I feel mostly the same way. And I must say it is very hard for me to talk to other people. I didn't feel so isolated from my peers in high school, but now that I am aware of how I can be one-sided in conversation, I've been very silent to my peers. Furthermore, I was advised to look for the "whole" and then to find a way of looking at the "whole" and the "parts" simultaneously. But I have found this search for "wholeness," that search pertaining to how to relate to other people, to have destroyed my very own conceptions of how to live with and talk with others. I am silent unless if I think I can say something that relates to the conversation at hand, but somehow I can't do that easily; it is very hard for me; I become discouraged and further isolated. Now days, I live a very quiet life at the college I attend, but I only speak to a few people--and maybe I should only be speaking to a very few people. I find that most people have a hard time relating to me or cannot treat me as someone who is in the conversation with me; they become "listeners" and "observers," or some people just interrupt me and say their own jazz of business. I've become so tired of dealing with them that I simply choose to not interrupt them. And whenever I'm at a table where the conversation is not interesting enough for me to listen to, I finish my meal, get up, and privately leave.
With this said, however, I've come to realize that I must sustain my own happiness. I'm doing this now through my limiting my relationships with people to only a few "true" friends. I do not have time or the energy to deal with everyone or people who are going to not treat me as someone at the dining table or discussion table or college community. I want to be someone, but someone to the people that will allow me to be me. Not "normal," not "compliant," not "fearful," just me. I want to talk to those people and learn to deal with the people that will not allow me to be me. And maybe we can be called "aliens," but truthfully, we are not aliens. We can be extremely considerate to our peers and to those most dearest and most closest to us. We want to be there for those people; we want to do things for those people; but what we do not want to do is say that we cannot be there for those people because they hurt us or treat us terribly. We want to be equals, and we want to be respected and loved like everyone else; we are trapped butterflies, but butterflies that become free with the right people around us and the right environment. We have potential yet to be seen; it's important, I think, to see that and to understand that. (I still have to work on that personally...)
