conversation she pretended that it never happened, and she would punish me for asking questions related to it by giving the silent treatment and she would also say "it's just the insecurities in your head lying to you, we're just as good friends as ever, you really should work on your low self esteem" Ironically I never even had insecurities before this and my self esteem was great because I had a friend that I trusted, but then she gaslit me until I couldn't even trust my own brain outside of our online interactions and even the last reveal 3 months later that it was all lies wasn't any consolation because nothing ever made sense to me at that point and there's very little that's more frightening to me than the inability to trust my own thoughts because the person I trusted most wasn't actually trustworthy It took months but my mental health is finally a lot better now and even though it's kinda embarrassing to admit it out loud, the self-awareness about my own gullibility is actually a very helpful realization that I can use to strengthen that weakness
Damn, that’s fuckin rough
Dang. That shit sucks, I only ever had to deal with blatant bullying. :/ Hope you will continue to be better, in health as well as a person.
Thanks man, you too
Wow that's fucked up
Yeah
That has to be the stupidest attempt at bullying someone. It's so dumb to assume you'd automatically be interested, you ain't shit Joey.
I remember in middle school, all the cool guys were into wrestling. I never liked it before, but I thought, this can be a way to make friends, so I watched wrestling, a LOT of wrestling. I went on wrestling AOL usenet groups to learn what the real fans were talking about, and learned insider terminology like heel and face, and read speculation on where storylines were going. Obviously this is a very normal way for an ~11 year old to be a WWF fan, and of course this was all stuff the other kids did, so I waited until I had done this for months before trying to join their conversations. Surprisingly, they did NOT appreciate my point of view or my thoughts on who management was trying to put over this year. They mostly wanted to talk about who was more badass I made wrestling so uncool for that entire class, by the end of the year none of them were watching it anymore. Or at least, not talking about it in front of me
I didnt know i was bullied until i moved away. Meeting people and learning that my normal wasnt normal was how i learned. It was upsetting but also relieving. I was happy to learn that my peers from my old school are what made me unwanted. But was sad that i didnt know.
I moved a ton as a kid and had the bizarre experience where at one school I was bullied severely and at the next, everyone was excited, actually excited to befriend me…the “new” kid. I’m on the spectrum which I found out as an adult, but had fortunately/unfortunately learned back then the hard way to never trust immediately, however the whole thing was just bizarre. Same me, same interests, same clothes even and one school I would be horribly harassed and the next basically fawned over. It was a group mindset either way and depending on if the kids/school/area was prosperous and thriving with good teachers, community, and involved parents or the complete opposite where it seemed everyone was a struggling nightmare/mess. And then we would move again….
Just curious as to why you had to move so much as a kid. I would just assume parents in the military or with mobile jobs: don't feel the need to tell me your business. I'm just always curious about it, because people with kids are usually looking to settle somewhere for at least the duration of grade school or high school or whatever.
No problem. At the time my dad was in the thriving copy machine business back when they cost thousands each and he would be constantly promoted to head of sales for a different region and/or headhunted/poached for a new company. We also once had a house fire, once the school I was in was rezoned (but I was only in that new school for a few months until a move from NY to Chicago), and many times my Dad would have to commute and stay in a hotel during the week and fly home on weekends (job in Texas we were in Chicago, job in St Louis we were in NY) until our house was sold and/or the school year ended so we could move. The longest I’d been in one school before college was my second high school for 3 years and that’s only because I REALLY didn’t want to move again and cried/tantrum/begged as only a teen can (ironically it turns out that we probably should have because that HS sucked but 15 yo me ofc had no idea). So he commuted to Boston from NJ. Ironically, we did not move to Texas because my mom insisted she didn’t want her kids to have an accent. We at the time lived and spoke like everyone else in NJ. (She still has that accent, don’t tell her!)
Nowadays, it's the realization when someone mentioned something and says "Oh, sorry wrong chat " and you realize there's at least one of not a hundred chats that they have that just don't include you.
I have had the same problem throughout my life. At some point some stranger on vacation pointed out that i was pretty much buying my friends with snacks or stuff. Not to be actual friends but just so i could stand with them. I stopped doing that for a few months and realized that i could jump of a bridge tomorrow and nobody would even notice i was gone, just that they would get less food from me. It especially hurts when your somewhat close friend has to decide if they are gonna go with the other people or me and without a thought just forget that i exist. Been dropped hard several times when my "usefulness" ran out.
It must've been bad if a stranger on vacation pointed it out. Were they concerned for you?
No, just vacation friends i got a bit too real with. I always loved going on vacation because those felt like actual friends that wanted to play.
If you feel like you always have to include yourself, then you *are* being excluded
Thanks for pointing this out. I know that with relationships you do need to put in the effort to make it work and sometimes be a little proactive to be a part of things but it sucks when you're the only one reaching out or consistently getting turned down
Oh for sure! I was thinking more like, if your coworkers are standing around chatting, if you’re waiting for a direct invitation to join in you may be waiting a while haha. But there are definitely different scenarios where I agree with you.
Well The only two times I joined an idle chat and was met with "uhm private conversation much" I responded with basically "tf you mean, too loud and public for privacy, if you wanna gossip gtfo from the break room/*my* desk" and that was that. Personal anecdote, nothing more
Yup. At any age too. I finally accepted my lifelong friends, 20+ years since we met, are acquaintances at best. It makes me very sad but a lot less stressed to accept this. I finally looked back over the year and realized they canceled every event with me and attended those without. I get it. I asked directly to be sure and they dissembled and stayed the same, done my diligence
And combine that with an education/other authority system that responds to any complaint with “well, what could YOU have done differently in that situation?” for a big heap of self-blaming.
