Dealing with the damage done

Well I'm trying to take it easy at the moment. Spring always ends up making my CFS play up and I overdid the activity and emotional stress a little both of which are bad for flare-ups.

I've been doing some gentle introspection lately to figure out how to improve my life a little. (Well, in between chapters of Varney the Vampire and watching a DVD I stumbled on for a pittance of Flesh For Lulu in concert)

Anyways my tiny social life and minute romantic situation had me wondering why things have been so difficult.

My problem is not communication skills, those are quite good. It's not empathy, that works fine. My trouble is social skills. Not ordinary day-today ones but more the meeting new friends and potential romantic partners skills and the turning casual friendships into strong ones.

And inevitably the problem came I think from school bullying. We moved around a lot in my early years but that wasn't much of a problem, I still made new friends and coped with the bullies. But the last year of primary school and then Highschool things were different. Thats when the ostracism began. A constant campain of not just physically violent but also psychological and emotional bullying from many and having friendship with me become social death for others what few friends I developed in high school swiftly ceased them to gain acceptibility for themselves.

And thinking about it since then I've devoted far too little time and energy to such social skills relying on having a small amount of good dependable trustworthy loyal friendships. But life draws people to distant corners and while all those are good friends they are mostly scattered over the continent now. And one of the worst parts of CFS is that it is socially isolating, leaving people unable to attend parties or having to leave early, preventing them from working or studying, keeping people housebound and restricting interaction substantially.

I realised that other than via the net I interact with other humans on less than half the days in the week. That is not good.

So despite the limitations of my CFS and of course of being far different from 'normal' (thank goodness!) I need to work on improving my social lot.

With the huge incidence of bullying I wonder how many others are struggling with the damage done to them. How great a cost that must have on society.

And considering the social effects on Transgender people... those caused by fear of having ones closet door opened, the fear of unacceptance, the fear those who find transgender people especially attractive that they would never have such a relationship accepted by others that leads them to either just hide it or to seek only sex and not a long-term relationship, worst of all being the outright hostility violence and ostracism that comes from transphobia where people lose families, friends, jobs and more for coming out.

Thats not ok, not acceptable. One of the major challenges for the Human Species is to change this malfunctioning excluding tribalist instincts role within society. We must find ways to include those excluded. Whether by the practicalities of illness or the oppressions of moronic and illogical intolerance.

So I'm adding another ball to the juggling act of balancing my CFS by slowly trying to improve my social life without getting myself housebound, or worse bedbound by my symptoms. It'll be interesting.