(please don't judge me if this is a weird one ok?)
Stress and emotions
So first a little background: up until a a little over week ago I was stressed about getting my wisdom teeth out (I mean c'mon, I thought dentists were supposed to help you prevent you from losing your teeth!). It would probably be reasonable to say that I was more stressed about this than anything else in a long time, and stressed for a lot longer too. But this gave me a good opportunity to experience the effects that stress has on me. Additionally it's worth mentioning that I experienced similar effects leading up to both me starting highschool (I was homeschooled until that point) and when I started my summer job as a programmer last year.
Well with that out of the way, back to the story. So leading up to these events I noticed that my emotions were becoming a lot stronger and sometimes harder to control. A specific example that thankfully falls strictly into the first category is a feeling of loneliness. In fact I'd even go so far as to say that the feeling of loneliness at times over shadowed the feeling of stress, and really if it weren't for this feeling I don't think I could have identified this phenomenon at all. At first it started as just a slight feeling that I'd get every so often but could easily dismiss, but then as time went on the feeling slowly grew into an ever present feeling of solitude despite being around people every day.
I remember one day in particular feeling what I could only describe as actual pain while sitting alone eating lunch, just watching other people talking and having a good time without me (wow that sentence was hard to write). Of course I know there's probably a difference between romantic loneliness, and general loneliness but truth be told I wouldn't know how to tell these two experiences apart. Specifically the two (three?) competing theories in my mind were that either I wanted to be in a romantic relationship or that I wanted in person friends that actually attended the same school as me, or perhaps that I felt that I wanted in person friends because I believed that was the way to actually start a romantic relationship. Regardless of what it was even though I'm talking about this in the past tense, those feelings are still there, but so subtle that I have to actively search to actually notice them.
My (perhaps made up) lack of experience with people and relationships
Well the title kind of speaks for itself a little here, and you might have noticed the underlying uncertainty expressed above, but I think this is an important part of my social experience, so let me explain.
Because I've been homeschooled my whole life until highschool, I feel like I've partially missed out on the social experience that my peers gained through attending regular school through childhood (not that I think that makes regular school worth it, though). Of course I did have friends, usually met through my parent's friends, and I did used to be friends with a few people from my block, but heading into highschool there was really only one person left that I still talked to on a regular basis. Of course this meant that I hadn't been in any kind of romantic relationship ever up until highschool.
Needless to say I was excited for highschool, and I did start to actually meet a few people when that one big thing happened and school got called off and two years completely disappeared (like really has anything actually happened or did we all just time-travel without realizing it?) Well that's not entirely true, a half a year into it I did actually head on to VRChat and over the course of the next 4 or so months actually met more people than I ever had before in my life. While that was great for me it still left me completely clueless when it came time to head back to school and even now a half a year later and with school mostly reopen the way it was before I don't know anyone. So needless to say I haven't been in any romantic relationship either.
So perhaps this finally takes me to the point that I've been trying to get to: I don't think I know how people in school generally form relationships. Actually I don't even know if that statement makes sense. First of all, I know that I am an introverted person, or perhaps a more accurate term would be a generally shy and socially anxious person, which means that I expect that my experience is going to be different than that of a person who is less shy or extroverted. (To be clear what I mean by introverted/extroverted, I'm talking about the difference between talking to anyone being work vs. being energizing in and of itself.) But even still, I feel like I should be able to figure out how to at the very least have recurring conversations with someone from school.
Then there's dating, I have no idea how that's supposed to go. Like really, I know nothing, is there something I'm missing or is there just no way to know this? First of all (and I don't know if this is a silly question or a question that doesn't have an answer) who typically starts dating? Completely random people who've never talked before? Acquaintances that have had a conversation or maybe two? Friends that have known each other for some amount of time? I feel like the answer is probably that it varies but is typically around the middle option there (how do you know if the other person is already in a relationship then?), but I honestly have no clue. Of course with that being said I have no idea how I would go about actually asking someone out. Then there's the question of what's even ok to think and do, currently the way I see it (I don't know why this is just the way I am), I feel like even wanting to be in a relationship with someone is somehow disrespectful to them, and even though I know this is probably not the case it is a rule that I try to make my brain follow (does this go against the idea of having a "crush"? What does that actually mean?) Actually, truth be told I've just in the past few months allowed myself to want to be in any relationship, and I'm still not sure that's ok. I also want to make it perfectly clear that I don't think I "deserve" anything, (frankly the concept of deserving things in general is not one I quite like, because of the predictable nature of the universe and ultimate lack of free will of individuals, but I won't get into that now.) but I do know that I think it would be nice and I would like to be in a romantic relationship, but I feel as I am missing some information on how I would actually achieve this (it feels weird to talk about this for me because I feel like I'm disrespectful to some hypothetical person by assuming that they would be interested in being in a relationship with me, but logically that's silly).
The ever present fight between wanting to fit in, and to be different
Finally for the last topic, and this actually relates to the whole thing with not having gone to school like everyone else, but at the same time being glad I didn't have to go to school until recently. It's the exact same issue with social media: Social media is very bad, objectively bad, and yet there are times I wish I used it. When I say social media, I'm talking about services that both have some machine-learning based "algorithm" to present users with interesting content and where you directly create content for (and receive content from) people you know or know of in real life. I have never been on any kind of social media of this variety: Youtube is different in that I am not the creator of content and I do not personally know anyone I watch on there, and Discord is different in that there is no algorithm directing your attention (well they're starting to introduce something like that but I have it disabled and it really isn't a big part of the app). But yet when I'm at school it seems the only way that people communicate with one another is via services such as Facebook (well specifically Instagram, but it's owned by the same company) or music.ly (yeah I know it's called TikTok now, I just don't want to give it the respect of using it's real name). My solution to this has been to not give in and "fit in" and so far that has lead to a fair amount of isolation in school.
(sorry that was a long paragraph, I had a lot to say and I don't know where to split it.)
This post was weird
I know this post was weird, but to be honest I don't think that's a bad thing and I don't think I shared anything that I don't want to share publicly, so here you are :).
Also, if this post felt a little bit scatter-brained and hard to follow, that's because I honestly have treated it a little more like a journal entry than a real blog post, so sorry about that, I just really wanted to get it all down. I noticed I was physically shaking while writing some of this and honestly couldn't tell you why but it felt like it was in a good way, if that makes any sense.