starshadow_rivaulx (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
starshadow_rivaulx) wrote2010-10-21 11:00 pm
starshadow_rivaulx) wrote2010-10-21 11:00 pm
Flashback
All this talk of bullying on the internet suddenly made me flash back to an incident in my high school days that was utterly humiliating at the time, but that I somehow managed to live down the next day.
Long story short, my batch was having one of these evening soiree things - dress-up, with a proper date and all. Dad fixed me up with the son of one of his good friends and golfing cronies, and Vincent was a proper gentleman about it, all things considered. Anyway...we get to the venue. We sit at a table.
No one came to sit with us at our table. Not even for a few minutes of chat after the dinner. I think it was at that point I definitively knew how much of an outcast I was, and there was nothing I could ever do to be accepted.
I ought to have walked out after the dinner (after all, I'd paid for it), but instead I sat through the meal - and a most excellent conversation - until the earliest moment possible for going home. All this subject to the scrutiny of sidelong glances and whispered conversations all around me and my date, and me just paralyzed with mortification.
As I said, I lived it down, and learned to move on. But sometimes, like today, things trigger the memory. And to this day, when I get invitations to class reunions and "bonding activites" and especially appeals to support the old high school alma mater with money? I do the mental equivalent of spitting in the dirt and get on with my life. Because, damn, life's too short not to move on, when you've decided what to do.
*puts money where mouth is, and goes back to LJ backreading*
Long story short, my batch was having one of these evening soiree things - dress-up, with a proper date and all. Dad fixed me up with the son of one of his good friends and golfing cronies, and Vincent was a proper gentleman about it, all things considered. Anyway...we get to the venue. We sit at a table.
No one came to sit with us at our table. Not even for a few minutes of chat after the dinner. I think it was at that point I definitively knew how much of an outcast I was, and there was nothing I could ever do to be accepted.
I ought to have walked out after the dinner (after all, I'd paid for it), but instead I sat through the meal - and a most excellent conversation - until the earliest moment possible for going home. All this subject to the scrutiny of sidelong glances and whispered conversations all around me and my date, and me just paralyzed with mortification.
As I said, I lived it down, and learned to move on. But sometimes, like today, things trigger the memory. And to this day, when I get invitations to class reunions and "bonding activites" and especially appeals to support the old high school alma mater with money? I do the mental equivalent of spitting in the dirt and get on with my life. Because, damn, life's too short not to move on, when you've decided what to do.
*puts money where mouth is, and goes back to LJ backreading*
no subject
I think we are two different personalities, though, and giving any advice from me would be wrong. For me, I have never cared whether people liked me or acknowledged me. People not coming over and talking to me, would have been much nicer than being forced into conversation with idiots I never liked in the first place. Of course, I am the kind of person who, when going to a party full of strangers, will answer the Question, "So, what do you do for a living?" with, "I write and draw gay fiction and erotica. And you?" and then laugh at their expressions.
I would have come over to your table, sat down, and talked a good while. I always pick the people off by themselves, because I always find that they are not only nicer, but far more interesting, usually, than those social butterflies that think they are better than other people. *Hugs*
no subject
Here's the best part about today's post. I ran into one of my former classmates at a hair salon, some years after we'd graduated - and she actually admitted my whole section conspired against me all throughout high school. I don't know how I managed to keep a poker face while my head was screaming "WTF? So it really wasn't all in my head, you were all in it together? And you are telling me this NOW, WHY?"
Still don't understand why she said it. But it was nice to know I wasn't under some sort of persecution complex all those years. *grin*
no subject