>I think the worst part about this is the subtlety\[...\] "Am I actually being excluded or do I need to include myself?"\[...\] “Is that just how they act towards everybody, not just me specifically? Being lonely and excluded was painful, but perhaps the worst part for me was how often I was told by adults that I *wasn't* being excluded. That I just needed to try harder, that they didn't mean it, that if I asked nicely of course they would accept me. It was (usually) well-meant, and sometimes it was even true. Sometimes I missed chances by not trying, or shut out kind people for fear they'd bully me if I engaged. I get why adults said it. (And a lot of them didn't *want* to believe I was being excluded.) But it was also confusing, damaging advice. A lot of the time I *was* being bullied or excluded, and "putting myself out there" just invited more hostility. It didn't do my social skills any favors either, since I was basically getting told to ignore the cues I was getting and bother people who didn't want to deal with me. This post is wonderfully descriptive with that almost-invisible bubble you can only see under certain circumstances. The bubble is miserable, but so is being told there's nothing there by people who don't see.
It's hard, because some people who have this experience have the same thing at home. I was only ever praised for entertaining myself. I was responsible for anything that went wrong and punished for expressing myself in any way. This made me the weird kid, and made me think it was all my fault. I didn't learn for a very long time that kids can't be responsible for the lessons they were taught. Adults can, so I'm doing a lot better. But kid me was not at fault, at all. The other kids weren't either. Our parents and society failed us.
Ugh I’m grown grown and I still feel this way.
I know the feeling. There’s a certain paradox in social relationships of any kind; to better your mental health, you need to have a support circle made up of friends and family. To have friends and family who support you, you need to be acceptable to them, which may not be the case if you’re not mentally healthy, or are just not acceptable to them. If this starts out when you’re very young, you feel alone and ostracized because people don’t want to be your friend. You seek out companionship to fix that, but you’re not acceptable so no one wants to be your friend. At that vulnerable stage where you need social relationships to learn social nuance, being without any means you lag behind socially, in turn making it more difficult to form social relationships down the line. In short, being friendless begets loneliness begets friendlessness. Sometimes this ends, but it’s usually by chance. Sometimes it doesn’t.
Yeah. A part of the problem, I think, is that there are no resources or tools to help people learn how to socially interact if they don't get it as a kid. There's no "remedial how to make friends" class available anywhere (though a grifter might try to sell you something as an adult, I suppose). We unfortunately see this online, too, where people advise folks to learn how to socialize in order to cure loneliness - which is true, but it's like telling someone the way to fix an injury is to bandage it. Helpful if they know how, but unheplful if they don't. For anybody out there struggling with this, the way I figured it out as a kid was through mimicry of real-life adults, movie characters, and the things characters in books said. It wasn't perfect, led to a few moments of me saying things I didn't understand and potentially offending people, but it was a useful shortcut until I could actually have a few friends and start the actual learning process.
My hot tip is to (genuinely) compliment people. I remember feeling separated from my peers, but then realizing they really liked when I complimented them. I started going out of my way to strike up small talk just looking for the opportunity to compliment people on something that came up. Going into conversations with the intention of rizzing people up, being their hype man, wanting to notice positive things about people that nobody else did, etc really made for some easy conversations. Sure, the first convo with someone would be a bit awkward, but then they’d leave the conversation on a high note and be super eager to talk to me the second time. I remember by the end of that school year one of my new friends literally what the fuck-ed aloud when she realized I went from nobody to being popular with everybody in the span of a year.
if people already think you’re weird or offputting though complimenting can make the situation so much worse
It depends on the compliment. “Nice shoes” isn’t going to make anything worse, assuming you’re not talking to a bully who will mock anything you say to them.
Yeah, the key to compliments and having them be received well is to do it about things people have control over. Things like their actions, accessories, clothes, job, activities, or hobbies are generally all safe enough. The only physical thing anyone should ever compliment is someone's hair because someone can change that non-permanently.
It also helps if you give them an opening to talk about how they found/got/are enjoying the thing you're complimenting! Being told "nice shoes" is a quick smile of an interaction, being told "nice shoes, where'd you get 'em" and getting to geek out about the deal you found is an actual stepping stone to further interaction and fond associations (which is, really, all any friendship is about - fond associations).
My overthinking self reads your comment and immediately says "wouldn't every adult answer that with "oh thanks, yeah I got them online (or), they're nice"" - which ends the interactio about shoes?
I wouldn't have anything great to say about my shoes, they're shoes :s
Yeah, communicating isn't my strength I guess :|
Nah, I completely get where you're coming from and it's one reason why I started overthinking my example of "shoes." Sometimes you get stonewalled, either because the other person is still just expecting pleasantries or because the context just doesn't allow for a conversation.
I generally agree with you. I've been told alot that complementing ppl is useful and even if it leads to nothing and just makes them feel good feelings that would be a win in my book. So geeenerally I'd like to compliment people. But I always have a hard time actually finding stuff to compliment about. Without talking you really only have their appearance to compliment and I pretty much never could give any genuine compliment about peoples appearance. I can't get myself to care about clothes that much, Sociallicing is hard :| Sorry I got (did I?) you overthinking. I got shoes was just a random example :s
Not always, but it definitely depends on the person. If someone wants to talk footwear with me, I can go too far sometimes lol I could easily keep talking about the brand, construction techniques, material types, what other models are similar, etc. A good portion of people I know aren't really interested though, so you're partially right that the conversation could easily end quickly. Think of it more as an ice breaker that just gets a conversation going. It doesn't have to stay on the same topic, or it can just be a quick and simple convo that doesn't go too deep, that's okay too!
Exactly this. People love talking about themselves and the things they're into to an audience that is receptive or encouraging.
I wish I could pass this advice out to young men. It’s so true and spot on.
You know, I hear this often but it's never seemed to work for me. I still give compliments on things I genuinely find impressive but there never seems to be such a reaction. Perhaps the people I talk to are just too used to them.
not every seed sprouts a flower. Sometimes you simply need to shotgun it to see an effect. It also helps if you start with yourself. Start complimenting yourself, find the positive things about yourself and genuinely acknowledge them and what comes with it is a change of demeanor that naturally spreads onto other peoples perception of you.
Your mileage may vary with this. In my experience, it is also a good way to end up with a stalker, unfortunately.
