Saturday 11 February 2012

Feeling Like the New Kid

This is a kind of personal post.  I usually don't like to share my thoughts or talk about personal problems due to a mix of things mostly my lack of being able to trust people.

Lately I have been feeling kind of lost and lonely.  I have had many issues with friends in the last year or so.  This has included an end of friendship with someone I had considered to be my best friend since the second grade.  I'd prefer not to go into much detail but I have felt broken up about it ever since, despite it having happened about 5 months ago.  I have tried talking to this friend but it is obvious she has changed quite alot since we were last close(almost a year ago) and she doesn't seem to care as much about patching things up as I do.  She treats my like crap everytime we do see each other so I'm not quite sure why I feel so quilty about things that I said to her the night I told her I was done trying to be friends with her.  The things I said had in no way been against her nor did she take them that way but I still feel like its my fault that were no longer friends.

I have also kind of emotionally moved away from the majority of my other friends, I didn't get into any fights or anything its more of a feeling of being the only one putting effort into a friendship.  Most of the people I was friends with I don't even consider friends with just as I am almost positive they don't really consider me to be a friend.  I feel like all the common things we liked just kinda disappeared as we got older and I don't really have any options to find friends who do have something in common with me.

Two weeks ago I went back to school full time after a year and like the title suggests I feel like I am in a new highschool with people I have never met.  The only familiar things are the room numbers and teachers.  Even the way social interactions happen seems to have changed.  When I left middle school and entered highschool I felt like it was heaven, aall the bullying seemed to stop and people just kind of paid attention to their friend groups and ignored others.  when I went back I noticed a change, mostly in my last period of class there is a girl who sits in from of me and you can tell she is not 'normal' by popular opinion and its not full on teasing or anything but I have noticed a few people mocking her and I feel there isn't much I can do besides give those people dirty looks.  The teacher has noticed and will tell kids to stop and they will for that day but will start up again the next day.  I don't remember highschool being this way, the last time I had been picked on to an extent to actually bug me was in middle school. 

I've even noticed that I myself have been given dirty looks as of late and even overheard people talking about me in the hallways, maybe it is because i was once surrounded by friends that I never noticed this but without having people around me it feels like the peacefulness of my first three years of highschool were just an illusion caused by my own ignorance to what was going on right in front of me.  My first day back to school I sat on a bench alone at lunch and realised just how much I had changed as a person since I had last been there.  People kept looking at me as if I actually was a new kid when I had been in that school since day one of grade nine and it just made me feel even more alone.  I even got a pity chat from a teacher who sat down and started making rather akward conversation about my hair color this naturally did not make me feel better and just made me think that you know your life has gone down hill when the only person who will talk to you is a teacher.

I once again feel like I do not belong, the last time I felt like this was in middle school.  To be perfectly honest I think my temporary feeling of belonging was a complete lie to myself.  In the seventh grade I discovered bands like The Ramones and The Sex Pistols and started wearing skinny jeans, this led to bullying and being called emo and other details that I'd prefer to keep to myself for now(I have only talked to one friend about everything that happened to me and this was only recent).  This was the first time I started to feel like I didn't belong in todays society.  When I reached highschool the main reason the bullying stopped was because I pretty much re-invented myself I started dressing 'normal' and making sure that I filled my MP3 with popular music.  I did this because at the time I thought it made me happier, I was so terrified of being bullied that dressing in a way I hated and listening to crappy music and not having people bully you was better that being myself.

I stayed like this for a long time.  A couple years ago an alt store briefly opened up in my city and people started calling it Goth.  I liked the stuff quite a bit so I bought some stuff  before it closed due to lack of sales.  I even looked up what goth was, I had heard the term before but never paid it much attention.  I liked some of the music I found and joined a goth group, what I didn't know at he time was that the online group I joined was and elitist group of sorts and as fast as I had found it I had left it because noone seemed to want to help a new comer and every small mistake you made would be looked down on.  This group turned me off of goth until recently when I had a bit of an emotional breakdown around the time I was having problems with my 'friends'.  I realised that I was going to be judged whether I was dressing normal or not and I pretty much decided that I was gonna go goth.  It was kind of an on the spot thing but I started my goth research again and told myself I would not join any groups I didn't feel comfortable in.  This time around obviously went alot better.  I ran into people who wanted to help me and showed me music that I liked even more that the bands suggested to me my first time around.  Things went great, I felt great too.

