I know I'm kinda leaping back to the beginning of the thread, here, but since I relate to a lot of things in the quoted post (even if I'm no good at conveying that), and because my brain is, like Rin's, unable to communicate anything coherent on its own, I need something to work from if I'm going to make any sense at all. Especially this:
micechasekittens wrote:I doubt anyone would read this, but thank you to anyone who does.
I don't know what your reasons were for saying that, but in my case, it's because people not paying attention to me is the norm. Well, honestly, it's pretty much the only thing that ever happens; or at least it seems that way most of the time. It's like some sort of forcefield that makes people pay attention to everything except me; even when I go out of my way to get someone's attention, it usually has no effect. So, I mean, obviously I'm posting this because I hope someone will read it, or bits and pieces of it anyway since it's so freakin' long, but I can't say that I expect that to happen.
micechasekittens wrote:I used to mirror Hanako exactly. Though I didn't have any physical scarring, my prominent nose was the center of attention. My peers teased me over it. Been told on a number of occasions when I was little that I'd be cute if not for my big nose. People wouldn't know my name but know me as the big nose girl. In addition, I was always teased due to being quiet and shy. I had rocks thrown at me, been bullied by teachers, and I never could make friends due to moving around so much.
In elementary school, every single kid in my grade (more or less) bullied me because I was short. At least, that's the best explanation for the teasing I was able to come up with at the time; really, I think it was more because they all just mutually decided, since I was decently weird, that I was one of the people they needed to universally gang up on to make themselves feel more socially important. I had a few semi-friends before then, but I never really knew any of them all that well, and never saw them again, for the most part, after starting elementary school. None of the bullies ever did anything violent--well, they tried to once, but I ran off and the school nearly suspended me because I had pushed one of the two-heads-taller-than-me guys out of the way--but their persistent teasing made socializing pretty much impossible, so I just kept being shy and playing by myself, which only made people tease me even more. There were a couple of rotten-egg teachers, too, though they've mostly been blocked out of my memory.
Middle school and high school were a bit better, and I made a few "friends," though I never really liked them all that much, and I eventually figured out that none of them really cared about me at all. My "best friend," for example, never really did anything to stop one of his friends from being an asshole to me constantly, abandoned me for a year or so over something arbitrary, and was kind of an asshole himself towards a lot of people, especially, appropriately enough, mentally disabled people. Which is pretty ironic, since he was bipolar (though I only know this from overheard conversations, just like everything else I knew about anyone, since no one ever actually told me anything) and I had/have Asperger's (which I didn't find out until halfway through college). But I guess it's kinda like gay-bashing politicians who turn out to be gay themselves...
I never really had trouble academically, though. No, wait, that's wrong. I mostly half-assed things in school until some random assignment came back with D's on it and my parents got all righteous about me needing to do well in school. So afterward I did...kind of ridiculously well, considering I didn't really care about all the A's I was getting beyond the fact that it seemed like I needed to do that. And that simultaneously uncaring and obsessive attitude just got worse over time, probably because with my consistently depressing social life (more depressing in retrospect, not less, since I understand better now just how completely friendless I really was back then) and increasingly difficult classes, there wasn't much else I could focus on.
I ended up going to a kinda-fancy college that I didn't expect to get into just because it seemed like what I was supposed to do, and wandered into a difficult science-type major because I couldn't think of anything I actually wanted to do, and I had some vague (and wrong) idea that it would lead to something I wanted to do once I graduated. But, since I still didn't know how to make friends with people or figure out what I wanted to do, I just continued studying obsessively. Except that's not true either, that's just what my parents thought I was doing because I only called them to get help on math problems that I was trying to do at the last minute. I did study, but very little of the time, yet I was still paranoid about not getting good grades. Paradoxical, I know, but just about everything about me is like that. One of the reasons I don't get along with people very well, probably. It's hard to talk about myself when everything I say sounds self-contradictory, and I can't do small talk at all...
Anyway, in my second year of college I unexpectedly fell in love with a girl in my dorm...suite...thing. Or, well, it kinda seems like that's what happened. It came up so suddenly and seemed so contrived that I feel like I just imagined the feeling unintentionally, pretended to be in love to see what it was like, out of suppressed boredom. Or maybe that's just what I tell myself. In either case, nothing ever really came of that. She didn't feel the same way, and hadn't even noticed how I felt before I told her, though one of her friends had figured it out. She got so uncharacteristically clinical-sounding about the whole thing, always repeating the phrase "can't reciprocate your feelings"...never quite understood that.
About half a year after she moved off to some unknown new campus residence, I completely lost my limited ability to concentrate on school, since I was thinking too much about my non-starter of a relationship and the fact that I had no idea why I was even doing all this studying in the first place. I had to drop out and skip most of the semester before summer break because I could barely consider the idea of even looking at my textbooks. After I came back, it took an extra year to finish because I could only handle a couple of classes at a time (and still managed to fail one of them). I had to commute--a couple of hours each way--for the first year because I wasn't enough of a social butterfly to convince any of the numerous apartment landlords I visited with my mother to give me a chance.