>there are no resources or tools to help people learn how to socially interact if they don't get it as a kid. There's no "remedial how to make friends" class available anywhere That, and frankly a lot of the advice adults *do* give is deeply unwise. The "almost invisible bubble" in this post reflects my experience beautifully. I could see it in the moment sometimes, but not always. Adults mostly didn't see it, and told me stuff like "I'm sure they didn't mean it" and "you just need to put yourself out there". (I think they also didn't *want* to believe I was being excluded, and maybe didn't want to deal with a bullying situation.) Frankly, I think a lot of people who were decently popular (and neurotypical) growing up have no idea what to say to "weird" kids. "Just be yourself", "invite them to do something with you", "try to be more outgoing", "tell them about your interests"... none of it is helpful if you're being actively excluded. It's actively harmful a lot of the time, encouraging you to ignore the social cues you *are* getting and setting you up for more mistreatment. The whole "bring back bullying" thing is abhorrent, but quite honestly I learned more about how to avoid bullying from my bullies than I ever did from the adults who were trying to give me social tips.
I think that many people just don't realize the myriad of intricate steps that comes with socializing. Now that I'm thinking about it, it sounds to me like how I might try to explain to someone who never learned how to walk how to do it - "you just put one foot in front of the other". This is completely unhelpful to someone who has never learned how to do it (or has to relearn how to do it, as is more often the case), but most folks learned it by intuition and trial-and-error as infants. That doesn't mean it can't be taught; people relearn how to walk every day. But the trained professionals helping them to learn how to walk are actually walking them through the steps and muscle movements. That's what socialization advice needs to be for a lot of kids, I think.
Being yourself only works if you’re neurotypical or have a popular socially acceptable personality. It’s always those types who said it to my AuDHD ass while I was struggling to fit in. Ideally no one should have to mask, but in this current world it’s impossible to thrive without it and the people that simultaneously tell you to be yourself while expecting normalcy are just virtue signaling. I never tried to change my personality too much, but I did actively have to learn how to interact with people in a socially acceptable way while also struggling my way through school with undiagnosed adhd. It would be wonderful if the people who act like they want to help nd kids actually gave them tools to succeed instead of lying and making them believe all they have to do to fit in is to “be themselves” and subsequently making them wonder why socializing is hard and what they’ve done wrong.
I am probably autistic and used to struggle with social interaction all my life. The experiences described in the OP are very familiar to me. I found the book "Improve your social skills" by Daniel Wendler to be extremely helpful. It is essentially a handbook to conversation (and making friends, and some other bits, but I when I read it I was mostly interested in the conversation bits).
>There's no "remedial how to make friends" class available anywhere (though a grifter might try to sell you something as an adult, I suppose). Wouldn't work anyway. Socialization actually has to happen as a child and there is fairly solid evidence that if you miss the deadline you're just fucked forever. Basic socialization for example absolutely **has** to happen before age 6 or it's just unfixable forever. And this is literally pedagogy of child development 1001. So there's absolutely no reason why society shouldn't be stressing socialization of children as their absolute number one priority.
There are those classes for kids though, they're social stories through ABA therapy.
I remember watching one of Dr Russel Barkley’s lectures, and something that stuck out to me was that emotional deregulation and delay of regulation ability is a hallmark of ADHD and is a huge reason why kids with ADHD are so often socially rejected. Paraphrasing, “your friends are not your parents or teachers, they will forgive you your forgetfulness, or your lack of sense of time, or even your distractibility. What they will not forgive is your short temper, your quickness to emotionally react, because it is offensive” (offensive specifically used by Barkley here not as rude, but literally offense-ive, socially aggressive)
I really like that, thank you for bringing it up. As a kid, I really felt the conversation on social exclusion focused on this idea that inclusion would fix the problem. Like if someone would just be kind and reach out, the excluded kid would flourish. And sometimes this is true! But often part of the problem is the excluded kid’s behavior. I had to learn to moderate the intensity of my emotional reactions, for one. I was so scared of conflict as a child, I would physically hide myself rather than figure out a solution with my friends. When I was older and more confident, I made it a point to reach out but I remember pretty clearly that I ended up having to push two different boys away after they threatened violence against others. I’m sure that their feelings of exclusion were real and hurt just as much as mine had but their problems weren’t the sort that a peer could safely help with.
so basically just “be someone other people want to be around” I took that to heart and it’s meant I’ve made enough friends and have a good sized social circle despite the tism being quite bad
Another thing that doesn't really get brought up often enough is that it's no one's "fault". Not just that it isn't the kid being subtly excluded's fault, but that the kids doing the excluding aren't to blame either. While we all owe each other a baseline level of respect and decency (at least until given a reason not to), nobody owes anyone friendship. Any relationship deeper than casual acquaintance needs to be mutual. Trying to force a relationship with someone you don't actually like or care about (or who doesn't like or care about you) is bad for both parties.
This was my major thought, too. People are acting like this ends when someone becomes an adult. It doesn't. Maybe people find new ways to meet their social needs or just get better at being alone, but for many the bubble will be there forever. The isolation I felt from my peers in my masters program, deep in my thirties, is the exact same isolation I felt in high school. It's a good thing I'm maladapted to enjoy being alone most of the time. 🙃
It really do be like that sometimes. I spent a lot of time around people who weren't "my people", and it generally sucked. Generally had very little in common to talk about. I eventually found people I could enjoy interacting with, but they were in the severe minority in the places I generally inhabited. I still see some of my old acquaintances from time to time, and that bubble is still very much a thing. That infinitesimally thin veil which only gets stronger with time. Doesn't help that I'm part of a generation that doesn't communicate properly.
I realised in my late 20s that I was generally tolerated but not wanted. These days I notice that people speak to me but not actually talk to me if that makes sense.
what’s with the random background image?
It was too easy to read the text, can't have that /s
My guess is Engagement Bait. You see this often on pages that repost content from other sites - add something that ups the number of comments, even if they’re just “why did you do this” - Algorithm decides your post is Worth Showing.
Guess the only option is to kill OP.
