Saddest thing

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This could certainly be true in your case, Greentea, but I seriously doubt that in my case the people were lying, Their perceptions were off, and they misinterpreted me, that's the extent of it. I can say this with certainty, as it has happened throughout my life in one group situation after another. There is a definite pattern to it and to the behavior of the group. Granted I am an unusual person and even unusual in my unusualness; in a group of so-called abnormals, I seem to be the most abnormal. It's very curious. They may have acted as if they wanted to get rid of me, at least that's how I viewed it, but it had nothing to do with lying, I am certain of that. If you are, let's say, a zebra in a group of zebras, but because you are an unusual or rare type of zebra, the group doesn't recognize you as a zebra and sees you instead as a llama, no matter how often you try to explain that you are indeed a zebra and not a llama, you will not convince them. The other zebras are not lying, they have been contaminated by group-think and group-perception. And let's face it, even the nicest group of zebras would not be likely to accept a llama into their pack and would surely give off signals, consciously or unconsciously, direct or subtle, to shoo the the perceived llama away.

But, enough of that. All of the sad stories here are very sad indeed, but they are also very beautiful, at least that's how I see them. And don't you think these experiences make you a better person (or zebra) in the long run? Think about it, they are the kinds of stories that great works of art are based on; music, opera, novels, plays, poetry.

Having been excluded by my peers in my early teens, I thought it was because I was sent to the elementary school in the next village, so I didn't develop good contacts with the peers in my village and street.

Being always alone among peers and feeling different.

My brother who preferred to play with my peers and humiliateint me in front of them and making me look like a ret*d, when he said 'you can't play with us (he had a remote conrolled miniature ship which he showed off on a lake wiht my peers)

Getting punished for constantly breaking things at home- I was very clumsy, they said.

Being called a sexmaniac at school for a year because of having found a porn magazine at home and brought it to school to show my peers at school. I was consequently an outcast for a year.

My father no wanting to send me to another school.

Having saved my mum at age 12 from being strangled by my father. I beat him on his back with my fists


Being bullied the year after for another 3 years.

Discovering my self being gay and running away from home with a craving for love and a craving for a peaceful home ( my brother had become a tyrant)

Getting adopted into a psychiatric institute where I had 3 suicide attempts.

Being an outcast because I was 'ugly' ( I developed sever acné vulgaris allover my face for 10 years, whcih made me even more socially shy and insecure).

Last edited by Loborojo on 31 Aug 2008, 11:57 am, edited 1 time in total.

In 1st grade, when we were all lined up at recess and going back to class, some students in the line were harrassing me verbally. They were talking about how weird I am because I don't eat (I never ate during lunch period because the stress of sitting in a noisy cafeteria made me lose my appetite) then another was singing a song about how "stupid" I am (my peers in 1st and 2nd grade mistook me for being ret*d). They kept going on until I broke down in tears.

I used to watch my brother and his groups of friends, and something about the way they socialized seemed really... almost free, easy, and fun. And I didn't have anything like that, but often wished that I did. There seemed to be something undefinably pleasant about their 'hanging out', and I very much wished to do the same, but had nobody to do that with.

Anyway... years later, I found myself, by accident sort of, associated with a group of people who all hung out together the way my brother and his friends did. But I knew next to nothing about how to tell if someone was a friend or not. In order to have the pleasant experience my brother seemed to have, I put up with things I had no idea were wrong for people to do to me. I allowed people to use me as the butt of jokes about things I had trouble doing. I even allowed people to fairly obviously bully me, and believed this must be all in the 'fun' of having friends, and that my problem was not appreciating it. So I worked hard to appreciate what was happening. I made the mistake of believing that if someone appeared to want me to be around, then I was not being bullied.

At one point, my parents and some professionals in my life didn't want me to be around my 'friends' anymore. I didn't understand why, and resented being forced to stay separate from them.

Well... years later, in adulthood mostly, I started making some real friends.

My real friends treated me in a way that was totally different, and that I had no context for because nobody in my life outside family had ever treated me in this manner.

Around my real friends, I braced myself every time I had trouble understanding or saying something. I fully expected ridicule and attempts to deliberately confuse me. Even when we got mad at each other, the experience was very different than with my previous friends, because there was an underlying and genuine caring about each other that wasn't there with other people. (There were exceptions. Two people who hurt me have sincerely apologized for their previous behavior, and a tiny number of people genuinely cared about me in one way or another.)

Also, my real friends did not act like they owned me. My previous friends did act that way, and even seemed to feel entitled to act that way. Like I was a possession of theirs, and as if, if I made my own choices, then I was stealing something from them and needed to be punished or revenged upon in some way. Some of them were heavily invested in telling me who I was, apparently (according to others) in order to get me to act in certain ways. To actually stand up and say who I was, and what I really thought about things... it was as if I was committing some kind of heresy -- I was taking their fun little toy away. And they did everything they could to undermine this.

