No interest in making friends. CW: CSA
I have always been a chore and a pain to put up with. In my youth, it was my aggression, impulsive nature, and a slurry of other exhausting traits which I now know to be caused by NVLD, but which could be mistaken for being aloof since I was a fairly good student in everything but Math and Science. I don’t blame the adults around me for not picking up on a disability sooner, the squeaky wheel gets the grease after all, and I was very polite to adults.
For the majority of my childhood I was bullied, quite a lot. For nearly everything you can imagine. My height, my weight, my face, my teeth, my hair, my ethnicity, my voice, my interests, my beliefs, my taste, and of course my idiosyncrasies. There was nothing I could do to escape it, and making fun of, or hitting the bullies back only ensured a teacher would reprimand me, because I had learned to always hit them where it hurts.
Growing up, I had two friend groups I was part of, but neither liked me much. Both had separate, much more active group chats with everyone but me. Both would go out and do things without inviting me. Both would send pictures to me of the event, sometimes as it was happening. Both used me for my labor potential, and both seemed to only keep me around as the butt of jokes.
My more athletic friends stopped talking to me in high school because they preferred another kid’s adult brother who despised me, to me. The nerdier friend group played a more insidious game of psychological hokey-pokey, where they’d let me in some times, and take me out others, until they decided they liked someone wwho despised me more, and kicked me out from junior year until two years into college.
CW: CSA
>!And through all this, from the age of fourteen, I was constantly putting myself out for older men to play with, both online and in the real world. Occasionally for money, but usually out of a desperation to explore my sexuality “safely” (meaning without risk of being outed.) and to be appreciated for anything at all. As a young teenager, I didn’t think anything of it. It felt good to be wanted, to be called pretty. To be a woman. As an adult, I know these men knew what they were doing. They knew how old I was and took advantage of me. Some had enough shame to block me after they had their fun, most did not. By the time I reached adulthood, my body count was magnitudes higher than the average. There were many times I courted death, and a few times I got luckier than I deserve, for nothing more than a fleeting smidgen of worth.!<
Just a month before I was due to depart for college, I suffered a traumatic experience at the hands of a friend so severe it rendered me selectively mute to this day, and inflicted deep scars. Before that, I was so excited to get to college. To “find my people.” To finally fit in somewhere and be wanted. For years I dreamed, literally dreamed, of the day I would move away and meet likeminded people. It was a fool’s errand from the start. Those people never existed.
After that, I still wanted to go to college, but I lost nearly all interest in knowing other people. Worse than that, I came to fear nearly every person I saw. The only exception were hookups, who I never wanted to talk to when we met, and who I would only see from behind sunglasses and a mask, in the dark of their car parked under the evening sky. No names were exchanged, no love was given. Purely transactional.
My family thought my newfound hermetic streak was for no reason or entirely illogical, and implored me to join clubs or activities, but they didn’t and to this day do not understand a simple truth I have internalized and made gospel. Camaraderie is a liability. What is a human if not a random agent, working in its own self interest? Most people are unpredictable. Quick to anger. Scared by and of things and people they don’t understand, and it easier to destroy something than understand it. They especially don’t want to be around someone who can’t read their expressions, can’t parse their sarcasm, can’t tell when they’re joking, and who is overly emotional and talks to much about shit they don’t care about. At a certain point I had to accept that while a disability may not define everyone, it does define me. Trying to live my life like a normal person is not possible. I am not a normal person. I cannot change this. But I can adapt to it. I can withdraw from things that cause me hurt. From people and cliques that do not want me around.
It has been some five years since I decided it wasn’t worth knowing another person, and I am richer for it. The only exception is my girlfriend, and though she can get rough, and displays some of the attitudes and beliefs my old friends and bullies did, I wouldn’t trade her for the world. We love each other deeply, and she is the only person outside my parents who even makes a minor effort to accommodate my disability.
In those five years, I have not made a single other friend. I have attended multiple schools, and have never had a roommate. Though I was let back into one of my friend groups, it has only been more of the same, and I am rarely involved with them in any way. Every few months I have to fight like hell to not be kicked out again. I only do it to preserve my pride. To stop them from feeling like they won.
One day, I just decided it wasn’t worth being hurt anymore. Jumping through hoops anymore. Being a puppy show anymore. Contorting my mind to try and understand why people treat me the way they do. The less people in your life, the less people who can do you wrong. Occasionally, I will feel a ping of longing. A desire to once again start looking for my people. But I never follow up on it, because I know I have no people. They do not exist. They never existed. If they did, they wouldn’t want me. It hurts to be alone, but it is also liberating. Sometimes you don’t know freedom until you realize you’ve been in a cage.