I’m feeling pretty stupid/lame/out of place right now. I am going on a little hiking thing/overnight trip tomorrow with people I knew in high school. I’m kind of freaking out. It’s all tied in with a lot of other basic insecurities.

People ask me all the time why I care about what others think of me. Especially after the slut post–why do I care what people think about it. I never really know how to answer because what goes through my head is, “How can people not care?” I care because no one exists in a vaccuum. I care because I didn’t have friends when I was young and I am terrified of losing them so I do my best to please them now so that they will stick around. I like to make people happy. If people are upset with me or think negatively it ruins my whole day, and potentially more. This is a crappy place to be in. And I have some baggage with my high school group.

I only really knew these people for about a year because that was as long as I went to that high school. In that year I spent time with two somewhat overlapping groups whom I think of as the computer geeks and the theatre techies. For the purposes of lunch we all hung out in the Quad and had a looser more overarching “weirdo” thing going. I came into this crowd my sophmore year and I always felt like I was missing something because everyone had been friends with everyone else for years and years and I was an outsider. [I have always had this hangup with every group I’ve been in. I think it is part of why I am getting back into the scene because even if I have been gone for a year or two I am part of the “history” and I like feeling like I belong.] I didn’t quite fit with the computer geek part of the crowd because I am demonstratively not a computer geek but I really liked them all and I wanted to fit in. I dated two boys from this crowd during my time there and that ended rather disasterously. (Long stupid story consisting of the fact that teenagers are clueless and rude and we didn’t know how to treat one another respectfully.) Basically, when I moved away to Bakersfield for that disasterous six month hiatus I felt like I was leaving behind something good but when I came back it kind of evaporated and there was some hostility with one or two people and I felt that those one or two people spoke for the group so I disappeared. One person from that crowd has kept in semi-consistent contact with me over the years and it has been hard to believe that he might actually like me.

The other crowd I felt like I fit with a little better at least partially because they were more sexually adventurous. I have fond memories of putting Nutella all over this hot guy and the lot of us licked it off. It was fun and playful and I didn’t feel as weird for wanting sex around them though I always felt like I was the most obsessed with sex in the crowd, but I don’t know. There was one girl in particular (who may or may not get around to reading this–she’s busy these days) whom I thought the world of and I spent a ridiculous amount of time around. I don’t think she knew that she was part of the reason I stopped trying to kill myself that year. I had the same problem with feeling like I wasn’t part of the history of the crowd, but they were less closed-group feeling so I was ok. I fucked up hanging out with that group by a few inappropriate sexual acts that got me in trouble with parents. Oops. Although, the parents didn’t handle it well and probably overreacted about some parts of it. (I did deserve to get in lots of trouble for the condom left in the mini-van and the correlating sex in their vehicle, but I wasn’t a bad person and treating my like a pariah was going too far.) I don’t know if I really was told to just leave and never come back, but it was my impression. I felt so incredibly ashamed of myself and like I was just a substandard person that I dropped contact with that group like a hot potato because talking with any of them brought back those overwhelming feelings of shame and guilt.

This all happened while I was going through a couple of break downs because I couldn’t handle hiding my fathers abuse or molestation. There was also a guy in the theatre group who date raped me during this period and that seriously fucked me up. I went to the psych ward a couple of times this year and spent a bunch of time in intense therapy. I was just starting to talk about my problems and to say that the kids I was friends with weren’t quite up for dealing with that shit would be an understatment. I technically know that they must have liked me in some way because they did try to be friends with me, but I was never secure in that probably mostly because I didn’t like me at all during that period. The couple of awful acting-out things that ruined me with the parents just confirmed my overall suspicion that I was just pathetic white-trash who shouldn’t be allowed to soil decent people. I still have trouble with that feeling now. I still feel like these are the good kids from basically good families and just by associating with me they will somehow be tainted and I should spare them from that horror.

So I’m kind of freaking out about this trip. And I’m freaking out that I am talking with more and more people from these crowds again. A bunch of them have just freakishly popped up in the last year or so. Hell, five of them are able to read this entry. I’m scared that I am going to start spending time with them again and I am going to feel rejected again. I honestly don’t know if I was rejected or if I just perceived that I was being rejected so it is all mixed up for me.

Some of my friends say that all they do is be angsty and whine. Well darlings–at least your whines aren’t as long as mine. 😉