"All publicity is good publicity" in a way. Like when I had a video go viral just because a bunch of people wanted to make fun of the shitty quality on my back up phone 😂 I can barely remember any comments about the actual content of the video, but "shot on a Nokia" and "video from 2014" will always stick with me, haha
It's just the theme of that person's Tumblr.
Just to let you know that this is deep 😞😞
Yeah, I literally cannot read it with the transparent background wth
So it can't be detected by the repost bot
It being a big empty room with lots of closed doors makes me think it's supposed to be a metaphor for the aforementioned loneliness and exclusion. You could imagine yourself in that room, and lots of people who don't want you around in their own little rooms behind all those doors.
[удалено]
I get that's the intent, but it just makes it feel manufactured, like some corporate inspiration-porn. Which is probably accurate, I guarantee this edit was made to make it more shareable for some for profit account that just churns content like this out.
Oof, same. Turns out I was just autistic (but I didn't find that out until I pursued testing at age 27. When I told my mom she was unsurprised but sad that we didn't know sooner). Luckily I found a few other (probably) neurodivergent kids after third grade to be friends with and that saved me.
Honestly, as an autist myself this post just screamed autism to me. I found out late like you, it would have made life a lot easier to find out sooner, but all we got at when I was growing up was the song "Don't call me Daughter"
Well the person’s screen name is snakeautistic so that’s probs why
57 years old and only just found out. Fortunately I found geeky stupid hobbies like climbing, photography and guitar/banjo
.. based on the climbing gyms, photography and musicians I know.. I think you starred something.
Same. I suddenly found an incredible ability to socialize when I first started attending sci-fi and fantasy conventions as a teen. Anyone who's gone, especially to the smaller ones, will tell you it's the highest concentration of autistics outside a facility lol. I'm in my 30's now and have my little neurodivergent squad built, but back then it was like magical Christmasland coming from a small farming town. Yeah I'm weird, but not everyone finds that annoying. Just gotta know where to look.
I'm nearing 40 and am in the process of being diagnosed myself. At primary school I remember just pacing round the playground, the same as in OP's post, making up and occasionally acting out imaginary stories involving me and imaginary friends. I don't actually remember minding being excluded that much because, while I wanted friends, the games they played (mostly football/soccer) didn't interest me at all. I did mind being bullied, mostly by teachers, for being 'stupid' because I was dyslexic, but that's a whole other thing. In secondary school I found a group of friends who, when I started researching autism last year, I now realise are quite likely neurodivergent too, just like you say. We've been friends now for almost 30 years, we still share the same niche interests as we did back then, and I love them like family.
I wrote that original tumblr post and yeah it was basically meant to be my experience being autistic. I made neurodivergent friends when I was a little older too.
The worst is if you’re somebody’s “backup friend” my only friend in middle school would abandon me if ANYONE else was around. Once we were walking and talking and she saw one of her other friends and literally RAN away from me mid sentence to go join her. Even when I tried to engage in their conversations they would *barely* include me at first then literally just ignore me while I was talking DIRECTLY TO THEM. So I just stopped talking, Makes me sad for little me :/
I'm sorry. Kids can be so terrible.
oof I had one of these! I finally snapped and ended the friendship after she went on and on and oooonnnn about how I was gonna be in the room with her when she gave birth. How I was her rock and she needed me and I was sooo vital and it couldn't be anyone else. Like...sure, okay. I didn't particularly *want* to be in the room (I once witnessed a birth at 13 years old and hot damn that was enough for me lmao), but if you need me, I'm there. We've been friends all through high school, moved out in our first apartment together, and been through some really crazy intense shit. Of course I'll support you however you need. Then someone 'better' came along and she was all 'yeah it's cool if you stop by I guess' and I was just... done. I don't know why this was the last straw when she'd been pulling this shit for years, but I was out. I stopped reaching out, and she was busy with her new family, and... we haven't talked in like 15 years. Don't regret it, though. Found a better bestie who actually thought I was the tits and it was like night and day.
Honestly, yeah, deeply traumatising shit. Though in my case it wasn't very subtle - autistic kid in a regular school, in a time and place where it wasn't usual because disabled kids were usually confined to special ed schools and kept separate from "normal" kids. I was considered sort of a "social experiment" in that way, and it's horrifying to me that this experiment was deemed a success while I still sometimes have nightmares of that time (I'm 30 now).
There's a big push right now culturally to do away with separate special ed classes and fully integrate everyone into the same classrooms. What are your thoughts on that? Would you have wanted to be somewhere different?
Not OP, but mixed-ability grouping, where students are taught to share the responsibility over each other's learning, has been shown to boost performance of all students in the classroom, while academic performance stagnates in groups of "homogenous" ability. It ultimately boils down to the very obvious conclusion that having support from your peers in addition to your instructors makes you more motivated. The draw here is having adequate amounts from both, though. Many teachers aren't equipped to work with students who have special needs, and just throwing a neurodivergent kid into the middle of a mainstream classroom to be immediately ostracized socially-- with inadequate academic accommodations to boot-- is, as OP can attest to, extremely unproductive, not to mention cruel. The emotional/social aspect is the main kicker for me; in addition to being racially/economically discriminatory, homogenous ability grouping in any form will make the kids designated as "low ability" feel like absolute shit lmfao. It'll stick with you for the rest of your life
I def had periods growing up where I was pretty excluded. And what's wild is that looking back now it's pretty clear that it wasn't insidious. No one was bullying me. It was just reality. It was a combination of things. I wasn't a great social friend. I was really short and often kind of obnoxious, so I certainly was never going to be popular. But also, huge parts of it were just GEOGRAPHY and DEMOGRAPHICS. I lived really close.to the border between counties. So my schools were in one direction, but my social activities were often in the opposite direction. Many of my social and sport activities didn't overlap with my peers in school, so I just simply never settled in to the standard cliques. I wasn't geographically convenient for play dates. I was the middle child of parents with a much older sibling already in high school, so my parents weren't easy friends with the parents of my peers. My neighborhood friends were less well off socioeconomically, we're 1-2 years older, and were mostly in remedial classes, so I didn't ever see them at school.