Then I came across more problems.  It has not been anything that can really be explained.  I started having nightmares about some of the things said and done to me when I used to be bullied, I have never had these before.  And in the last two weeks I have had this odd feeling of not being in control of my life and like everything around me is just spinning out of control.  My emotions are everywhere, one minute I'm happy as can be the next I'm crying for no reason and the worst part is that I don't really have anyone to talk to.  I have always kept things to myself and have some pretty major trust issues.  I have one friend that I am considering talking to but I just don't know if it is the right thing to do.  The last time I talked to someone I ended up in therapy with the therapist asking me "Why don't you get a group of your friends to talk to?"  when the reason I was feeling like this was because I only had one friend that was moving half way across the country in 2 months.

Anyways sorry for the giant rant about my life and my feelings but I'm just really confused right now and writing this blog seemed like the right thing to do at the time but will probably get deleted when ,my mind starts telling me to stop complaining and suck it up.

4 comments:

  1. why delete something you feel is/was the truth. never be ashamed of your own thoughts :-*
    hope you can feel better soon *huggles*

    ReplyDelete
  2. We almost came into this subculture the exact same way. I used to try and pretend to be completely normal too. It can really make you un-happy.

    Why not make friends with the other girl being bullied? You might have more in common than just that but it seems like you're both 'outsiders' and in my school outsiders tend to stick together.

    Anyway, I hope things look up. :3

    ReplyDelete
  3. I've had similar problems this year, so I get what you're talking about.

    My friends left me as well, I thought they were going to be great...but the one I really was fond of cut all communications and even now, almost a year later I still feel really sad. And I've also had nightmares recently, and all sorts of worries about what to do with my life and how to deal without my friends. That equalling moderate depression, a thing which I still have to fight every day.

    It didn't help either that in order to try to gain more friends I bent over backwards and gave them all I had, I changed, but no matter how I tried I couldn't fit in with the mainstream. And I got insulted by various people saying I wasn't 'cool' enough to be with them.

    It was then that I found Goth and all the lovely bloggers who I am happy to have met.

    Like Sary says in her comment here, it might help to talk to the other girl that's being bullied. She might be going through the same problems as you.

    I hope everything starts looking up for you! *Hugs*

    ReplyDelete
  4. Your friends are changing because people do change over their teenage years, and they change considerably. I don't want to sound like a patronising old lady saying that! I would suggest widening your circle of friends to people outside of school, so even if things there aren't going well, you have someone to talk to. Do you participate in any external clubs? Or do volunteering at the weekends? I've met a lot of interesting people that way (in my experience over in far away Scotland, conservation and environment volunteering organisations tend to be havens for the alternative).

    Don't try to be normal again, it really isn't worth it. I tried doing that for a bit as a teenager, and I just got paranoid about if the facade would crack and if people would see the real me, the version of myself I felt was "unlikeable". I know it doesn't feel like it now, but "belonging" is... possibly not something to strive for. It's more important to make friends with people who are nice, kind and trustworthy than to try and 'belong' to any particular group. I have never really fitted in anywhere, and was bullied from the day I walked through the school gates at age 5, so I'm not saying this without knowing what isolation feels like. The important things are to be true to yourself, and to keep grounded at the same time.

    Your probably getting more people at your school talking about you now that you look visibly different, but really, what they think is unimportant. I wouldn't say that just because you were surrounded by people before that your peace was illusionary - mean behaviour generally gets focused on those who aren't surrounded by friends, and you said you were looking more normal, so you probably genuinely were on the receiving end of less bad stuff. You said you took a year out (I did too) and I think that time and distance have given you a different perspective.

    Things are going to change again when you leave school, and and generally adults are lot more mature and less cliquish than people at school are. School is an unnatural society of people grouped by age and put in close proximity, and it breeds friction, cliquishness and gossip. Things are better outside! Keep focused on your education and your plans for when you leave school and go to college or work, because your efforts now will pay off in the long run. I let problems in my social life interfere with my studies in the last year of college (in my case dealing with a mentally ill boyfriend) and seriously regret it now.

    ReplyDelete

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