Idle musing

[jadislefeu]

I spend so much time seeing people be thoroughly frustrated by unwanted/intrusive replies on twitter that it makes me really chary of replying to basically anyone anywhere that I'm not already close friends with, because I've had a deep horror of imposing on and annoying people for most of my life. (I am a very loud and strange person and was rather singularly unpopular in school, because I was annoying. I'm not very good at settings between 'talking incessantly' and 'not talking at all'.) I do a lot of typing out half a comment (or a whole comment), and then deciding I'd better not and closing the tab.

This makes it rather difficult to make new friends, and I really don't know what the solution to that is.

Relatedly, I made a new OKCupid the other day on a whim and have been confronted with the necessity of actually sending messages to people, and man I am not sure how to do that anymore.

Comments

[havocthecat]

Oh, oh, did you also get that "I really like you, but I FIND YOU GREATLY ANNOYING!" bullshit? I was also unpopular in school. People found me uppity and annoying and fuck them. (Talk to me! I don't always reply quickly - or at all, if I'm overwhelmed or migraining, but I promise, that's on me, not on you.)

The solution, I find, (for me, I'm not telling you what to do) is to find friends who don't find me annoying. And to ignore everyone on the internet who posts guides to proper behavior.

[jadislefeu]

Sort of! The "I like you" parts tended to be of brief duration and not concurrent with the "you're obnoxious" parts. My middle school best friend--with whom I had been close to the degree that we wore matching outfits on the first day of school--just straight up stopped talking to me in eighth grade because she had decided she wanted to be popular, and being friends with me was incompatible with that. Though there were also the girls who would act like we were friends only when there wasn't really anyone else around, and be nasty if there was.

I do have friends who don't find me annoying! Apparently! They keep telling me so! But it's damn hard to budge that bone-deep conviction, or the habit of constantly monitoring everyone around me for signs of finding me irritating and thus that I need to shut up. And ending up in a sort of vicious cycle of not wanting to bother people and then feeling isolated, and out of the habit of communication and thus rendering reaching out even more difficult.

It's also entirely possible that dropping out of high school at sixteen, getting my GED, and then spending five years locked in my bedroom with crippling anxiety and depression that had manifested agoraphobia and a literal inability to walk unassisted (what the hell were my parents thinking? how was it not manifestly obvious that I needed help?), did... less than ideal things for my social development.

My historical tendency to being... divisive, where people either like me or fucking hate me (I had a dude stalk me online for like five years because he found me annoying in an IRC channel I no longer frequented) also makes me rather chary of reaching out to new people.

...Also, I talk like I ate a dictionary as a base mode of communication. Twitter is sure full of people yelling about how if you don't phrase everything in the most accessible possible manner, you're a terrible person. It is actively incredibly difficult for me to try and do that! I don't know what words other people don't know! I changed my mind about majoring in technical writing specifically because I am violently terrible at writing accessibly! (I just woke up, and the less functional my brain is, the more arcane my phrasing gets. I am palpably worse at remembering simple ways to convey concepts than complex ones, they are way harder to reach.)