How was your teenage years?

~Beyond the Border~ > The Shrinemaiden Café

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Absolutely terrible. I was the lonely misfit kid. In primary and middle school I had maybe two decent friends, everyone else either picked on me or ignored me. In secondary school there was no more picking, for which I'm thankful, but I rarely interacted with others. Didn't even attend prom. I compensated with escapism a lot, mostly computer games and online chatrooms (most of my friendships at the time were online, though only two stood the test of time... I met my wife online too, but that was past my teens already). Well, what can I say, it was a strawberriesty time and I'm glad it's long over.

akudan:
I'm still a uni student, so my teenage years aren't very far behind me. But I can definitely say that they got better as I got older. I used to (and still do to some extent) have a good deal of social anxiety and struggled making friends in school. I was never picked on, outside of middle school, but I had trouble fitting in with other kids and didn't really build many close relationships. I was always on the fringe of several different friend groups, but not really part of the "core" of any of them.
Part of the reason I didn't really get to know anyone is like how Funbil said earlier in the thread, that anytime anything went wrong it seemed like the end of the world. It often felt like saying something awkward or misinterpreting a social cue would totally destroy a friendship, so I erred too far on the side of caution and

akudan:
continuing from my last post, which I accidentally hit "post" on:
I erred too far on the side of caution and didn't open up to anyone. Looking back, I can see that people were generally nice to me and probably would have been open to being friends with me, but I simply rarely took the opportunity.
As I grew older, I became more confident in myself and started being less afraid of other people and messing up social interactions, which made me a lot happier and more comfortable interacting with other people, although I still wouldn't say I have many close friends. Also, I really relate to what a lot of people here are saying about figuring out hidden social rules. I was never diagnosed with autism, but it was still hard for me to intuitively understand social interaction and I had to manually figure out a lot of the rules. So as I got older, I understood the rules better, which made social interaction easier.

WitheringFlowerCrown:

--- Quote from: akudan on January 31, 2024, 03:19:00 PM ---continuing from my last post, which I accidentally hit "post" on:

--- End quote ---

Something that you may already know: You can modify posts after submitting them. As long as you don't massively omit something and/or modify it soon after posting, nobody will have a problem.

Good job on improving your social skills. I mainly spent my time avoiding conversations entirely since I was absolutely sure that something would go wrong, so why should I bother with it anyway? I'm glad I got out of that attitude.

akudan:

--- Quote from: WitheringFlowerCrown on January 31, 2024, 05:02:44 PM ---You can modify posts after submitting them.

--- End quote ---
Ah, very good to know. I'm new-ish to traditional forums like this so thanks for letting me know. Also I'm glad you were able to get better at socializing as well!

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