I am still confused and surprised when people actually respond to what I am saying.
There was a long period in my life when I did not expect this -- quite the opposite really. I kind of expected everyone to hear me and go "eh" in their heads.
I mean, that's how I treated them, so maybe it wasn't all that surprising...but it was still disappointing, to the point that I wondered if people couldn't actually hear me speak or something.
I don't know. My relationship with my peers for most of secondary school was...cold. Like I said, I treated people with the same indifference they treated me. There was one point where I was like "Screw everyone, i don't even need friends." To this day I don't know whether that was a good idea. Was their behavior worth abandoning them over? Was it really all that bad, in the grand scheme of things? Children are terrible at understanding the grand scheme of things, and their worlds, being smaller, are much more threataned by things that adults find easy to shake off.
Which is to say, I may have been overreacting.
On the other hand, their behavior felt like it was genuinely callous, and whether out of ignorance or recalcitrance, they didn't seem like they wanted to change. I didn't really know how to convince them to stop saying horrible things -- not helped by the fact that my method of doing so was to call them horrible, as if that's all they could ever be.
I think there was a period in Grade school where I kept telling kids that unless they shaped up, they were going to Hell. So, you know, it's not like I was going to be very convincing, even if people did want to listen. I didn't actually learn how to forgive my peers until the latter part of High School.
So...maybe it was a good thing that I avoided their company when I could? Maybe we were better off separate.
But it still felt like Awkward Hell when I said something I thought invited a response, and I got literally nothing in return.
Hell, I'm talking about middle-schoolers. They must have been as awkward as I was. How were they supposed to respond to the smelly kid who didn't even seem to like them?
(And I did smell. I refused to shower daily until high school.)
8th grade was a bad year.