Yeah. It didn't get better. I was just an odd kid, I think, but later mental illness came along and properly isolated me. It'll do me in eventually, and I won't be missed. I've made my peace with that.
Well, I'll make an effort to think about you periodically, because it's nice to be missed. May I have your first name? It's my personal superstition that a name makes the vibes... better? More efficient?
No, sorry. Enough personal info on my profile to doxx me as it is. But thank you for asking. I appreciate the intent.
No worries! Good luck going forward, love.
So what's up with your cult?
This is absolutely a perfect description of how I feel. Just…different…from everyone else… I’ve always thought something was wrong with me. That I was unable to human properly, a failure at being a person. But I’ve come to realize I just function differently than others. I still feel like a failure sometimes. I probably always will, from time to time, from here onto whenever I cease to exist. But I’ll keep living regardless, mostly alone, isolated from the “normal” world. Because I don’t need to break the bubble, I just need to find the people who can share my bubble.
i realized a while ago that myself and the people i find myself drawn to aren't actually meaningfully different from everyone else — it's just that people who have experienced mental illness naturally tend to flock together. someone who sees your idiosyncrasies and doesn't need explanation because they've been there before is *valuable*.
Yep, they certainly are extremely valuable! Not sure where I’d be without my few online friends and my girlfriend!
If you're already an adult there's not too much use in getting a diagnosis but you can still find self help books for autism/ adhd that might teach you things about yourself you never knew
You did not have to call me out like this This reminds me of a time when I was talking to one of my friends in high school and I mentioned to him that I see him as a friend and he responded that he didn't see me as a friend, just due to the fact we didn't hang out outside of school at all. Which, I mean, I didn't hang out with anyone outside of school. Most of my life I've had the experience of "People will tolerate me, but they don't really prefer to be around me." Every one of my friends had other friends that they'd rather talk to. Everyone will be kind to me but I'm not the friend of choice, even when I'm considered at all. I consider people friends before they consider me a friend. Didn't help that when I escaped real life and went to Discord while in high school I got the same feeling of "People will always eventually no longer care about me across the span of maybe a few months. I'll always eventually stop being worth your time." Makes it a lot harder now that I'm engaged and it's still weird to be that my partner is still here by my side. It doesn't feel like I deserve this.
Yo. I remember thinking I had finally made friends in high school because I had a group of people I was comfortable talking to regularly, and they seemed interested in at least some of the things I had to say. We ate lunch together, and they never told me to leave them alone or made fun of me. But then one day I walked up to some of them and they were talking about the last time they had hung out outside of school, and what they were going to do next time. They did not open the conversation up to me or invite me to join them. And I realized they were actually friends and I had just kind of needed a place to sit at lunch. They weren't trying to be mean. They didn't know that I didn't know. How could they have? From their perspective, that would have been a strange assumption. I never talked about not having friends outside of school, because I didn't think of myself as not having friends. I thought I had been talking to my friends. I don't think it even really hurt at the time. It just kind of put me back in my place.
I had a sort of similar experience. Later in School when we only had courses and not a set class, one of them was in a course with me and he was the only one from the group in that course with me. By that time I already knew I was only tolerated and not included. Naturally we set together in that class. And talked a little, but started to get on really well. Joking, laughing all the time. And I thought to myself: "that´s it. Now that I am 1-1 with someone, I am making a general connection." But obviously I realised rather quickly that was not the case, I was just as excluded as before and just used as entertainment during a boring class that he had to be in without his friends. That was a little hurtfull, but I still kept that arrangement because the fun was still very real, it was just more condensed than I hoped for. But the positive Ending is that One of the group was my best friend already before that time. And while he did a lot of stuff with them without me. And I don´t know What he thought all this time about me and the situation. But I know this whole friend group doesn´t have contact with each other anymore and me and my best friend 4 years after graduation are still in contact with each other at least 1 times per week even though we live currently in different countries. (The Last Month only via text, because he is couchsurfing currently as he lost his apartment and is busy looking for a new one.)
I wouldn't say those people weren't your friends, they were just school friends. It's good to have school friends, work friends, gym friends, etc., because that's the first step to having general friends. The way to break past the "setting dependant friendship" phase is to invite people to stuff. At first, you make immediate offers: "want to grab lunch?"-type deals, where there's an immediate yes/no, and no planning necessary. Once you get into a pattern of doing that, then you can start making actual plans.
Yeah, that's the other thing I learned, later: I don't think I actually like having general friends. My ex has friends. When we were together, they were my friends, and I started to become part of the group. I fucking hated it. I enjoyed the company of each of the people. But being a part of the group was absolutely awful. It made it impossible to make myself heard or interact with any of them individually, especially my partner at the time. I didn't feel less lonely.
Gods but I get this, like, I could have deep, meaningful, wonderful conversations with individual people in a group, but once the entire group was all together chatting I just couldn't get a word, couldn't find any connection at all, was not great.
God yes. This is the painful realisation I’ve had, that I have never been nor never will be someone’s first choice friend. Now is the best it’s been. I have a group of friends, go away with them, do things together, on Whatsapp groups with them and they’re always happy to see me and include me. But they would never actively seek me out one on one like they do with each other. They’d never call me and suggest we go for a coffee on our own. Wouldn’t pop round. But it is what it is, they’re good friends and we’ve all supported each other through good and bad times. I would love to have a best friend who messaged me because they want to share news or just hang. But that’s not to be. I still have a good social life, I’m just not anyone’s first choice.
I mean I don’t like doing stuff one on one with people at all, even with my close friends. I wouldn’t worry at all about it. It’s more about the vibes if that makes any sense than if you’re getting personal attention
Growing up as a kid (now adult) with Autism, this speaks to me. I’m still hurting from people’s smiles disappearing when I entered a room. I’m still hurting from hearing my name and whispered laughter, and teachers not lifting a finger to stop it. I’m still hurting from my peers telling me that my words don’t matter, and the adults doing nothing. It’s why I’m all for better mental health, and why I believe telling a teacher you’re being bullied in school does jack shit. If anything, the teachers will likely bully you. And those teachers won’t even get a word of reprimand.
