The year was 2021. I was 14. Right around March or April, I was sitting at the kitchen side of the main room eating a snack or listening to my parents all being open for discussion, I remember it was about their workplaces or what they are feeling about their overall days, and then this sentence from my dad hit right at me: “We’re moving to North Carolina this summer”, because for three reasons: my other side of the family that acted a lot better than my dad’s side of the family, in which I had a couple of connections with in the past in terms of how much I was alike to them like my Grandma, however I’ve had difficulty in establishing relationships with any side of my families, including any of my brother’s friends at a young age due to behavioral issues. Second reason: We lived in Arizona where there’s only one infamous sole factor about it, the weather. In North Carolina there are various exciting factors about the weather where any of the seasons weren’t as bad, like snow and the heat being more moist in the air. And finally: My dad had applied for a job there to work for the Diocese of Charlotte, which didn't last until sometime in early 2023 due to a toxic workboss. When I received that sudden response I was dismayed since I already had a good friend group going on consisting about 5 people including me, and I had an already good and memorable year in a cohort room/zoom meetings during the COVID days, where everyone looked like they spoke their thoughts about the subjects and emotionally cared and felt for everyone. It even let me join a birthday party sometime around mid-to-late May where we watched the latest Mortal Kombat outside on a projector after a pool party, then we toured around in his house until we each waited until we got picked up by our parents, so I was really dismayed when I was announced this from my dad, during the peak of my improvement line of looking out for the right people to reside with. I even sadly confronted him on how he made decisions like these, but he convinced me that It would be an adventure, but I could only hope for the best at least..
When we arrived there, we rented an apartment after a drive that took us about 3 hotel rooms in the span of 2-3 days, two of them being nasty and uncomfortable to sleep in because of the poor, unsanitary conditions in one of them, of the bathrooms being short, smelling bad, prone to more bugs around it, and the horrible conditions of the walls, the majority of them being torn around. But it took us the whole night to move into the designated apartment after our older house was already sold in the hands of another person so we can no longer own it. My first school day was somewhere around two weeks later in August. My first middle school was Jay M. Robinson around when I was already at the cusp of ending my years of Middle School. 8th grade. My first day of school was decent there when some friend already came up to me and was already wanting to start being friends with me, but the rest of my years there it was never the same thing I felt as much as it was back in May. I never knew that not preferring basic small talk and preferring conversations only solely about my interests were already going to be a problem that I have with me compared to neurotypical society yet here I am. These days I feel like an abandoned bunch of people whose usual structure of talking to people is like a difficult foreign language by itself, if not the words. Even If I were to go look at someone and I found them being a lot like me at face value, yet I would feel inferior to them because I’ve had a history of talking to people across my tables and they would give me weird looks or accuse me of interrupting into barging into conversations, and I just never understood, since it was just socially inept me, but then I would realize that this is how I would never look at people on how they would make friends for the first time. I tend to be more high-masking these months and 3 years during my school days to avoid people looking at me being weird and this would lead me into have a fear of embarrassment and to not be made fun of because I just wanted to be like the average person I looked up to that wouldn’t seem to be misperceived by the public to be making mistakes often or answering people’s questions wrong, and me being hyperaware of these cautions I have, compared to other socially awkward people in my class, after witnessing their behaviors, it has caused me to be in a paranoid like state and it was just never easy functioning with hyperawareness. This has decreased my chances of developing strong connections with people and by hardly having anyone by my side to be studying for anything in certain classes without being preoccupied by persistent negative thoughts and mental health issues. Overall, I never felt good about myself after all of this.
At this day and age, I always wondered how things would have gone differently or If I were to ever have a different start, but I wanted to start something more successful in this new state in my life. I wondered if was it seriously my fault for not taking responsibility for not talking in the first place with people around me even if they seem to have barriers, restricted borders, and different types of being a human that I could never have access codes to, but it was only because that type of access code never clicked with me as a person, or it defined who I was, or has driven me. If only I knew it can take me to find the right person. If only….