Back in 2008, I used to spend a considerable amount of time with a group of children who went to my bus stop. They certainly didn’t want anything to do with me, but Maslow’s third level needs told me that I needed to belong, and who better to make a bond with than the people I spent two forty minute bus rides with? I served no purpose in their group, as they played football and threw beach chairs into the community pool while I played Pokemon and posted videos of me babbling about inane nonsense on Youtube. There were times when they assured me that I was accepted as one of them, and I believed them for a while. However, I was always the goody two-shoes that they expected to snitch to the neighborhood watch committee for ding-dong ditching or throwing golf balls at lamp posts. Nevertheless, I ignored their verbal abuse and idle threats of violence (and occasional acts of violence) in order to maintain the status quo if the group, thus increasing my chances of one day being their friends.

I was incompatable with these people, and we all knew it. They made every attempt to aggrieve me into pursuing other means of belonging, but I felt it a dire need to fit in with this group of people. The event that made me ultimately decide that my time with this group was over occured when they invited me to go camping out in the woods in the back end of the house. My mother decided that she didn’t like the idea of me spending the entire night with a bunch of people the neighborhood would rather see in juvenile hall unsupervised in the middle of the woods, so she told me I couldn’t stay overnight. I had a grand old time that evening, and departed at around ten o’clock. The next morning, I went out to the campsite to help clean up, but they’d gotten a jump start on the packing and were just pulling the last of their gear back to their houses. Sure enough, there was a party at the neighborhood pool that did a poor job cleaning up. The neighborhood apparently instantly blamed the kids with the worst track records with this sort of thing, and allegedly, the police were called to investigate. They told me that I was the snitch, and that my mom posted their names in the neighborhood community forum. I tried explaining to them that my mother had no posts in the forum, but they insisted that my mother deleted them to mask her guilt. Then when I brought up the phone records, which had no evidence that the police were called, they told me that she text messaged the police. I debunked a few more of these claims before they began shouting profanities at me in order to drown out any sense of reason I could muster. I ended up walking home in tears, and on the way back, I encountered one of their mothers, who again chastised me and my mother for snitching on them. Eventually, the mothers all got into a shouting contest and we called it a day. The next morning, I saw them at the bus stop, all glaring death at me. “I’m not mad at you because you snitched, I’m mad that you cried.” One of them insisted, explaining that they got grounded after their mother confronted me, seeing me already in tears. At this point, it was clear that, if pressed for more logical reasons for why they were mad, I’d eventually get stories about leprechauns. This wasn’t about my mom or the police, it was about them making me want to leave them alone without saying that they didn’t want me around.

I hated them for their horrible misleadings, and I lost my ability to trust in almost everyone I knew because of it. However, the majority of the blame was on myself. I let them control me. I let them exploit me. I let them abuse my fragile self-esteem. They were certainly dirtbags for just lying to me about why they didn’t want anything to do with me, but they certainly made it so obvious that they stopped short of painting “We don’t like you” on my house in neon green. I saw the signs that they only included me because I wouldn’t leave them alone, but forced acceptance was better than nothing. I always thought that their actions were the most deplorable thing in the world, yet now I’m starting to see it happen again. This time, I’m being the rotten vandal kid.

My friends and I have all tried to keep a few choice people excluded, but their desire to belong with our group keeps them coming back despite the unkind words spoken to them. Both sides of this sort of relationship are nothing but detrimental to one another. The one who forces themselves on a group that doesn’t want anything to do with them makes themself suffer by pursuing a goal that they’ll never achieve. Inversely, the group that passively expresses disdain for a person keeps them coming back with hope that they would one day be accepted.

The solution to such a conflict doesn’t come from the excluding party accepting the incompatable individual, nor does it come from the incompatable individual conforming to the lifestyle of the excluding party. Neither one is correct or completely at fault in the situation, and the best thing people can do in a confrontation like this is stay away from one another. Please, for your own sake, if you’re in a situation like this, don’t let it escalate.

t-nod:

devoutofcharity:

princesscrowhoe:

professorshaftenberg:

goddamnitriot:

REBLOG WITH YOUR ANIMU SELF

hypersweetie:

duplicitycon:

Nya~

accurate. 

boku no maddie

dayum dats kawaii

And then Daniel was a stupid weeaboo.

(Source: missmurrka)