Can’t comment much on the trans stuff, but the main thing I wanna say that if you were lonely in high school, it wasn’t your fault. Don’t blame yourself for it. Society should do a much better job at making schools more accepting, or sorting kids to schools where they’ll be accepted, or at minimum just not forcing them to be there all the time. School does serve a purpose, but it’s still a miserable place for too many of the children confined in it, and that should be fixed.
In any case it’s great that you didn’t get get hung up on “improving social skills” somewhere that didn’t accept you, and instead found a group that accepted you. This is the only real way, I think. Next I’d encourage you to find more such groups and live a fun life between them, unless of course you’re doing that already :-)
I agree that finding a group that accepts you is awesome. But I think that it’s very valuable to improve your social skills with the default group. An issue I had (and have observed others having) is that, by spending time online, I would get used to making jokes and comments and references that online-people understand and appreciate. Then, I would do the same thing in real life and it wouldn’t work. And people would talk about things that I didn’t understand, like sports and popular artists, and I would feel left out. (Sports was the worst for me, because I grew up without cable so I had no way to keep up with sports even if I wanted to.)
I would guess this happened to OP as well. I think for most people that this happens to, it’s not some unchangable quality they have, but just something that happens when to people who spend too much time in one social group and then abruptly move to an entirely different social group. (Someone who spends all their time with, idk, mormon lawyers, and then goes to hang out with blue-collar workers in brazil, will probably have the same experience,)
I’m not saying that this replaces the need for finding a real-life group of people like yourself. Just that being able to fit into the default group when you need to is valuable and probably achievable with some effort.
Can’t comment much on the trans stuff, but the main thing I wanna say that if you were lonely in high school, it wasn’t your fault. Don’t blame yourself for it. Society should do a much better job at making schools more accepting, or sorting kids to schools where they’ll be accepted, or at minimum just not forcing them to be there all the time. School does serve a purpose, but it’s still a miserable place for too many of the children confined in it, and that should be fixed.
In any case it’s great that you didn’t get get hung up on “improving social skills” somewhere that didn’t accept you, and instead found a group that accepted you. This is the only real way, I think. Next I’d encourage you to find more such groups and live a fun life between them, unless of course you’re doing that already :-)
I agree that finding a group that accepts you is awesome. But I think that it’s very valuable to improve your social skills with the default group. An issue I had (and have observed others having) is that, by spending time online, I would get used to making jokes and comments and references that online-people understand and appreciate. Then, I would do the same thing in real life and it wouldn’t work. And people would talk about things that I didn’t understand, like sports and popular artists, and I would feel left out. (Sports was the worst for me, because I grew up without cable so I had no way to keep up with sports even if I wanted to.)
I would guess this happened to OP as well. I think for most people that this happens to, it’s not some unchangable quality they have, but just something that happens when to people who spend too much time in one social group and then abruptly move to an entirely different social group. (Someone who spends all their time with, idk, mormon lawyers, and then goes to hang out with blue-collar workers in brazil, will probably have the same experience,)
I’m not saying that this replaces the need for finding a real-life group of people like yourself. Just that being able to fit into the default group when you need to is valuable and probably achievable with some effort.
Yeah, I was talking more about finding a real life group. Finding an online group is much less useful.