Scared Bunny

I want to tell you something I was told by my therapist. She had asked me what I wanted to be able to do after therapy and one of the things I mentioned was having a social life. I know it’s hard for some to believe, but I am incredibly shy. I feel very uncomfortable around strangers, and have a hard time forcing myself to talk to them. That’s a big reason I spend so much time alone and don’t go out. I get real embarrassed when I go out alone.

But, at the same time I had told my therapist I don’t like people. And if you ask me I would say the same thing. I feel like I don’t belong or connect with people. I also don’t have a lot of patience for ignorant people. I tend to focus on the things I don’t like more than the things I do like. I think it helps me justify being alone to myself.

But my therapist says the fact I have a goal of wanting a social life kind of shoots down the idea I don’t like people. Deep down, she says, I want to be friendly and outgoing. I want to have a lot of friends and to spend time with them. In short, I want to be a person very different from who I am.

The shocker to me, though, is that she doesn’t think the real me is the one I have shown everyone for years. She thinks I have taken on a role, since childhood, of an asocial outsider. I have to say she’s probably right.

My first clear memories start around age 7. One thing I recall at that age was not feeling like I fit in. I didn’t have any close friends in school. I was the smart kid who lived in the shitty apartments. My “friends” were all middle class at very least and I was poor. I remember being teased because at times we couldn’t even afford to buy bread so I had sandwiches on home made bread. Other times I had peanut butter on crackers. Eventually I was given free lunch at the school, but I still didn’t fir in.

What made it worse was that many of these kids had known my family for our whole lives. But they knew us through my grandparents, who were not poor. It was like there was an expectation my mother hadn’t met because she had gotten divorced and was now poor. And even the glimpses of memories I have before and after that period really reaffirm this outsider feeling.

I act like I do because I expect people to dislike me. I expect to be rejected. It’s not even just about romantic relationships. I expect guys to not want to be around me. I know that people can sense something isn’t right. If you are uncomfortable the people around you sense that and then they become uncomfortable.

Being an only child probably didn’t help things, but more than that I was alone far too much as a kid. One thing I know I did, but have no real memories of doing, was coming home to an empty house as young as 5. When you hear about kids with a key on a string around their neck, you are picturing me. I went home to an empty house as long as I can remember. And we rarely lived anywhere near where I did have friends from school.

I could go on with examples from my childhood, but that isn’t the point. The point is that my discomfort with being an outsider makes my therapist believe strongly that is not who I was ever meant to be. I was conditioned to be an outsider and accepted the role because I didn’t know how to be anything else. What happens when you work hard and strip away that conditioning? What kind of person will be there when there isn’t 36-years of training to be asocial.

Here I am, a person who loves to talk and is generally considered good at it. I love going out and having fun. I love having close friends and hanging out with them. But I have some kind of barrier that convinces me people don’t want me around and don’t want to talk to me.

I just don’t even know who I really am anymore. I know who I want to be though, and that person is someone I rarely let anyone see. Maybe all this work will bring that person to the surface and I can get rid of the little kid scared of the world around him and the people that inhabit it. It’s all so confusing sometimes I literally think myself to sleep just trying to solve this puzzle.

And next week I start hypnotherapy where I practically will fall asleep to think about it and try to get to the bottom of the mess,