💾 Archived View for midnight.pub › replies › 7291 captured on 2024-03-21 at 16:11:29. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-12-28)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Moving is stressful and sucks when you're moving down the street, much less to another country. There's no sugarcoating that. And having a privileged background doesn't help either. The only silver lining is that you've made friends before, so you'll do it again. (And I say that as someone who was a criminally awkward teenager.)
This may be a controversial take, but imo, nobody is anybody when they're around their family. If you've had that sort of steady family life, your relationship with your family is so calcified with the years of living with them and the lifetime of awkward family moments that you'll basically never feel that euphoria of friendship that you can get just hanging out casually with some friends. (I guess all I'm trying to say is that you can't really dick around with family the way you can with friends. So if your time is mainly spent with family, it's not super surprising if you feel like a cardboard cutout sometimes.)
I may not be able to provide some of the wisdom of others here in the pub (I'm only 25, young-ish pub patrons represent!), but I can say for sure that those faceless people will surprise you. Maybe not all of them, but in my experience, at least a solid 30% are great, interesting people. (Probably much more.) Everyone has an inner world and people only remain faceless so long as you're unable to see and feel that inner world. And sure, some may be simpler than others, but you'll always find that they're more than they appear. And that includes you, even if you feel generic and hollow right now.
You'll move, settle in, and find more friends whose personal brand of weird matches your personal brand of weird. Who knows, maybe you'll even be forced to explore your fluid sexuality a bit more? (It really can be a doozy to figure out.) And if nothing else, you'll probably be off to college before too long, where you and everyone else will be thrown into the same boat all over again.
As for how to start relating to people in the new place: I don't know. It _is_ scary and difficult. And it'll take time. And in my experience, it can be kinda soul crushing to have that time before you manage it. But you'll manage it. If this was an actual pub, I'd buy you a drink, seems like you need one.
The tough part is really finding people that fit me is really difficult. It's taken me so long here to find good people that understand me. What i mean by not being able to dick around is my parents are incredibly hypervigilant and straightfoward. It's always been a certain way. For a long while I barely had social skills to stand up for myself and relate to others, it still bugs me to this day. For a kid that's been so many places I have never really seen the world in a sense.