I’m going to take a moment to apologize to people; some who I’ve wronged, others who I’ve felt have wronged me. Maybe you have, maybe you haven’t, but I’m more guarded than you realize, even if it may not seem that way.
This is going to be long.
I often tell the story of how I (almost) single-handedly destroyed half of a popular (if toxic) fandom. I do so, usually while laughing or faking pride at it, but it really does hurt sometimes.
You might be wondering why I start off with this off-topic anecdote when it has nothing to do with the DCMK fandom, but it all stems from here. No, it probably stems from a time even before that.
Going even further back, I....don’t have a good track record with making friends. My father was in the military, so we moved around a lot while he was still on active duty. This meant that, basically for the first six years of my life, I had no close friends. I would try to make some, but within a year or two, we would move, and I would have to start over. Even when we finally moved to where I live now, it was so hard to make friends up through middle school. I would fit in with a group, but eventually I would be considered weird, and they would start to move on without me. I grew used to it, jumping from one group to another, but honestly that didn’t make it hurt any less. Those early years of mine could easily be described with the words “abandonment issues”; this is half the reason why I have such a hard time making and keeping friends.
The other half, of course, is social anxiety, which has gotten better since college but had done nothing to help me make friends until I finally started taking my medications approximately a year and a half ago.
This is why I have to apologize to everybody I’ve pushed away, or have made feel uncomfortable. When somebody doesn’t talk to me, when somebody seems to have time for all of their other friends but never bothers saying hello to me, I push them away because I’m used to being pushed away first. When I feel somebody encroaching on my territory, I push them away because I’m afraid they’re going to come in and take something before leaving like everybody else does.
When a group of people breaks apart and threatens to never talk to each other, then damnit, I’m going to throw myself into the middle of it and make sure everybody understands who was wrong and why, because I’m so used to being left behind that the least I can do is make sure lessons are learned before I become the bad guy.
When somebody hurts one of my friends, I get hyper defensive to the point of almost being a bully, because I have so few people who are precious to me, and I don’t want to lose even one more of them because of what somebody else did to them.
And when somebody does something that makes me feel any of these ways, then I hold a grudge. I can hold a very, very long grudge. Sometimes, an apology is really all it takes. Usually, I never receive an apology anyways so it doesn’t matter. Other times, I lick my wounds and hide, never wanting to talk to that person again because I can’t trust them not to do the same thing again. It really depends, and if you fall under the latter category, I just hope you understand that it’s not you. I’m just too defensive for my own good.
So I guess what I’m saying is that I’m sorry for making anybody feel bad, or ostracized, or whatever. These might all just be excuses, but they’re how I honestly feel, so I hope you understand.
And.......I guess if you’ve ever felt hurt because of something I’ve done, this is an open invitation to tell me. I may try to justify it, I may not. But I’m going to try not to push people away anymore.