I haven't had anything resembling a relationship before or after the incident above (it was about 4 years ago). I went on OKCupid for a little while at some point, but couldn't bring myself to care enough to keep up a conversation with anyone. I guess I still wish I could have something like a girlfriend, especially after playing KS, but it seems impossible for someone like me, with the social skills of a dead raccoon and less romance experience than you would believe possible, to pull it off. (Specifically, I've been attracted to exactly two people in my entire life; one of these attractions was probably imaginary, and the other definitely was, because the feeling went away quicker than it appeared. Never kissed or been kissed, never asked anyone on a date, only been asked on a date once by someone I disliked who was probably messing with me, never even held hands with anyone my age. I mean, nowhere to go but up, I suppose, but it's hard to do that in a wingless airplane.)
micechasekittens wrote:When I was seven, I tried drowning myself only to be resuscitated back to life. That wasn't the last of my attempts. Every few years I'd make another attempt of some time leading up to my hanging when I was a teen (which I had blacked out from).
There's various reasons why I haven't done things like these, but they're not very good reasons. Still hoping I'll find one of those elusive good reasons...
micechasekittens wrote:I fear no one will understand me. My few friends I lost due to being so depressed that it was all too much for them. I feel like I am hideous though I fall head over heels for girls that look like me, long hair, glasses, frail, small chest, and bookwormish style. For a visual image, I look a lot like Yomiko Readman. I only wear skirts and dresses due to wanting to dress as pretty as possible to make up for my ugly nose. Only compliment I receive is the fact that I'm only 50 kg (112 lbs) despite being 5 foot 7, this reinforces my disinterest in eating (my crazy metabolism burns off the two meals a day I eat).
The last part is funny, in a way, because I'm almost exactly the same height and weight, but only ever get criticized for it, probably because I'm a guy. Hooray for double standards, I guess. I eat pretty irregularly, but it never seems to affect my weight or energy level at all.
I'm pretty much certain, at this point, that no one understands me, and most likely no one ever will. There's a lot of reasons for that: I'm bad at communicating things, people *cough*parents*cough* are quick to assume they understand something about me when they're really completely wrong and once they decide their minds cannot be changed, I still don't feel like I understand myself all that well so I constantly change my mind about things which only makes the previous problem worse, I keep a lot of things hidden from everyone, I write really long sentences, etc.
Of course, I don't understand other people any more than they understand me. Or maybe I do, but not in the same way. I can figure out the way they behave, but the way they act so consistently and predictably is strange and almost creepy. And I'm sure it creeps you out to hear me describing people that way. I can't really help it, though. Maybe it's just because no one has ever opened up to me enough for me to feel like I understand them in a deeper way. There's probably something to that, since fictional people (written by other humans), and people in threads like this one, seem a little more real to me than people I know in the real world. But...it's very hard to make any friends or get to know people, with so many things in the way. Fiction and things on the internet seem like an entirely separate dimension from reality.
And, well, the internet's not always such a lovely place either. I used to hang around on the XKCD forums a bit (different username), but that kinda deteriorated because they all started calling me out for being "wrong" about things, often when I wasn't and always more rudely than they would to other people. I think I posted something like this diatribe on there; most people just decided I was an unlikeable jerk and told me so in a hypocritically unlikeable jerk sort of way. One of the admins harassed me about my harmless attempt to avoid their verbal bullying, which was pretty much the last straw, so I gave up and left. Actually, my "you're wrong" aura has manifested itself in a lot of other places, like my parents trying to deny my claims of not enjoying something they forced me into doing. How they think they know my feelings better than me, I can't really guess, so I can only blame the aura. Or maybe it's just an argumentative-smart-person thing.
micechasekittens wrote:I was always alone and, like Hanako, had my own games to distract myself when I began to feel self conscious and overwhelmed by the world. I loved going on the swings too and still do to this day. I would usually close my eyes and daydream I was someone and somewhere else. Needless to say, that got me teased a lot in elementary because kids assumed that I was scared. I just wanted to block out the world around me. Like Hanako, I retreated to the sanctity of the library. I had a spot right in the non fiction section by the books no one wanted to look at. Being a girl who adored archeology and history didn't win me any friends with my peers. My diary was filled with stories of my plush animals (collectively called the Plushie Brigade) and I having adventures together as they were my only friends. Leaving it in my open backpack in the second grade was a horrible mistake. At least they didn't see the diary I wrote years later about liking other girls.
Because of all the teasing I got in elementary school, I also retreated into a lot of imagination-games, which of course just made people tease me even more, probably because the games looked weird to them. I had a lot of stuffed animals and things, too, which were involved in some of the games, sometimes with my siblings. I was way too self-conscious to have a diary or journal, though, and it took me a long time to learn how to write personal things at all. I remember a stupidly important standardized test in elementary school that almost got me pegged into remedial English, because the prompt was too personal and I couldn't write about it very well (my parents, as usual, didn't see why it was hard for me). And given how hard it was to write about something tangentially personal, you can probably imagine the difficulty level of talking out loud to people about myself (namely, so nigh-impossible that I never really did it at all until college; I still have trouble, as this rambly mess shows).
