Today at work a coworker of mine gave out bags of M&M candy (regular, peanut, and peanut butter, depending on the desk) and put them on the desks of our office. However, there was no candy on my desk. This leaves a few options as to why this happened. It is possible that the coworker simply forgot to put candy on my desk while putting it on all of the other desks in our office when she arrived at 5:30AM. It is also possible that she intentionally chose not to put candy on my desk out of some sense of personal pique or some sort of desire to be rude. It is also possible that she put the candy on my desk but that someone else stole it for themselves, which would be rude, but would not mean that the original person was behaving rudely. When I ponder such incidents, being very sensitive to social slights, I remember that in many matters of life we never move beyond public school and the pettiness of social conduct and our alertness to signs of being accepted or excluded by our peers.

As might be imagined, my life has been somewhat difficult when it comes to socializing, and the fact that I have been treated very poorly by others over the course of my existence has drastically shaped my own thoughts of the kindness and politeness of those around me, and made me hypersensitive to the way that I am being treated relative to the way that others are treated. To be sure, the presence or absence of a bag of candy is a small matter in the grand scheme of life, but for someone like myself the absence of generosity towards myself when others are being treated generously is a sign of much larger personal issues that I have struggled with all my life and continue to struggle with even as an adult. It is not clear that this absence of generosity is necessarily intentional (since I cannot read the hearts and intentions of others), but what is important is that I tend to automatically take it as intentional, and use it to reinforce a view of other people as being rather unfriendly and hostile towards me when I have not deserved or merited that sort of ill treatment, and that definitely does not help my social life in difficult circumstances.

This sort of matter comes up more often in my life than it really ought to. In fact, seeing as I am a friendly person, it ought not to happen at all, but such petty acts of social rejection occur very often. For example, every week at church I have the opportunity to watch people interact with each other and compare their interaction with others to the way that they interact with me. I take note of who gets invitations, hugs and other warm and gentle affection, and who does not. Being alert to such matters tends to come about because one has a personal history of isolation and social exclusion, and to be sure I have that history. In some respects, it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, because one tends to read unfriendly intent when there are a lot of other things going on. For example, someone could avoid saying hello or goodbye not out of rudeness but simply because they are intensely focused on something else and aren’t very aware of those around them. Also, being aware that one is being intensely observed and scrutinized can make one more nervous and less friendly than one would otherwise be. We change our behavior when we are aware that we are being noticed, which keeps us from being as natural as we would otherwise be.

I can certainly understand these matters. The fact that I am a very observant and often critical observer of the behavior of those around me is fairly obvious, I imagine, and I am sure that some people are uncomfortable with being observed with the kind of scrutiny that I give to those people and events and situations that are within my immediate vicinity. I would hope that most people are aware that my observations are generally kind, but all the same I often find much with regards to social matters that makes me uneasy and unhappy. Social (as well as romantic) matters have often been a source of extreme stress within my life, and that is as true of me as an adult as it was when I was a nervous teenager. It is often intensely frustrating just how little has changed in my life since I was a teen. To be sure, I am a lot more patient and mature (though perhaps not patient or mature enough) than I was then, but the basic and essential patterns of my emotional life and my social anxieties are largely unchanged from those dark and evil days. I know not when they will ever change, if indeed they do, but I would hate to be young forever in the least enjoyable aspect of youth, in one’s relationships and interactions with others and the lack of affection and respect that they entail. How long must this curse endure?