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I was isolated growing up.
Isolated in the regular run-of-the-mill homeschooled way. Growing up in rural Canada where everything is a minimum of a 30 minute drive away. Groceries, entertainment, activites, friends - and nothing in between but wheat and sloughs and cows.
Born to people who were not only the youngest child in each of their families, deeply introverted, and whose external social situations also put them in the way of easy ridicule.
It was the sixties, man.
My experience of the world for the first 18 years of my life was through my mother's eyes, primarily. My beliefs were filtered through her opinions, and my actions were dictated by her whims.
On top of that when I was 13 my family moved overseas to facilitate my dad's job. Moved, not to a town, or a an expat compound... but to a vacation village, which we inhabited September - May until I was 18.
We went back to Canada in the summers, dooming me to a cycle of social deprivation and catchup, never getting ahead or making meaningful connections.
None of this is stuff I really tell anyone, anymore. At 26 it's all far enough away that it doesn't come up in my current self synopsis when meeting new friends.
As my world expands, and I meet and love more and more people I'm so aware of how the more people that you meet and interact with the more you have a sense of your own place in the world.
Every time I have a new romance I learn what love is out there for me. Each new experience changes my views on past experiences. What I like and what I don't. The kind of love I can accept, how I want to be treated.
Every time I make a new friend I learn that there really are all kinds of people in the world, and that growing up it's not that there was something wrong with me, it's just that I didn't necessarily vibe with the 10 people I interacted with.
Nov 15, 2024
Related Recs
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I looked different, didn't speak the language, didn't understand well the culture — and every moment I was out in public I felt alone, unknown, and as if I were being mocked. Probably it wasn't true, but that's how it felt.
That season, at the time, was dark and lonely and often painful. It was a stark shock my my system and worldview after having grown up in a small rural town surrounded by people who looked and talked like me.
But quickly after I came back to the USA I was able to see what a gift those nine months had been. The gifts of perspective, of empathy, of knowing the cold, constant pervasiveness sense of not fitting in, of knowing what it is like to be an other have stayed with me and shaped the course of my life.
Jan 26, 2025
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A little personal, but being non-binary, I grew up very dissociated from my body and my time, so I don’t remember a good chunk of my formative years and have retained none of my hobbies. Recently tho, I have been trying to piece myself back together, so I have been spending a lot of time on my own. Another thing about me is that I have crushes everywhere I go, so I spend a lot of time loving others. After breaking-up with an ex that made me feel very neglected qnd unappreciated, I decided that I was going to give myself as much love and attention as I give my crushes and lovers. This has changed me.
I just let myself feel my feelings and get carried away by them. I get myself little treats and flowers, I get myself little treats and gifts. I organize little fun dates/plans for myself where I engage in new hobbies. Small manageable things that don’t feel too overwhelming to learn, like decorating Altoids tins with collage or journaling. By letting myself navigate the world through my feelings, I’ve discovered what I like, dislike, and developed little rituals and habits that I can then tell other about and share.
Social media has helped me that way, surprisingly. I treat my instagram like a scrap book and use it to document my feelings with shitposts and photos; the visual story telling makes me appreciate the little things. Pinterest allows me to collect things I like and develop a taste with no effort and no consequences, and I end up with huge pin boards full of pictures and art I love and that make me feel particular things I can name and explore. This app has been good for that too.
It takes time, love, self-compassion, and trust. Trust that the love others give you is legitimate. Trust that you are liked for a genuine reason. Trust that the mundane is magical by itself, love it for that. Trust that you don’t need to be special to be worthy of love, you can just be a person and that’s really cool <3
Mar 11, 2024
📲
I left all social media for something like five years and only posted on a small insular abandoned app during that time and that was the main way I communicated with people. After feeling repeatedly hurt and misunderstood and wondering why it was so hard to build earnest connections through this medium I decided to leave. I realized that constantly narrativizing my life with no filter gave me no space to process or examine and kept me trapped in deeply baked-in stories in my head.
Anyway I’ve maintained contact with a small handful of my closest friends and it has honestly been somewhat difficult keeping in touch to the same degree as I did before about everyone’s day to day lives.
I think the hardest part is being the odd one out so you’re missing out on the tidbits they share in this one centralized place for the purpose of economy and time and that’s something you kind of just have to accept. There’s a certain level of meticulous detail that may be lost to you and I think interactions become more of a broad big-picture thing; not being so bogged down in the mundanity allows you to engage with more distance and perspective which can lead to greater depth and emotional honesty.
And then it’s funny because the communication you’re engaging in becomes so direct that rather than everything being so uniform and kind of tossed out there, everything has to be very intentional and personal.
You have to choose to reach out, again and again; you also have to choose when to give people space. You have to be very conscious of the balance between giving and taking because everything isn’t just being offered all at once indirectly on both sides—and this balance won’t always be perfect and sometimes you might not handle it in the most perfect way.
I decided at the beginning of the year that intentionality would be my main theme and I’m still working on it. So I don’t really have the answers but engaging with friends off of social media shapes everything in new and interesting ways and those are some thoughts I’ve had as I begin to navigate this…
Feb 24, 2025
Top Recs from @pumpkinspite
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Join a club or take a class! It's funny how chatting with 9 people in real life & clicking with 1 person feels like such a win when I know if I talked to 8 people I don't click with online I would feel soul sucking failure. We're just animals, find a herd.
Jul 3, 2024
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Currently backpacking and whenever I'm in a place for a couple of days I buy a bag of potatoes.
They're CHEAP and delicious with everything, and you can make them in the microwave.
Fave baked potato recipes:
- Tuna + Cheese (canned tuna mashed with chopped onion, hot sauce, and mayo) top with cheese
- Taco --- all the taco fixings or just black beans pan fried with taco seasoning, salsa and cheese
- fried mushrooms and onions w sour cream and steak (fancy)
- Regular baked potato toppings (sour cream, bacon, chives, cheese, etc)
- I hear baked beans and cheese is also good??? will try
- Spaghetti sauce, ground beef and cheese
Jan 28, 2025
Feb 17, 2025