I sent two different messages to two different group chats of friends and been super ignored and now I'm questioning my ability to socialise. Spiralling pretty hard really.
Like maybe I don't know what's appropriate anymore, maybe my social skills are atrophying. Maybe the stuff I find funny isn't actually funny and I am way off base.
I am probably cringe, and my feelings hurt.
I have this pervading sense that there is a normal and good way to behave and I am always trying to do my best facsimile. I want to be palatable, I want to be seen, I want to bring joy to the people in my life and not make them uncomfortable.
The flip side of that is the sense that when I am being my unfiltered self, I am not pleasant, I'm not good enough, I am not fun to be around.
And I'm mad at every person that has ever told me to just be myself or laughed and asked me what is normal though, there's no such thing as normal when I try to explain that I'm not fucking normal.
Can we just admit that there's a set of parameters, an unspecified range of behaviour that we find acceptable and that some people kind of struggle on the edge of it, outside the bellcurve of prosocial behaviour and unable to intuit where the parameters might be.
I really wish there were people who would just love me for who I am. Because I really feel like a social nomad sometimes. Moving from group to group. The periphery. I still keep in touch with my old groups, I'm not a path of destruction and burnt bridges.
I guess this is my loneliness.
I don't feel it very often, but losing the ability to judge social situations and appropriate behaviour is definately a sign that I am becoming too isolated.
I want my personality to become whole and fully integrated, but I also want to make and maintain friendships, I want to be kind and good to people.
Rejection sucks though. I think my experience of rejections is also limited. Like part of opening up and being myself is that there will be more rejections. Having more opinions and voicing them means more people think your opinions suck, but you will also find people who like you the way that you are.
I've been a ship in the night, a light in a locked box, unseen for a very long time. Somebody will find my conspiracy theory that autocorrect is correcting correctly written messages to have spelling mistakes in them amusing. Somebody will like me sending videos of a man inflating a condom by playing super mario into a trumpet to them. Just not these groups at this time. Both things are pretty innocuous I think.
The trouble is you can't connect to the right people just by waiting for the right people to show up and magically connect with you. Because if they are like me then they will also be walking around with their own lights hidden, not being seen, not seeing me.
That means that sometimes I have to just show myself and people I care about be like "nah".
I've been very dreamy this week, dissociating pretty hard. I've had some moments this month where I've come back to reality. I started organising my stuff again. I keep on washing clothes. I cooked a food the other night. It was chicken marinated and roasted in fish sauce, rice wine and sesame oil with dill, aleppo chilli flakes, fresh ginger, onion and garlic. It was very flavoursome. I visited a friend, started making more paper dolls, imagining who I'm going to be. Had some cool thoughts about gender and ugliness which make me feel more settled.
I think when I start to do more things then I feel more comfortable connecting with my friends. When I'm not actively trying to be a person, I think I don't really have anything to talk about or like, I don't have the right attitude? I want to devegetablise. I don't want to be a vegetable, I want to engage with life. I don't want to keep checking out, to randomly find lucidity only to realise that days, weeks have passed and I don't really remember what happened. It should be scary to me? I should be scared but most of the time I'm not.
I have to be kind to myself in order to keep living. And sometimes my jokes aren't fucking funny and that's okay, my friends will still like me. And the more I am me, the more likely I will find people who do like my sense of humour.