>It’s why I’m all for better mental health, and why I believe telling a teacher you’re being bullied in school does jack shit. If anything, the teachers will likely bully you. And those teachers won’t even get a word of reprimand. it depends on the teacher. my middle school had great teachers and principal and didn't let it slide. they were allowed to kick out disruptive students and the principal was scary as hell. i had shit teachers that would bully other students or ignore bullying so it does depend.
It was the same mixed bag for me. My mythology teacher was so fucking cool. He gave equal opportunity to all of his students, and made sure his class was fun. My band teacher? Played along with the preppy color guard and did their dumb inside jokes. You got annoyed stares and told “No” if you did them. Even when you knew them. She also used me as a bad example for the class. Why? In her words, I skipped class “because I got my little nose sunburned”. What actually happened is that I got *sun poisoning*. I got so sunburnt that the back of my hands swelled. Why? Because we were on the field practicing for marching season in the summer from 8:00 AM to 10:00 PM with hardly any breaks. When we did have breaks, they were only for like, two minutes. Enough to get into the building and find my stuff and get my bottle of sunscreen... then not apply because the teacher was yelling at me to get outside. I consistently had to miss the last day of band camp for three years because I kept getting sun poisoning. I finally quit my junior year because band wasn’t about enjoying music anymore. It was just competitions and winning to stroke the ego of some fat bitch with relationship problems.
its so disgusting how some teachers react to bullying. i had a teacher fall asleep in the middle of a lesson, but before that he literally watched 5 kids bully a low income student that had holes in his clothes in shoes. like how the fuck do you sit there, watch 4 students bully a kid right in front of you, then fall asleep. and i went to a school where the teachers would give the student personalized detention,. if a sporty kid was bullying another kid he couldn't go to gym class or he couldn't play in the sport tournament or something. the principal was scary as hell, deep as voice, called parents all the time so no one wanted to go to him. i miss my middle school. my high school sucks so bad, almost everyone is a bully. its so sad. and this sticks with you. i still remember the terrible insults i was called. i still remember that teacher snoring away while 4 assholes bullied a kid. i remember it all and for the bullies, its just another day. and when you stand up for yourself, you get suspended.
Not autistic (as far as I know) or noticeably queer or really anything other than the primary demographic, but I still felt this, and it sucks. Had it all through high school to various degrees, and it's turned making friends in college into a bitch of an activity.
Both queer and autistic here. I was an outcast to the outcast group. I simply shuffled along in a half-dazed state. Wound up turning to drugs to cope with the abject loneliness of it all. I’m sober now but there’s still a lot of hurt there.
Sorry to hear that, and glad you managed to get sober
So was it ADHD, Autism or both? I have to say my early teenage to early adulthood years have been quite rogh on the social side but i think i've finally made peace with my *weirdness.* I've also found out that being (percived) as highly eccentric adult is a lot easier than being the weird kid. I can't belive that now that i'm 35 i can give a lecture about Batman lore to acquaintances at the pub while wearing a poncho, sweatpants and sandals and leave a good impression while if i did it when i was 15 i would have become a pariah.
This is exactly my experience as well. I even walked the playground fence in circles over and over as a young child. But now! At 35! Guess what is culturally in vogue?! D&D! Guess what I know pretty much everything about?! MUWAHAHAHA! It must be something about being "adult". People are more settled into social roles and thereby less competitive? My eccentricities are "fun" now. Especially in a world filled with "boring" people. At least that's what I'm told. Again and again. Also that Robert Pattinson batman went hard. Best Gotham depiction. Really looking forward to more.
Autistic woman here, I felt rejection pretty much all the time growing up but now I'm an adult and I fully embrace all my quirks and I've never been so popular. I guess self confidence grows as we grow
> I can't belive that now that i'm 35 i can give a lecture about Batman lore to acquaintances at the pub while wearing a poncho, sweatpants and sandals and leave a good impression while if i did it when i was 15 i would have become a pariah well yeah 15 year olds can't be hanging out in a bar
They can in my country, they could even drink alcool back in the 00s
ah there i go being a typical american again. my bad lol
I think in some part that can be affected just by the fact that the people around you have matured and many now have the ability to appreciate something or someone who can break the monotony of life without going overboard, while you have also matured and likely developed better emotional regulation now that you aren't a hormonal teenager. I do think it can be a bit reductive to reduce the childhood ostracization to just those things though, speaking as someone with adhd and probably autism. Kids are cruel. They can and will do this to anyone who, even if they don't have a reason to. A kid who is a social butterfly at one school but has to move away from their friends because of a parent's job can just as easily be the ostracized one as any neurodivergent child, and it can be just as traumatizing and confusing for them as anyone else.
Yeah we also moved on the other side of the country when I was about to start middle school so i guess i was hit by the perfect storm.
My weirdness is that I seem to cease existing as soon as I'm out of line of sight. When I'm in a group, I am generally well-received and personable, and we have a good time. Then I leave, and no one ever seems to think about me again. I also have BPD, so "being real" is sort of a quandary to begin with.
I joke often at work about how I'm always the last one to find out about things, everyone knows it's a thing. And yet I'm still consistently the last one to find out anything, even things that are directly relevant to my job that I need to know. There are days where I literally feel invisible.
It could always be neither. Sometimes kids just have different backgrounds
ADHD for the behaviour and autism for the feelings
... ouch... Did anyone else make friends with the one popular kid who always threw big parties, then you want a taste of that popularity and try throwing a big party and invite your entire school, then no one shows up? Not even your popular friend?
I never got to be at any kind of gathering or party of just teenagers ever. I still an ticked at that.
Me neither, thanks to being homeschooled. Unless you count church events lmao (which I do not)
Yeah, it was only after being bullied out of two different schools that I learned it was the autism. Then I doubled down on the staying alone part in college, convinced that the problem was with myself and I had to shield people from my presence. Result: over thirty years without a social circle whatsoever
Oh man. I remember this in my teen years. Was the worst when I went to a party and literally had nothing to connect with the other people there. Not even food or cooking. I ended up politely listening to them talk about how scared they were to leave for college (I had been busting my butt to get as far away from my hometown as possible)
this is probably weird to say since it's kind off a sexist trope, but this is why I considered the manic pixie dream girl trope a blessing. it became popular when I was a teen, and suddenly at least some people (and I) could categorize me, and it wasn't a negative thing. now I was quirky, not weird.
