If you’re like me, the kind of person who tends to feel different from other people, you might think that you don’t have as many friends as you might simply because you’re a different sort, and that this is natural and to be expected.
However, thinking about it more closely, the way I act is a big part of why I don’t have as many friends as I could. Sometimes I hold back a lot and don’t get as involved in interpersonal interactions as I could (because I think I’m different and that people might not like me or be able to relate to me), so how can I expect people to get to know me little by little and possibly end up liking me eventually some day?
This has been a self-perpetuated problem for me for years without me ever recognizing it.
My family moved to a tough, working-class suburb when I was 10 years old.
Before then, I had always felt somewhat different than my friends at my old midtown school, due to our different cultural backgrounds, but I didn’t think much about that much because we all got along so well.
Looking back at those years prior to our big move to the ‘burbs… sure, I felt different from the schoolmates that I liked, but, in contrast, I felt utterly alienated from my parents. My schoolmates and their families seemed smarter and more emotionally stable than my parents, so that attracted me to them. Visiting them meant a bit of time for me away from my crazy parents.
Before our move to the ‘burbs, I had a lot of self-confidence with my similarly nerdy midtown friends, but it would thereafter be beaten down, little by little, year by year. My social isolation schema–the development of self-defeating thought patterns wherein I started to feel it might be better not to try to connect with the people around me–grew rapidly after our big move.
I had always been a special kid. I’ve been told that I was reading newspapers at age three.
I and several of my friends were moved into first grade after two weeks of kindergarten because we were too advanced. From that point on, until I finished high school, I would always be a year younger than most of my classmates, always different.
After moving to “the nasty suburb,” I was suddenly the smartest and nerdiest kid in all my classes, though I had been a more or less normal kid among other smart kids back where I lived before age 10.
I was traumatized by my new neighborhood, totally unable to relate to the new working-class kids and bullies who were equally unable to relate to me.
My parents were themselves working-class, neither of them having finished high school, so they were a good fit for this suburb, though I wasn’t.
Back in the midtown neighborhood where I lived until I was 10, we did live on “the wrong side of the tracks,” but I had the privilege of going to school with kids “on the good side of the tracks.” My friends’ parents were well-educated professionals of various sorts, while mine weren’t. My parents never ended up making friends with any of my schoolmates’ parents; they simply appeared to have nothing in common with each other.
As I entered my teen years out in the ‘burbs, my self-identity started to revolve around how different I felt from everyone around me. Instead of succumbing to the sadness and awkwardness of being the nerdy kid who doesn’t fit in, my goal seemed to be, “I’ll show you how different I am.”
My social isolation schema would soon be firmly entrenched. My mustache and goatee were sacred to me when they started to grow (and still are, I declare proudly). No teenagers and very few adult men wore a goatee back then, except the famous Kentucky Fried Chicken guru, Colonel Sanders.
Controlled by the social isolation schema, I strongly rebelled against it throughout my teen years in so many ways… without knowing it, of course.
For example, instead of fighting the class bullies, or simply ignoring them, I prided myself on complying and providing them effortlessly with test answers that they seemed hopelessly incapable of figuring out for themselves. The more I could do such things and pretend to fit in with these kids, the more superior I could feel about myself. I don’t think I ever believed I was truly fitting in with them, but my tactics provided me with a certain level of comfort in a world that felt hostile.
Doing an undergraduate degree in art at the end of my teen years allowed me to connect with other kindred outcasts who studied at that same university. Those art studies fed a part of me that was empty emotionally and intellectually, and I was happy to connect with a community where people seemed to be like me in many ways. This contentment and the resulting optimism were feelings that had been absent in me for years.
After graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts and moving to a larger and more dynamic city by myself, I felt like I finally had an identity of my own and had escaped the prison of my childhood and family for once and for all. However, in the background resided a yet-to-be-acknowledged awareness that my contentment was constructed around the art bubble in which I lived, ignoring the fact that I was still rebelling against people in the larger world outside who had no idea that us “important art people” had intellectual pursuits that mattered (at least to us).
Almost a decade later, I would pursue and complete a graduate degree in art, and then begrudgingly enter the corporate world in another part of the continent as a “web designer.” There, I would feel alienated from most of my coworkers, even when I did sometimes have things in common with some of them.
In my head, I was still the special child that I used to be 20 years earlier, and my coworkers simply could not appreciate how special I was, so I kept my distance and brushed off any compliments I might receive from these “unappreciative people,” which I often felt were phony (my projection).
Many people, not just me, get stuck in a social-isolation schema in this kind of way, withdrawing into their own private world from those around them, somehow stuck in their past, used to seeing their differences from others as a strange thing that should be minimized or exaggerated, whether it be due to national origin, religion, class, sexual orientation, or some other difference that’s more personal and less easily categorized.
The more I think about it, the more I think that social-isolation schemas live on in us because we have such a hard time accepting potential criticism for being what we are. When we’re feeling grounded, without such a schema in the background of our minds, we don’t care so much what others think. We just do our best and simply accept that some people won’t like us and that some will, and we have no need to act shy nor boastful about who we are.
On the flip side, when we’re less psychologically stable, we might re-live our past over and over by counter-compensating for the social-isolation schema that developed in us over the years. Such people (and I am still one occasionally) might draw attention to the extremes of their personality: how smart they are, how artistic they are, how feminine or masculine they are, how poor or wealthy they are, how religious they are, how politically conservative or liberal they are, etc… But it’s still a social-isolation schema that’s controlling the person, whether we’re rebelling against it by being flamboyant or agreeing with it by being quiet and submissive and hiding our personalities.
I was taught to think negatively by my parents. Part of the same package is that my Mom would even tell us that she felt different from others, but I never really understood why she felt that way.
She was very working-class and would socialize a bit with other working-class women who appeared to be like her, in my childhood eyes. Perhaps it was her creative side that left her feeling that many of her acquaintances were not like her, not creative like her, resulting in her feeling different. I wish I could ask her that question now, but she passed away last year, so I’ll never know.
Just because we’re different from other people doesn’t mean we have to cut ourselves off from little conversations and makes ourselves feel isolated. Sure, some people are not going to like or accept us for whatever deep or superficial reasons they have, but others might, eventually. Everyone doesn’t need to like us!
Furthermore, some people will enjoy the difference that we bring to the conversation, as long as we’re not forceful and obnoxious about our difference.