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My tank of deal with it energy is a bit low.
I have my choice of three events that friends have invited me to and it means choosing between friends and...
I'm feeling all or nothing about it.
First event will be, essentially, hanging out by myself because those friends are super social and will be flitting around like butterflies chatting with everyone else the whole time because this socialization shit is easy for them.
Second event is a bit of a haul and although I've been invited, I'm an outsider to this group now. I put myself there, and it's been difficult to summon the energy to get back inside.
Third is a celebration of a business friends put back together after a partnership exploded. It's got much the same trouble as the first event for me.
Normally things don't line up like this and two of the friend groups attend the same event and that means not either being alone or feeling like I'm intruding.
And I can never quite shake the feeling that I'm intruding and unwelcome.
That follows naturally from watching group after group continuing on as if I'd never existed when I depart.
You want to really feel like you don't matter? Check up on a social group you left behind and see if they were more than mildly affected.
Better not. You may discover that they were relieved and happy you finally stopped showing up.
At least I know I did one thing good for them.
I feel the same way. In particular I found out after my first wife passed aay that "our friends" were really her friends. After she was gone I was forgotten about completely. And pretty much every place I've worked I've found that maybe one or two people keep in touch afterwards out of dozens or hundreds. Social groups, I don't know that they are actively happy I don't show up any more. But they certainly don't seem to notice at least.
ReplyDeleteI mean I think a lot of it is just the way it is, and not directed towards a person in general. But people like us who struggle with human interactions sometimes it is just that much worse. i think a lot of us kinda got thrust together because we weren't part of the "in" group. I was kind of always the weird interloper who was on the peripheral edge of a bunch of groups but never really in anywhere. School administrators hated me for that because I was that instigator who made things happen by interconnecting groups that often didn't interact otherwise. Of course being an old geezer now, I don't have any of the forced interactions and as I've mentioned before we've mostly gotten scattered over thousands of miles over the years. Frankly, if it weren't for my wife being he "joiner" type, I probably wouldn't have any social life at all. The organizations I interact with are like with my first wife's circle... Mostly her friends, and I'm just kind of a hanger-on.
-swj