I read sometimes, but only nonfiction for many years, because my dad refused (and still refuses) to read fiction of any kind and I just imitated that for some stupid reason. I eventually moved past that and read some fiction, fortunately, though at this point I wish I'd decided to do everything my dad didn't do instead of many of the things he did, because maybe then I wouldn't hate my current situation so much, or feel like I wasted all my schooling years working on things I didn't really care about...I feel like I should have majored in music or something, or gone to some other college, or just not gone at all because it seemed like such a waste of time and such a degrading experience.
micechasekittens wrote:The most ironic thing is that I fear of letting go of my depression. It is all I know. I've never been a happy or carefree kid so it makes me really sad when I see kids running around so carefree and my peers telling happy stories of their childhoods. Who am I without my depression? It is like a comforting blanket which makes moving past my past difficult. I've made huge steps to no longer have as great as social anxiety. I can even joke about being the princess of social awkwardness now. I tend to push people away though I'm now accepting more invites and stepping out of my comfort zone.
I still don't feel like I've done all that much in terms of moving beyond all this, though getting into anime about a year ago helped a lot, since it got me interested in going to anime conventions. That kinda confused my parents, since going to cons tends to involve being around a lot of people I don't know...but then, they don't really comprehend how much I've hated most of the things I've had to spend my time on over the years, or the fact that various anime-type things have been some of the first things I've ever actually liked or felt connected to, or even the fact that large crowds of strangers are actually much easier for me to deal with than individual people I've known long enough to get sick of. It's not really that I don't like people, I just don't like people who are jerks, and I've only recently discovered that people who are not jerks actually exist. Though it's still pretty hard for me to get people's attention, especially in a noisy crowd, since I seem to be unable to talk loudly.
micechasekittens wrote:People think my seldom seen smile is really cute, but I hate it because to me it looks like a knowing conniving smirk like I had just slipped poison into someone's drink. I also hate hate hate my voice, it is a bit lower due to my big nose being broken when I was little so I sound chronically sick. People say I have the most soothing voice they have heard, a voice that makes them feel comforted and safe. Wish I could even kinda sing like most girls can which is why I took up piano, all it takes is a tap of a finger to hit notes that my voice never would.
I also don't smile much, and when I do it around other people it usually feels fake. Interacting with people often feels like a really boring game that I nonetheless have to play, even though I don't get the rules very well and usually feel like I'm just playing along to convince others that I'm not a creep or mute or something. Actual games with people are easier to deal with, because the rules are understandable and there's less of a need for me to figure out what to say out of a seemingly infinite list of possibilities. Sort of like Hanako, I think.
My voice always sounds really dumb to me when recorded, which makes me hate watching home videos or otherwise listening to recordings of myself. I can kinda sing, but whether it's good or bad is really hard to predict. I guess I could try taking lessons, but since I pretty much hate anything school-like now because of all the negative associations, that isn't really an option. Besides, I feel like the unpredictability of it fits my personality; the parts of it people never see, that is.
I really can't play instruments, though. My parents forced me into taking piano lessons when I was in middle school, which I hated, and hated more every year. It's hard for me to learn to move my fingers intuitively--typing is hard, and it's still frustratingly hard for me to write properly, both of which are because I can't help thinking too much about what I'm doing. So, playing a piano was hard, I didn't get much better over time, my mom would get mad at me every time I came out of a lesson in a bad mood because of hating school and hating the lessons, as if that was my fault somehow...you get the idea.
At least there was an upside to getting overwhelmed with schoolwork later in high school, because it gave me an excuse to drop the piano lessons. But it's still annoying because music is one of the few things I actually like, but I didn't even realize that until college because the stupid piano lessons (among other things) made me hate most music for a long time, and I don't feel like I could ever learn to write or play music decently with my lack of (positive) experience, even though that's one of the few things I think I might kinda like doing. In theory. More likely, given the way my life apparently works, I'll just end up stuck in some job I can't stand because I didn't know how to look for anything else.
The worst thing, really, is that I don't feel like I have much right to complain about all this since my life technically isn't all that bad. You know, the old "but children are starving in Africa so stop whining" argument. I mean, my life would probably be okay for a normal person, who is capable of socializing and doing things for themselves and so on. I'm just not that kind of person, though, and it's starting to seem like I can't really get past that.
I think someone mentioned the saying about only regretting the things you haven't done, rather than the things you have...but honestly, the only thing I regret not doing is not getting into anime ten+ years ago instead of just one year ago. My life in the meantime might have been a lot less pointless. In all other cases of regret...far too many of them...I regret that I did something instead of nothing, because if I'd done nothing, I might have found something worthwhile or at least non-damaging to do. But I guess I'm just backwards like that.
I guess that's probably enough of a text-mass to intimidate anyone away from actually reading any of it...well. Not what I was going for, but there you go. There's more...
much more...but I think that's plenty. Sorry about the ridiculous length and, er, pervasive cynical tone.
The Criticism is not here and thats what I love about it.