How well do you fit in with the people around you?
For some reason I've always felt somewhat out of place. I tend to sit on the borders of a lot of different groups but don't sit comfortably in the middle of any of them. I wonder if this is why I've found it difficult to find relationships and things.
It's just... I suppose in a way I don't feel passionate about anything enough to really throw myself into whatever it is I take part of unless I find someone I want to support in doing it, except anime music, perhaps. Like acting: I started that initially to be with my friends after school, because I'd just found them after some trouble and wanted to make sure they didn't forget me. And even fanfiction writing I only truely started because I wanted to impress my female penpal. Writing my book is the first thing I felt I've done truely and completely just for myself, which is why I'm taking so much pride in it.
I had two best friends in primary school. When Year Six (the end of primary school in the UK) was drawing to an end they were both going off to a different school to me, and almost suddenly they decided they didn't want to be my friends any more. I didn't understand why. I hadn't changed. I didn't do anything. I didn't even tell them I was going to a different school. They just... didn't like me any more. I'd be bullied a lot, not just by them but everyone else as well. I didn't fight back; I didn't really know how. And in a way I didn't want to, because I just wanted things to go back to normal.
I can remember one of the biggest instances that I shot myself in the foot: there was a conversation about which of the Disney characters we'd ever had a crush on, and, just to join in and to try and provoke a laugh, I said 'Minnie Mouse'. You couldn't have no answer. Oh dear me, that was a mistake. Bane of my Year Six, that was. They never let it leave me. Never, ever try to conform with people you don't really like or understand. It leads to problems.
When High School started I made friends arbitrarily from people in my form, even though I didn't really like them that much- they were just people I knew and hung around with. I think they could tell, too, and after one mistake they decided it was time to lynch me, and they started bullying me too. Funnily enough, they were from my primary school too. One tried to push me down the stairs, and that was when I told Mum about it. The head of our year group was a great guy and sorted it out for me for good then and there, but I was left without anyone to be friends with. In time one of them admitted to me that he'd only been bullying me because the others were and he liked me really, but by that time I was past holding grudges, and he never troubled me that much.
So these next friends I met up with, acting wise, included Dan, someone I was great friends with in Nursery School. We're still friends now; he's my best friend, in fact. But I always felt I was trying to win over their affection, and I was never sure if I was ever actually accepted. I'm sure I was, but my confidence has never been amazing.
Once I got into Sixth Form many of them left, save for one, and on some deep level we could never properly connect even though we had a lot in common. I think I was more self-aware than he was, but he had a certain sense of pride in his lack of self-consciousness, whereas I was always careful to rein it in if it went too far, probably as a result of being bullied in primary and secondary school. For the most part I was happy and didn't mind, but I was still lacking something, and was always an outsider to the majority of others. Even within my other friends everyone else's bonds to their friends seemed stronger than my ties to them, to the point where I felt I was a secondary character in someone else's story. I would think that a lot.
