Illusion: Shattered.

So, I found out something pretty mind blowing recently.

I've been self conscious about being shy for so long. In high school I just basically gave up on the idea of ever being actually liked by the people I hung out with. I'd just be tolerated. After all, that's all some one as awkward as myself was capable of. I just got used to being lonely.

I got to university, and it seemed like I'd actually made a couple friends. At first, I wouldn't let myself believe that people actually wanted to get to know me. I told myself that they just talked to me because I hung out with people who they actually liked.

But then yesterday, I skipped hanging out with my friends during my break to study for a midterm. I was still so used to just being tolerated that I figured they probably wouldn't miss me for a day. It was a couple hours later when I was talking to one of them and he asked where I'd been that morning that it hit me: I was actually missed. Which could only mean one thing: I was liked enough to be missed.

Needless to say I was thrilled. It occurred to me that maybe, just maybe I'm not as utterly unlikable as I've convinced myself that I am. The funhouse mirror that I'd look in to see a timid, awkward, generally hurting version of myself had been shattered. In its place were all the memories of feeling unwanted that I'd repressed and now had to reconstruct.

Looking back at the past five years, it's just crazy to me just how elaborate a lie I'd constructed for myself in order to keep that mirror, that false perception of reality, alive. People used to smile at me in the hallways out of pity. People would say hi to me because I looked lonely and it seemed like the right thing to do. Nobody knew or even cared who I was. All were lies I had told myself and believed. It makes me angry at myself to think that I thought I was smart, and yet, I was never able to put 2 and 2 together enough to realise that perhaps, just maybe, people were nice to me because they actually wanted to be.

On the plus side, now that my cycle of thinking so poorly of myself has officially been broken, I'll probably be a lot more confident from now on. :)