dianthus wrote:
This video reminds me of situations I've been in, where someone like the guy on the left was joking with me, and picking on me because I didn't want to go along with something, or didn't feel like being sociable or just whatever they saw as a reason to pick on me. And then someone else like the guy in the middle would sort of collude with them, someone that I felt should have been sticking up for me but instead it's like they suddenly turn on you and gang up on you.
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I know exactly what you mean. I've been in plenty of "oh, this guy? We don't really know him, but yeah, he's kinda weird" situations as a teenager. It's especially bad if you got along great with such "friends" until puberty struck and they suddenly seemed to feel embarrassed for and weirded out by you all the time. To make things worse, it was them who always invited me and dragged me along. I was always afraid of being a bother and would have been happy to stay at home reading a book, but I guess they felt some sort of obligation to a childhood friend who was suddenly all weird and socially inept. Either that or they wanted someone around who made a couple of nerdy NTs look normal by comparison (and by means of picking on me in front of others).
What hurts even more though is when a parent acts along these lines. When the one person who always stood up for you, and is your sole remaining attachment figure, starts apologizing on your behalf to complete strangers and unsolicitedly tells them that you've been a very sick child with asthma and allergies and whatnot. As if to say "it wasn't me or my parenting, or my genes for that matter, please believe me when I tell you that we aren't circus freaks in our family, it's just this one messed-up kid who had such a difficult childhood and banged his head pretty hard that one time on the playground when he was five, so hopefully that explains it, please don't let his utter weirdness tarnish my social reputation".
Blood isn't always thicker than water I suppose. Well, that person won't have to worry about how my oddities reflect on her social standing ever again. And neither will my sperm donor, seeing as I haven't spoken to them in more than a decade. They don't even know about my relatively recent autism diagnosis. I've lived 90% of my life thinking that I was perfectly "normal" aside from being pathologically shy, and everyone else was exceptionally sh*tty to me for some unfathomable reason. I even considered the possibility that I had gone delusional at some point in my early teens and simply imagined everything from then on. So up until my diagnosis, I wasn't sure that I could trust my own senses anymore. Sorry about the rant, but emotional vomiting is very cathartic and I kinda need that right now.
PS: Does anybody else have the strange urge to format a longer post in a way that all paragraphs have about the same length? I've noticed that recently about my posting style.