Creatures Caves

Well, I was in the same boat as you Missmysterics (and a lot of people in this thread). I was scared of social interaction, and the whole thing of "exploitative friends that act like they don't understand to get their way" rings painfully true. To be fair I'm still frightened of a lot of social interaction. But I've definitely improved in the last five or so years.

I don't have aspergers. For a long time I was led to believe that I had aspergers or that there was just generally something mentally wrong with me by someone who had a vested interested in keeping me antisocial. That person was my mom. She had something wrong with her herself, probably should have never had kids, and ended up doing a lot of mental harm to me that I'm still unraveling today. I was a huge social butterfly when I was real little, but then I started withdrawing severely and getting incredibly anxious in social situations, probably because of the abuse stuff that was happening. Growing up in that kind of environment can "wire" your brain in a bad way, plus I was homeschooled and kinda isolated for a good portion of my life.

I started going on here and internet forums like it because I guess I really did need some sort of social life (funny enough, today marks the day I actually signed up for this forum so I guess it's fitting to say this now). So not only was I experiencing this "life stress" and isolated from homeschooling, but my earliest lessons in socialization took place online. Luckily on here people were nice but honest, but it got really bad outside of that.

Anyway, my life changed in a lot of ways around 15. I started going to community college, I joined up in the theater program where I took the risk of sending in a play and I actually impressed people. Like, for the longest time I'd just sorta been holed up writing to myself, and the first time I get out there and put myself out there people actually like my work. I met my current SO through that college, who I honestly owe a lot of good things in my life to. He's a social butterfly who encouraged me to talk to people and introduced me to some of our now closest friends. He helped me realize that the stuff that happened to me at home wasn't my fault - I mean, I sorta knew it was already, but having someone else validate it is something different.

More stuff happened in my life. My parents are now divorced and my mom has been completely out of the picture for almost three years now. Everything in my life has gotten so much better honestly. She had been forcing me into a major that I didn't want, now I'm studying what I want. She hated my SO, and most of my friends, now I don't have to worry about what she thinks. I still have problems, I still make mistakes, but I'm learning to be ok with that. And I now am part of a group of really close knit friends who I would do just about anything for, and we have done just about anything for each other.

This was a long rambling thing but I think part of the message here is: Don't be afraid to pursue what you love. And don't be afraid of yourself. If you pursue your passions, you're gonna run into people who share those passions. And, there you go, that's how you meet your friends. The next step is to talk to people, to not be afraid. And I think that best comes with the understanding that all the things that you think are weird about yourself are things that other people have in one form or another. I mean this in terms of personality quirks. There's a reason why a common stage anxiety trick is to picture the audience without any clothes on - a lot of social worries that we have involve putting people on a higher level than us automatically, when we're mostly all at the same level.

And if someone doesn't like you, well, they probably would have made a poor friend anyway.

There's the issue of manipulative friends. It's painful, but I think being able to avoid this only comes with experience.

Boy this got long.