On being introverted, easily overwhelmed, and feeling different than...

Exploring feelings of never being able to connect to other people, especially other guys.

I never understood or liked sports. I don't like the noise and commotion. I can never seem to understand or remember the rules. Team sports never made any sense to me. I never understood the attraction other guys feel about sports. I hate it when guys will try and start conversations with things like, "What do you think about that Lakers game yesterday?" It assumes a lot. I'm not sure who the "Lakers" are or what kind of game the guy is talking about. I never know exactly what to say to these guys. I've gotten to the point that I am really honest with them, but after telling them I have no interest in such things, they either look at me like I'm an idiot, or move away like I have a disease or something. It was really hard when I was kid.

I never liked a lot of the "guy things" guys do. I've tried at different points in my life to do these things, but I never was good at them and they didn't feel good to me. I tried riding motorcycles back in the '70's. I bought a friends used dirt bike so I could ride with him. I dumped that thing so much it was ridiculous. I was afraid of it. Same with firearms. I got into shooting for awhile (not hunting) and I hated it. I already hated sports. I had a horrible time in school during P.E. classes. I was the kid who got picked last--who teams leaders argued over not choosing. Dodge ball was terrifying and painful to me. Calisthenics and track events hurt. I couldn't climb the damn ropes or do chin-ups. When I was younger, I feigned an interest in cars and mechanics, but I really didn't give a darn about it. I didn't like getting all greasy and I didn't have a lot of patience when things went wrong. I also didn't understand a lot of the more complicated principles about gearing and how engines actually work. A lot of that is math type stuff. I acted a lot of ways and did a lot of things just to try and fit in.

I do some "guy things" in that I've always had an intuitive sense where fixing mechanical things and building things comes in. I'm pretty clever with metal and wood. But I'm also quite challenged due to my problems with math. If a project demands more than my intuitive mind, I'm pretty lost. It's always been a problem. People, in particular employers, see that I'm gifted in some sense, but then find out that I have huge gaps in my abilities. I've had to work really hard at hiding this or finding ways to compensate and manipulate, both on the job, and with male friends who are mechanically minded.

I don't like parties. I tried so hard as a young man to be like everyone else, but the much touted parties always felt like so much work. Too many people talking about so much nonsense and trivia. I mostly just wanted to be left alone. I never felt comfortable around crowds, even if I knew most of the people there. I never liked superficial talk and I'm horrible at making small talk. I'm much better at talking in-depth about certain subjects that I actually care about on a one to one basis. Mostly, how I feel about things. Feelings in this case being my subjective experience of it, not my opinions.

At 52, it's embarrassing to be so very socially naive. A lot of the things others seem to take for granted seem to just escape me. Things like card and board games that I never learned how to play. And if I did, I couldn't seem to remember the rules long enough to play them again. Small talk, pop-culture, and trivia baffle me. Not that I care much about trivia, but how do people keep all that stuff in their heads???? I rarely know anything about movie stars or movies... recently a friend referred to a TV commercial that I guess was running for a long time and running all the time. I watch TV but had no clue as to what she was talking about. This type thing happens to me a lot.

I don't understand the subtle clues involved in dating and those types or relationships. I often miss the overt signals that most other people seem to understand. To me, the "game" is best avoided entirely. But sexual things are often topics of discussion when guys get together, whether it be talk about some woman's big boobs or a dirty joke. I feel out of the loop. I feel distinctly uncomfortable with that sort of thing. Not because I don't like girls, I do, but... I dunno, it's like they are talking a foreign language or something. I end up feeling like an alien, uncomfortable being around both men and women.

All in all, I think most people find me rather boring. I'd rather talk about feelings than things. I'd rather spend time quietly by myself or with one other person than in a crowd. I don't keep up with fashionable things or society's more trivial pursuits, most of which are merely fabrications of Madison Avenue and Hollywood designed to sell products. I don't have a lot to talk about. I can do pretty well conversing about things I care about such as certain recovery issues, animals, growth, spirituality. But even there I'm somewhat of a fraud. How can a person grow and become when they live in a vacuum? Isn't part of recovery and even spirituality learning to interact with one's fellow human beings? And it seems so few are really interested in these things quite the way I am. I meet almost no men that are, so the people I get closest to tend to be women.

After I got sober, I wanted to take up fishing again. I've always loved the forests and streams of the Pacific Northwest and I use to fish quite a bit back when I was drinking. Anyway, I went fishing once after I got my life somewhat together and really enjoyed my day. That is right up to the point that I actually caught a fish. I was appalled at myself and horrified at the suffering of this beautiful creature. Unfortunately the fish died. It had swallowed the hook and, well, there was nothing I could do for it at that point. I've never told anyone this but that was the last time I put a line in the water. I broke my fly pole up into little pieces and stashed it under a bush before returning to camp. I couldn't bring myself to tell anyone what really happened so I buried the fish and destroyed my pole and claimed that I lost my pole so would be fishing no more that day. From that day on my so-called fishing trips were excursions out with just me and my dog to enjoy nature.

I'm sure that a lot of my social phobias stem from the social isolation of our family when I was a child, and other abuse issues. But my sense of things is that I'd always been different than.... Some time after getting sober I read about temperament types according to the Jungian way of seeing things. I think it was something like the Kersey-Bates temperament scale and if I remember right the first book I read on this was called, Please Understand Me. It was great to learn that being an introvert or "intuitive feeling type" wasn't a disease. But I still felt "different than" and outside of the mainstream—to the point of feeling intensely isolated and unable to belong to anything or anyone. It's really quite a lonely way to go through life. As if you can see it, but you can't quite touch it. How much of all this is due to my childhood situations, or my innate temperament, choice, or mental illness, I haven't a clue. I don't know what normal is to begin with.

As a child I lived quite a bit in my head. Imagination was almost the same as reality for me. Still is to some lesser extent.

To be continued...

Dave