Then the two then-just-friends-of-friends laughed and laughed and laughed.
I felt like my humanity had been ripped off.
I felt like I had been somehow, inexplicably, put in my place. Somehow put into the paradigm of the nerdy dork, hell, I wasn't apparently supposed to have any more dimension than that, regardless of everything I say and do. And because I'm a bit of a nerd, yes, and I can be a dork, sure, but do those things, the negative expectations of them, do they have such gravity that they pull in everything about them, that the person is lost into those gaping cultural voids? At that moment, it seemed that way to me.
But, you know what?
A few years later, I'm in a relationship with
Like I said. What people say and do to do me or around me affects me. I'm not made of steel, and neither is anybody else. I've exhausted myself by acting the contrary.