Total Fucking Fuck You Rant: Please Ignore

[thesummerqueen]

And you're not a therapist, either - you don't have to teach these people how to handle those situations or try to "expose them to new things" in the hopes that they'll like it. You're not doing it to help them - you're doing it to help you. So bugger the fuck off

I think that many people fail to realize that what they want might not be what other people want. You can't decide what's best for someone else. You have to respect what others want, and understand that world doesn't revolve around you and your desires.

I'm a really outgoing person, and I suffer from "loneliness hangups" from time to time, so I might have been guilty of pestering a few friends, but I also try to understand what my friends and acquaintancies want. A no is a no, and deserves respect.

I totally get that, and I get that some of my friends are extroverts who really get off on dealing with crowds and talking to lots of people and just being in that sort of environment. I can do that if I need to, but it takes a LOT of energy. It's taken until now, at 27, to understand my limits and learn how not to fall prey to peer pressure. Now I know when to leave a party or event before I snap from the strangers around me, or the whirl of people. It's a piece of luck that David is just like me and you frequently find us setting up a little "fort" in a corner where we can back away.

We don't want to be drawn out onto the dance floor, and we don't want to be encouraged to stay or told that we're being rude if we leave, even though we understand our friends enjoy our company. We're just avoiding getting to a point where one of us actually IS rude, or where it becomes so much that I have a melt-down. He actually has a hearing condition from a busted ear drum that makes loud places painful after a while. Me, it eventually tuns into sensory overload. These sorts of things take time to explain and are a pain in the ass to have to do so at EVERY gathering where new people might be there.

My point by those examples, and Shell's much more serious explanation, is that not everyone is going to manifest external signs of a problem until it becomes too late, and if they're old enough to have learned where their line is and they start to leave before it's breached, you shouldn't be an ass about it. ("You" in general, not anyone specific)

My mother used to complain that I acted like a shut-in, until I finally explained to her that having a stranger touch me makes me feel physically ill - even if it's just a hair-dresser, and I used to balk at calling strangers. That's gone away thanks to working as a secretary for the past 10 years. The touch thing hasn't. I'm not a shut-in though, I just prefer to be alone in the woods or doing my own thing without the crush of people around me. I actually like studying or reading in a restaurant with all the white noise - I just have to have my own little corner.

I know a lot of people, girls especially, who find this sort of behavior odd. Of course, that's coming from the gender that seems incapable of even peeing by themselves.

But I found my own solutions, and I still try to get out to interact with other people as much as possible - preferably in small groups. Shell has her ways of dealing with it. No one should harass an introvert or act like it's a bad thing. It's just different. Here in America we just seem to have an issue with treating anything "passive" or "quiet" like it's somehow bad. We always have to be brasher and louder and stronger here. That's bullshit.