Reader

I've been struggling for connection my whole life. Granted, when I was a kid, it was easier. I made friends at school and outside my front door easily, but most of us did. Things started getting difficult around the seventh grade. I never quite fit in, even with the few friends I had. It was a contortionist act, bending myself to fit in however it took, but it never felt right. That continued through high-school, getting more and more difficult. After university, it dropped off almost entirely.

I tried to leverage the internet to make new friends, and have been trying ever since. I joined gaming communities, but the friendships never really materialized. Everything was one-sided, with me always being the one initiating conversation, and very rarely having anyone just send me a message out of the blue to check in, or say hi, or invite me to something.

Blogs, Yahoo Chat, Google+, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Twitch, Discord, Matrix, Mastodon, Owncast, Peertube.... it's all the same. I get excited, I think I might have found my people, I put a lot of work into it, and it never materializes. I give up for a few months, maybe a year or two, and for whatever reason I start feeling the itch and I start all over again, with the same, inevitable result.

I am not someone who has friends. I don't think it's that people actively do not like me, it's more of a passive thing. I never really “take” with people, and I rarely enter their minds. They don't think about me when I'm not around. In the rare situations where I do actually make friends, it passes quickly, and pretty soon I never hear from them, I'm basically inviting myself out to events with them because I saw or heard about it somewhere else. Then I realize that I'm back there again, always being the conversation starter. So I stop, and never hear from those people again.

I don't know why I keep doing this to myself.

#Friends #Friendship #Loneliness