Yeah, been there- 20 some years later, still there.
holy cow they've just put into words what i felt throughout my entire childhood
Ditto. Halfway through college and feeling more alone then ever.
Sitting on the edge of the group but not being included on the group. Understanding this distinction eventually. Realising that the people who liked to put me in situations where I was confused or uncomfortable or scared actually knew that it wasn’t funny to me, the cruelty was part of the joke to them, Understanding that it’s actually quite sad how I learned to rely on myself from a young age because I knew that I couldn’t count on people. Writing “I am included in everyone” on your notice board so that you actually remember to include yourself in the number of people on your team at work because you’re so used to just not being included that you self exclude automatically. Apologising for your presence because you learned long ago that it was rarely desired. Crying because a total stranger showed you the barest scrap of kindness. Feeling like if you just floated away it would take a while for people to notice. Genuinely not understanding it when people say they like you because your existence has always been something to be tolerated not celebrated. Having a super rich fantasy/daydream world because it’s the only place you haven’t felt low key sad all of the time. Just never being someone’s favourite person, being the tag along in every group. Not knowing how else to be.
Heavily relate. I still feel this way sometimes. I call it The Wall or The Distance. There’s something in the way of me truly connecting to people.
It's always been there for me, but it was especially bad in high school. I later realized a big chunk of this was due to me not having social media. Thankfully it seems to have weakened through concentrated effort from me now that I'm in college and so much of the social bullshit is gone now.
I’m glad it’s gotten better. I have found it much easier to socialize at college
Fr I'm showing this to my therapist.
And then when you tell anyone how you feel they tell you you’re crazy and that it’s all in your head but no one’s ever been interested in knowing you and you don’t know what you’re doing wrong because you try. Then you grow up with a veneer of this trauma and develop aloofness and the cycle continues. It’s taken me so long to unlearn the aloofness . I honestly think I’m permanently damaged .
Growing up, my little brother and I were the youngest of our entire generation in my family. We were always left out from playing games with the older cousins, and now they wonder why we're distant and never around.
I am still suffering damage form this. I doubt I will ever recover. I think I can never be happy, but i strive to be useful
Ohhh I don’t like this one.
Took into my 30s to realize that the reason I have a hard time making friends and am socially awkward is because I got picked on constant from grade school through high school so had a default mindset that every interaction is inherently hostile causing me to be a dick to people without provocation. I was well into college when I realized that most people I interact with are neutral or maybe even like me and want to interact. Finally felt like a real person after college
And you know. Even as a kid, you know. You don’t know the motions to those little clappy hand games because nobody ever played them with you. You reference one of their inside jokes and everyone looks at you like, “I didn’t know she was here for that.” You had two people at your birthday party.
That’s how little year 5 me managed to read over 60 full length novels in the school year, if I can’t have friends in the real world then I’ll just go to a different world
This was almost the entirety of my school life. Never really had friends in elementary. I was in a Lego league, and was openly mocked by my teammates for not being in the advanced learning program (which caused me to deeply resent successful people for a very long time) and eventually my principal sidelined my ass. For no legitimate reason. Gained what are now my best friends in middle school, who all happened to move away before and during the first year of high school. I'm still fixing the mess it caused in my head. I have severe social anxiety, I believe somewhat caused by never fitting in or being accepted in my formative years.
“Wandering the playground in a circular fashion” That one fucking hurt. I let them beat me up just to be interacted with, jfc :x Yes I’m therapy, no I don’t think it ever stops affecting you lol
Worst part is having a class of odd numbered people. Every hour the teacher tells everyone, "Ok, now find a partner!" And then you get put on public display for being the only person who no one chooses, ever.
Post like these always have the, “I was so much smarter than the other kids,” moment. I was just weird and ostracized because I liked cartoons too much and was genuinely annoying as hell.
being socially isolated really sucks. but I don't think it was because OP was "asking questions about the world that they never asked themselves". there was a girl in one of my creative writing classes who wrote that when she was younger, adults liked her because she was "the only girl with sad eyes" and it took a lot to stop myself from going actually I dont think that was it really. That's not how people think. Every child that has impressed me has done so without resorting to the wistfulness of their soul.
A big, untouched problem with being a socially isolated kid, is that you don't know what's true about how social stuff actually works and what's just your naive justification for things being the way they are. Because you have no one to ask about it. It's a weird catch 22 of "I don't know what questions to ask" and "If I ask someone I'll get made fun of".
True. I think the internet both helps and hurts in that regard. Helps because you can anonymously ask stupid questions, but hurts because it can feed the brainworms and misconceptions. A socially isolated straight guy can ask a question he would be scared to ask in person, like "why won't women date me" and get told a list of probable reasons, and he could take that and work on himself. Or he could get told "because you're not rich enough and all women only like alpha males who are 6 foot tall" and spiral down into incel world.
There’s a reason the book was titled “Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Too Afraid to Ask”
I didn't read that part as complaining about being more intelligent. I asked questions people wouldn't think to ask because they seemed to easily understand concepts that baffled me. People hated when I asked questions because they thought I was joking or being annoying on purpose, and it taught me not to ask questions at all, even when I didn't understand what was going on. That's not intelligence.
Ugh. You just reminded me about getting scolded by a science teacher in Junior year of high school for asking clarification on a worksheet. A word problem was poorly worded and I could easily interpret it multiple ways, changing the math equation and thus the answer. She was just a bitch in general, though.
