I'm very out of touch with my peers and I am looking for a nonjudgmental group or just a few people to be friends with in real life. My first signs and symptoms of mental illness appeared sometime after I graduated from community college with my associate's degree in computer networking and from there me and everybody else parted ways.
I have social anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, bipolar 2 disorder, and I'm on the autism spectrum.
I'm quite introverted and I generally like to be alone or on a situation where it's just me and a friend because of the freedom that I find comes with it. In social groups, I experienced the group always wanting what the most popular leader guy wanted to do all of the time with all his followers thinking that his ideas were great but me. It just wasn't for me. I wanted to make my own movie choices in the theater. Also, my quietness often made my presence forgettable too. Imagine getting "Hey, did you come with us to Cheddar's last week? I can't even remember!" comments. Maybe I just never found the right group? What do you think?
My going solo for a decade (just me, mom, and dad, pretty much) has made me, I think, weird and out of touch and it's getting worse daily, probably, but yeah, I can't relate well to the wife and kids with a mortgage and car payment and stressful job lifestyle.
Something I noticed about high school was that it sorta of taught me how to behave? I knew that I was supposed to desire the brand new video iPod and I can't remember the popular bands back then but you might pick up on liking Justin Bieber would get you teased and shinned. I never wanted to pretend to like what they liked or feel what they felt either but it gave everyone small talk subjects and it made me aware of which subjects people were sensitive about like Israel right now for example.
My mom encourages me to volunteer but I live in the Bible Belt with a hundred Christian churches in town and as an atheist, I just want to pack food bank boxes and do without church representation or any group prayers or proselytizing stuff. Hey, you're free to join that kind of group if you want but I would like to find something else.
I also hate night driving so it eliminates some meetups I can attend. I've seen a few events where there's going to be a group of people attending an after work social hour event at a pub an hour and a half drive to our state capital in the daylight and I would have to make my drive back in the dark.
There's a stigma around having a disability and especially so when it's invisible to the eyes like the mental health stuff. As you might expect, I'm only out in the world when I feel good and I hide out at home when I'm sick. Nobody sees the struggle of my 4 conditions on the government's list of officially recognized disabilities.
Some of the hardworking types see my purchase of even a 20 oz Coke as an undeserved luxury that they helped pay for through their taxes.
Inthink that I need to either keep my mouth shut in real life better about shopping or better yet, keep my disability payments private all together. It only sets me up for grief and maybe even ignorant or malicious fraud reports to the government that could trigger a case review headache for me in situations where they know my full name.
I've been considering telling any strangers who ask a complete lie about being a play it safe 2010 Bitcoin gambler who didn't go all in and get to the yacht ownership level and a truthful one about supporting my parents in their old age. I'm not sure if that's even a good idea.
I know a Twitch streamer, I just tune into her, who's a year younger than me who does song request streams and it's known by all that she's 35 and lives with her 70 year old dad who's a piano repairman. Reddit is always saying that you're a loser if you're like us at that age but hearing hee say that on air opened my mind to how reddit didn't get it right on this one.
I didn't come to their conclusion while I was free of their influence. The two of them are two independent people and equals contributing to the household chores and bills from what it feels like and definitely not a woman-child who still needs guidance from her daddy scenario.
I personally feel a lot more adult like than child like just like her but I can contribute my government aid checks in our house rather than my Twitch streamer piano earnings. I didn't have a "judging her" feeling at all either when she as a single woman and her senior dad go on camping and hiking vacations together and she posts Instagram shots of them on top of mountains. Do you?
