just really mourning a sense of natural secure connectedness to, well, anyone at all today/lately. and ultimately it's like, well, lord knows people haven't felt connected to you in the past, kiddo, so very arguably you're just reaping what you've sown… and in any event maybe the entire notion of 'natural' is as overrated in a social context as it is in food/gender/&c contexts, and i just need to accept that the path forward involves a lot of awkward attempts at (re)connection, and that it's unavoidably going to be a very unhappy road for me because of how miserable any interaction that isn't Overtly! Positive! immediately makes me feel, because [RSD/chronic post–social rejection stress disorder/however you like to frame the Sudden Disproportionate Flood of Misery phenomenon].
it's just hard because usually the slow, laborious, only-intermittently-rewarded slog is how it works at, like, the edges of your comfort zone, you know? but unfortunately my entire social comfort zone has turned into edges, even the loadbearing bits, and whether or not that's entirely ""my"" ""fault"" (often not a particularly good way to look at two-way social streets in any event: self-righteous isolation isn't gonna keep you warm!), it's unquestionably going to require some active effort from me to improve. just, you know, the eternal cruel irony that things so often require more work precisely when you're already operating at a deficit…