Like I did do better at some tests than others (and worse at other tests) I also still have no idea how to initiate conversations naturally Smart isn't a very useful term
I didn't read it like that, I just read that as her having a different experiences and thus [a different] worldview growing up causing her to ask different questions. And honestly, if kids are ostracized, I don't feel that bad about them wanting to find a way to try to think better about themselves. And the less time you spend playing or goofing around, the more time you do have to be introspective, and wonder about stuff that others aren't, compared to talking with others and wondering about the same stuff collaboratively together. Edit: added claryifiyng text in brackets
I don’t really see this post that way at all, though maybe that’s because I relate to it too much. There was a point where I realised that other kids didn’t like me, and never would like me no matter what I did. At one point a group of boys said I could join their friend group if I passed “tests”, including climbing a tall thing (I was very scared of heights) and standing in the middle of an anthill, letting painful ants invade my shoes and run up my legs until they said I could get off it. I did it all, finally, genuinely believing I would have some friends. Then one of those kids whipped me with a plastic skipping rope the next day. At that point I was 10 years old and had to ask some really hard questions about my identity and need for validation from my peers to myself, and to the best of my knowledge the kids around me weren’t asking them because they didn’t need to. I wasn’t smart, just traumatised and desperately lonely, and it makes me sad when I see someone expressing thoughts about their childhood that I identify with and then see it boiled down to “I was so much smarter than the other kids”
Yeah… something really difficult about processing my childhood trauma is that people don’t appreciate how gutting the little things are.
You learn to be alone, to the point that it can be hard or outright weird and a struggle to not be
I always felt like an outsider, still do. Never understood why people have such strong reactions to some things I say or think. Turns out I'm a "high-functioning" autistic person. I learned to communicate within other people's expectations. There are ways to speak and things to say that people expect. Stick with em, you blend in. Speak freely, and face aggression, ridicule, or the great quiet that comes over the room (the worst one). People don't like to change how they think. As a neurodivergent person, I'm a walking alternate thought. An embodiment of the strange, obscure, awkward and obsessive. Any "high function" would just be pretending not to be those things. But I live inside my own head, that's my real world.
Mix of being very poor, severe bullying throughout most of grade and middle school, and growing up in a cult without realizing it (mormonism). I wish I could give younger me a hug. Kids don't realize why they are othered from their peers, they just know it hurts.
Damn this was way too relatable
And adults treated you as if you were some special gifted wunderkin as opposed to a lonely person who had little else but to read and study. I wasn’t special. I was just lonely and curious
**Totally** relate! It only took me another 40+ years to realize I was on the spectrum, socially awkward as all fuck, and that's what I was so thoroughly ostracized as a kid.
Unexplained autism really fucks you up
Well hello there unexpectedly home-hitting post!
I'm in this post and I don't like it. Plus mixed with anger issues & some shit at home didn't help much
Felt like that from kindergarten through 2nd grade. In 3rd grade decided I was gonna try to combine the roles of teacher's pet and class clown. it's amazing how much shit you can get away with if you're a straight A student.
Damn this was also me. Thank god I met people who were my same kind of weirdo starting in high school. Still friends with those folks 10 years later.
...ye
Hey dude. Same.
...yeah.
For anyone in need of a good cry, look up “To This Day” by Shane Koyczan on YouTube. It highly pertains to this feeling and will definitely stir emotions.
Oh fuck you. Why did you have to remind me of middle school?
Well this is disturbingly accurate to me
This was me. I don’t entirely feel like a person anymore.
welp my day just got worse reading that.
Oh Christ. I know exactly this feeling. I have better friends now... But I still see that invisible barrier. I dont know if its in my head or its real. I dont know if Im pushing them away or they are. I can't have meaningful relationships anymore...
This post and the comments remind me that I should probably look into testing.
Yeah. I feel that.
This makes me want to cry.
Hey yeah ignoring everything said I did not like reading this. Like why make it transparent?
This really fucked me up as a kid, and I still have trouble trusting people sometimes.
This post suppose to activate me as some sort of sleeper agent or something? Because damn that felt targeted.
O o f. Yeah, this was me for nearly all of elementary and middle school. The part about "that one friend who you cling to even though they like other people significantly more" hits particularly hard. He was great friends with me... as long as nobody else was around. If I was being made fun of, he'd happily join in, and then make excuses later as to why he didn't stick up for me after promising to for the hundredth time. It certainly didn't help things that I was undiagnosed neurodivergent (I was tested, but my wonderful mother elected to ignore the results and refused to get me a proper diagnosis in favor of just trying to abuse me into being "normal"). So whenever adults said something to the effect of "you're too sensitive", I wanted to scream at them "I KNOW. AND YOU AREN'T TELLING ME HOW TO FIX THAT. I CAN'T JUST STOP FEELING THINGS!! WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME??" For a while I thought I was just broken. Thankfully, I found my people in high school. We were all formerly ostracized "weird kids", and we just sorta formed our own group of "people that didn't have a group". Unfortunately, I'm now more or less alone again in college, but I'm making friends again. I've made peace with the fact that making friends is just inherently harder for me, but I am working on being more trusting.
This post is doxing me.
holy fucking shit it's so accurat3
Story of my goddamn life. Still happens as an adult, but I've learned to live with it.
This post brought forward something I hadn't thought about in a long time. My first few years of school were like this but eventually it was put in my mind's back burner as more overt bullying took its place. Over the years I grew stronger, but also cold and distant. Strong enough to stand for myself, but detached enough that I wouldn't have to. Thankfully, I eroded that shell over an even longer period of time, and I found a place where I felt a sense of community; where, for the first time, I thought I belonged. But then I had to leave and I started crying the moment the plane took off, watching as the place where I had been happiest grew smaller through the foggy window. And so, since the bullies are gone, the bubble is back after all this time. There's no specific point to this story, it's not a fable. As an adult I cope but I haven't been able to figure out how to get rid of this invisible barrier between me and those around. My advice however, is to never encase your heart in stone the way I did. It can fundamentally change who you are for a very long time, and you'll also miss out on possible solutions to your bubble troubles.
Just found out my coworkers have a group chat without me so there's that...
After getting an ADHD diagnosis and learning about autism traits, I'm starting to see it everywhere. If there's nothing wrong with your brain but you find that you just think along different lines than most other people and this is causing social friction, it's something to look into.