Calling for help/support
I’m incredibly unsure if I’m going to deeply regret posting something like this on an unassuming music blog on Tumblr of all things, but I feel like I need to get myself out so I can find someone else who can relate to most of what I want to say.
I’m not quite sure where to start. I originally started up this blog as inspiration from me sharing my favorite pieces of video game music to my first girlfriend, and I wanted to spread that love and energy around to others who stumble upon this blog and also as a way to archive my thoughts and feelings on a music track that I really liked, since I love sharing music with people that I care about for some odd reason. I updated less and less when my girlfriend broke up with me and I had to focus my priorities on other things such as finishing up college and I generally lost interest in updating this blog. Over the years, or rather, for the longest time, I have had a very difficult time making friends and maintaining them. Very early on, I have been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome (which I constantly forget that it has been merged into the Autism Spectrum in the DSM as of late, but that seems to be a very controversial subject). Everyone copes with it in different ways, though how it affects me is through social interactions and increased sensitivity to sounds or touch or emotional regulation. I have never had an easy time interacting with most people, even to this very day. I always imagined the process of socialization as me trying to operate and manage a car that is purely manual while everyone else operates automatics; while it seems to come easier for everyone else, it seems that i’m missing something and I have to furiously compensate by thinking carefully on what I want to say, how to say it, and how it keep the conversation going as the words flow out of my mouth. But, I am getting far ahead of myself.
With that said, i’m aware enough of certain social cues that it appears that i’m able to socialize like the majority who socialize so well, at least on the outside. On the inside is an incredibly mentally taxing process where I have to furiously keep track of everything that I want to talk about while saving face to the people around me, making me far more easily prone to mess up on what I want to say or completely blank out when I don’t know what to say next. I feel like it’s something that a myriad of people around me do not see and some assume that I am making up excuses that I am mentally struggling to keep up with someone in a conversation for sympathy points, which is definitely the case with my family.
I mentioned that I am much more sensitive physically, mentally, and emotionally. And with that increased sensitivity comes with me being far more prone to coping with anxiety, which I have also been dealing with my entire life.
I say all of this to establish context on what I want to say next, so I apologize if all of this sounds redundant in one fashion or another.
In recent years, I find that my circle of friends, or friends that I can connect with or confide in has been dwindling. I have a share of other friends and acquaintances which i’ve tried to connect with, but I feel very incompatible with most of them, mainly from the emotional connections, or lack thereof.
I don’t have much of an emotional connection with my family--- apparently the one place where I am supposed to feel the most like myself--- my family is not the most emotionally invested or sympathetic. My mother is borderline emotionally abusive, where she disregards most of how I feel and what I say as excuses to feign sympathy and that I need to ‘shut up and man up.’ She constantly compares herself to me, even though what she is doing is essentially comparing an army general to a new recruit and expects me to follow her standards even though we are fundamentally very different people from different upbringings. It gets to the point where it feels like that I am under debt from her giving birth to me, as she cares far more about me finding a career and finding superficial prosperity over my own mental and emotional state. My father is somewhat better, as he doesn’t have the need to constantly berate or judge me for every single minor mistake that I make. He tries to be supportive, but he mostly opts to be emotionally distant as he has never really had a chance to come in terms with his own personal emotions. Dealing with my mother probably has burned him out as well. I also have siblings, such as my sister who wholly takes my mother’s side and teams up with her to gang up on me when I try to explain and justify myself in front of them. They’ve essentially conditioned me to not say anything to them, since I know that they will brush me off in one way or another and begin to say that I am the one at fault for trying to butt heads with them, not them for not listening to what I have to say.
Having that deep, emotional connection is very important for me, and I am sorely lacking it with my family. Sure, they treat me with goods and essentials, but what good are these if I can’t open up to them and force myself to close off from them for my own protection? So, I flock online, since I felt that the people I have found online are the closest I can find to others who actually understand me, listen to me, and being fully supportive overall. I used to have one friend in particular who was almost like a mother to me; moreso than my actual mother whom I mentioned was more like someone I had to tolerate if I still wanted to stick around. Even then, she had her own slew of personal issues that cropped up, and she closed herself off to a myriad of people, myself included. She is not the only example, as I have had a myriad of close friends or people that I felt like I could be very close friends with decide to distance themselves from me, either because of my own faults, as I like to believe, or neither of us being incompatible in the long run, among other factors. Since I had nobody else to go to for moral or emotional support, other than a therapist who would only see me for about an hour or so, I really started to feel more mental and emotional strain as I wanted to open up and express myself, but I had nobody around who would be willing to tolerate, understand, or put up with me without cutting me off in some fashion.
I still have a couple of friends that I feel like I can open up to, but they are not always around, whether it be different timezones, stresses in their own daily lives, or a mix thereof, leaving me to mostly fend for myself.
Whenever I see other large groups of friends who feel like they have a very big, very tight connection with each other, I can’t help but feel heavy resentment for those types of people around me. They have a whole group or clique that they all can conveniently confide in and be the most themselves, or talk, or rant, or rave and blissfully go on with their groups, which most have known since their childhoods, while I have personally been denied that; I was forced to spend a good chunk of my childhood learning how to function adequately among society since I went through a very different developmental path, with my ASD and Anxiety, enduring my parents, moving from place to place and not being able to keep in touch with a good chunk of my friends, I feel like alot of things have been essentially lost in translation on my end, such as maintaining conversation or delving into small talk or struggling to keep similar tastes to even have a chance to open up and talk to not feeling like I can properly relax around most people and having to constantly judge or evaluate myself. I can’t help but feel a fair share of heavy resentment for it. I know most of it is on me. I do my best to go through day to day and be the best person that I can be, but at the same time, I feel like my faults and issues can’t ALL be my fault, can they? I have to work much harder to get what I need, or to basically get through the day. More often than not these days, I feel like I am alone fighting against the world with nobody to come and pick me up when I’m down. But according to my parents, they are just that; feelings. So what do I know, right?
This post has gone on long enough. I feel incredibly conflicted conflicted about posting this. One one hand, i’m posting this on Tumblr, and i’m not sure WHAT the reaction to this may be. Will I have people telling me off or whining that i’m not grateful for what I have, or people try to savagely attack me from saying something somewhat off-color that I did not realize? I really do not know, and it scares me. On the other hand, I feel like I haven’t gone in enough detail about writing this post up. I am absolutely livid on how I feel like i’ve been jumping around, or that I haven’t explained myself well, or that this post isn’t the best written since it was all done in a single draft. However, I don’t want this to go on for too long and lose attention of others who may stumble upon this. I suppose I am getting desperate, and I want to find more people to talk to. People who have gone through similar situations that I have and are far more willing to relate to what I have to go through. I’ve stayed quiet about this for such a long time, and I suppose posts like these seem very cliche around these parts, I am not sure. I am writing from what I know and how I feel, and I hope this entire post will reach out to someone sensible enough to understand me. I’m not asking for any followers or any sort of hugboxing or the like. I want to find a friend who is willing to reach out to me, relate to me, listen to me and stay committed to it, like I have with a myriad of my other friends before.
However, at this point, I doubt it. If this doesn’t work, then I may as well scrap this page and this entire blog with it.
