[To see the much more detailed and overlapping followup to this post, see here ]
At first I wanted to post this in the 3rd person, but after concluding that many of these ideas don't cover all people like me, this post is solely about me. I would, though, love to meet others who have had the same experience as me. Here goes nothing...
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At school, I rarely socialize.
There are only a few like me at school, about 3-7 in each 300 person grade, but they can be found. I call these people, the outsiders, the aloof group, the loners.
It is not hard to find us, in fact extremely easy, but only if you look for us. We do not stand out, but we are always observing, the ones that rarely speak, but when we do, you are surprised, especially if you don't know us, at our fluency and way of speech. We are not part of any cliques, no groups are of our interest, and they wouldn't accept us anyway, unless we are the head founder of one.
We are the ones that are alone at lunch, the ones that sit in the hallways in groups of one or two, very rarely more. At lunch we are usually either roaming the hallways with no destination, sitting in the hallway with a book or something to read, watching and observing people in the gymnasium or in the cafeteria or in the hallway, in a club that we contribute greatly to (the club is very important to us), helping others, roaming outdoors, heading home or out of school boundary for lunch, or more traditionally, in the school library, but all these places with only by ourselves or with one other person at most. During breaks, we are frequently outdoors running, alone of course, jumping or else. The only ones running around the school (even if we are not in a rush or we don't know where we're running to), it's probably us (the smart ones).
Clothing, nothing special, usually plain jeans or simple pants, or on other minority of days in suits and more formal wear, or on other days dressed like a young well-dressed child. The ones with their jacket on all day, and with the zipper of that zipped all the way up is distinctively us. Theme days we do not participle in, no pajama days or spirit days.
Our handwriting is legible, but not in any way neat. Our letters are not the same height (ie. there are letters that are situated not at the same spot on the baseline, some are higher, some are lower), letters mostly separated, and we can write relatively quickly. The smart ones of us write with a (slight maybe) left slant, and are very direct in our writing.
I have a suspicion that we are all INTJs, but not necessarily. We are definitely more autistic like relative to our peers.
Some ask us if we have any friends, and we try to answer appropriately. The answer to this question depends on what the interrogator defines as a friend. Most of us have one true friend, that has stayed with us throughout the years. This true friend is with who we share some of our secrets with, that we trust most, and is an outsider just like us; they are
the only non-school peers that we actually talk about our lives with. The rest of us have no true friends. But if you define a friend as someone that we occasionally speak to, only talk to at school, but rarely meet outside of school, there are dozens.
One thing to be sure, we have no enemies; we are not popular, but who that take a class with us, or at least talk to us, are able to remember who we are after time. In class, we only sit in the back or front row, usually in corners, always with book in hand.
And of us, there is only a portion of us that are smart. I am one of these people. When Honour Roll is publicly posted in the hallway, I can tell, that those that are part of us that made the list, well, are smarter than the above average student.
One very important feature is that the only exception to what is above is if it is part of our passion, our expertise. Most of us have a interest that we are very good at, sometimes but rarely two, but this subject, whether it transit (me), autism (me), hockey, animals, home design, this subject we excel at and strive to learn more, it is our life, so we grant exceptions to the above rules to fulfill it.
Simply, we are different, and we know we are different, but we try to find why this is so.
In our families, we are either fully dedicated, loyal members who stay with family significantly more than the orthodox teen. We are reliant on our parents, in our own familial bubble, all through elementary school and the first years of highschool. 2nd to 3rd year in secondary is when we start realizing the truth. Fourth year, familial matters begin to Disintegrate as our goals that we have established in highschool but are still secret to our parents begins to drift further and further from the image of us in our parents. By Fifth Year, Familial crevices have grown into full scale cracks that may break at any moment.
But the main separation between us and our peers is socialization. For all that are not outsiders, they are always in groups of 3 or more, usually 5 or more. Facebook and social media, we have never gotten on dedicatedly. We may have hundreds of "friends", but at the end of the day, we do know these people, but no, we are not addicted to Facebook, wanting to quit in fact.
The ones that always smile are the smartest ones of us. We are always smiling and happy, smiling on our yearbook photos and in the hallways. We run up stairs 3 at a time, go down 2 at a time, wear running shoes all over school and have a few people that we frequently speak to that may appear that we are friends with them, and for the first little while we are, but we soon drift away because they loose touch in our lives and we decide to halt much more contact. And at home we think a lot, and spend a lot of time pondering deep issues.
Sports is not an issue for the smart ones of us, but we do detest PE. I am also analyzing the possible correlation between looks and intelligence.
If the above described is you, please email me because I have a huge desire to learn more.
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For me, it's not that I don't want to socialize. It's that I can't sustain a social situation without becoming too exhausted after 10 sentences. Eye contact, tone, comprehension, replying to a person without offending him and saying it in the most concise way possible while detecting sarcasm is not a simple feat. Socialization is also time consuming and of little gain. For me, I have the ability to repeat and replay entire conversations with tone and the emotions of the person I was speaking to in my mind, and if I miss a point that I should have said, or accidentally missed their subtle social cue, or said something that wasn't appropriate, it will stay in my mind for the rest of the day and probably the next day. I can remember exactly what I spoke about and approximately in what order I said it a week later. Because of this, every sentence that I speak with someone, requires time of afterthought to review. This is time consuming and since I always see my errors is each conversation, very depressing and exhausting. That's why I try to avoid unnecessary conversations as much as possible.
-Kyle - Feb 2013
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