(Again, I am aware my social judgment of typical people can be really bad, so I have consulted other people who saw all this, in the formation of my opinions about the matter. All of them more or less agree with my assessment.)

Anyway... the sad part to me is the betrayal, which I only was able to feel once I was able to understand what had happened. I normally don't even think in terms of betrayal, it's a foreign concept most of the time. But in this instance... yes, that's what it felt like. Like I had a chance to experience something positive and wonderful for the first time in my life, something that did not come easy to me. And people for whom having that experience was trivially easy, deliberately messed up that chance for me while leading me to believe I was having that experience.

I don't sit around feeling self-pity about this all the time. I cried it out once or twice and that's about it. But it did happen, and it made me sad that I had missed out on the real thing, to instead spend time with people who were gratuitously mean to people who were different from them. I am also sad that another person with poor social skills that I saw sucked into the same situation, never realized it was a problem, and continued to go along with being the butt of all the jokes and stuff, believing this was acceptance and belonging.

I don't think these things happened because I'm autistic though, I just think the assorted bullying was easier to carry out on me because I was naive socially and took people at their word.

Same situation, friend. Except for the "solution" your parents put you through... During my middleschool/HS years, my family was in "financial crisis" and couldn't afford that, thank God! However, I'd have liked it if someone would have stepped in sometime after noticing YEARS of absolute failure, and tried to "break" my ways... Having standardized test scores in the 95th-99th percentile for years and bringing home Ds and Fs is something odd I think...

Second saddest thing, for me, realizing how much time and potential was wasted. Never using it, and now losing it, eats me up.

Saddest thing? Feeling that love is an illusion. It doesn't bother me much anymore.

In 5th grade, I was at the end of the line to leave the classroom to go to an assembly or something. As the line started moving, the boy in front of me turned around and said to me, "You know, if you weren't weird and had glasses and zits and braces, people might like you." I lagged behind for a few minutes and did my best not to cry, but I had to catch up with the class before I lost them for a place to sit at the assembly.

Not the worst I've had by far... But at the time, it was pretty crushing.

Probably the worst though, is having all the people that I know and care for, ultimately finding the same flaws and faults in me (for a multitude of different reasons though) and now knowing that these are just aspects of myself that I will probably never be apt at correcting/avoiding... and even try as I might, they will undoubtedly still be considered intentional and misgiving.

[/quote] Second saddest thing, for me, realizing how much time and potential was wasted. Never using it, and now losing it, eats me up.

Saddest thing? Feeling that love is an illusion. It doesn't bother me much anymore.[/quote]

I have that too, the loss of potential...If only my parents had seen it, if only it had been dx earlier, the support I could have had, but then If I wasn't matures like my peers then that is something that couldn't have changed or improved my potential.
It is in the past and one cannot cry over spilt beans.

I can't think of one memory but all those times I got teased because of being bad at sports in school is enough I think...

the worst one I can think of right now is when my mom died- I had a really hard time dealing with it and a few months after the funeral pretty much all of the family from my mothers side stopped contacting me and recognising me on the street cause they didn't like the fact that I didn't show any grief.

I remember clearly overhearing one of my aunts talking to my dad in the kitchen about the fact that I'm so "cold and inhuman" and how I probably didn't give a s**t about my mom... that really hit me badly, I started to think of myself as inhuman for some time and really felt disgusted myself and with the fact that I can't show to people just how sad I am.

that was 12 years ago and I still haven't heard a word from that side of the family.

When I was eight years old, I had a meltdown over putting my shoes on (I think it was shoes. Dressing for school was always a big point of contention in those days). My stepfather kicked me out of the house and told me not to come back. I spent two hours walking around the neighborhood in my socks, trying to find my grandmother's house, until my mother picked me up.

I don't remember crying, or feeling rejected; really, I was just mostly confused, and concentrating on finding soft things to step on.

That is horrible and so sad. Your stepfather should have been the one to be kicked out of the house. I can't imagine anyone being cruel enough to do that to a little kid. It makes me very angry to know such cruelty exists.

My experiences were more scary than sad. I remember being harassed at school by some very large, very scary, bullies. Otherwise, my school experiences were pretty good. I got good grades and had some good friends, although I didn't realize there was anyone on my side at the time. The teachers, for the most part, thought I was smart.

I don't have anything in particular, just that kids teased me because I wore glasses because of an attempt to fix my lazy left eye. I also got pulled out of class for speech therapy because I had trouble pronouncing certain letter sounds. I had my book bag dumped out all over the floor, and getting gum put in my hair was a regular occurrence. The only time that bullying stopped is when my family moved across town and I got to go to different middle and high schools.

I can't decide between these two:

1) Dropping out of medical school because I couldn't handle the social pressures of dealing with patients and mostly residents in a chaotic clinical environment.

2) Not being a better daughter to my mother because I couldn't convey emotion or bond to her as she probably expected me to. Now she's dead, and it's too late to even give it another try.