Lonely Panic

Maybe it was last week, maybe a few months ago, maybe in 4th grade.  It makes little difference really.  I'm lonely.  I'm so different that most of my peers won't have anything to do with me, nothing personal but I'm just that weird.  If I relax at all and just act me it almost always goes wrong, so I've been hiding for a long time.  Long enough to lose touch with the part of me that is hiding and I'm not even sure what that part of me looks like anymore.  That leaves me... hungry...  Most people I've ever tried to explain this to simply don't understand and might even make insulting comments about how its my fault for not smiling enough.

Every once in a while the social deck is reshuffled a new person comes into my life.  Maybe a new student in the class, a new coworker, almost anyone.  Instead of being a novelty that I can choose to ignore or accept from a position of security I'm often so hungry for contact I can't help but hopefully imagine that this new person is going to be when I break through and the isolation will be over.  Generally speaking its a short lived hope.  Many of the people I've intentionally tried to befriend practically don't even notice me.  Others became outright hostile.  I can remember in particular one new kid around 5th grade that I tried to make friends with by trying to help him with the new kid bullying he was being subjected to and he outright told me to leave him alone and stop trying to help him.  Other kids I'd try to invite to come play on the sole basis that they never tormented me and seemed nice enough and they'd start tormenting me to drive me away.  There were a few people who would be friendly with me, mostly from the bottom of the social ladder.  Generally it didn't extend as far as being invited to come and play and since my family didn't celebrate my birthday once I got beyond the first few grades of elementary school I couldn't even build a social network by inviting people over to parties once a year.  I coped by trying to be invisible which only worked so well when it seemed some kids made fun of me not to get a rise out of me but to prove to others that they weren't low class like me.  This was before the Columbine shooting happened so there weren't anti bullying policies in place to protect kids like me.  And really, those policies came into existence more in fear of school shootings than because anybody cared, so its not as if I feel grateful to society for changing those policies after I was gone.  In any case, it was bad enough that when my parents pulled me out of school to home school me most everyone assumed it was because of the bullying that virtually everyone seemed to know about other than my parents.  For me it was a huge relief just to escape the anger and despair I had felt at being trapped in a toxic social cesspool.  It was only a short time before my home became a new hell to replace the one I had just left, but for a while at least it seemed as if I was actually free.

To this day I can find myself in the same pattern, unable to socially relate to anyone in a particular environment, becoming desperately hopeful when the social deck is reshuffled, and often being disappointed.  A few months back this happened again and a coworker seemed fairly intent on making sure I knew I wasn't wanted, making comments in front of me about how they only wanted their actual friends to talk to them, ignoring my existence if I tried to start a conversation, that sort of thing.  I started having panic attacks - feeling as if I was still trapped back in public school hell.  I was able to request a seating rearrangement to escape the situation but I was so far gone before I was able to get up the courage to ask that I could barely avoid breaking into tears while trying to make a generic request to be moved.  Apparently that part of my life hasn't really left me, one of a set of traumatizing experiences that leave me not only socially incompetent as comes with autism but practically terrified of launching new conversations.  Social anxiety might be irrational in many situations, but the fact that it develops in the first place is at times completely unsurprising.  While thanking everyone who has given me safe haven to be as much of myself as I could figure out, I also wish that more people could understand what is going on.