It's okay with me. I think I know you well enough from your posts to know that you genuinely would like out help out here. Let's see what a few others say as well.

welcome aboard.
sad that eferrari is absent. maybe i will track her down.

good to see you

I am okay socially in real life. I think I have some type of internet Aspergers. I'm such a flop at making friends and I don't think I come off very well as a personality. I have been reckless in a few places with the anonymity. I think I might be seen as a bitch because I've defended the right to see it used in print here at DU. Mind you not to name call with it, but as a concept in context.
I really am not a debater or an arguer so I'll scram if there is a fight. I've smart mouthed my way into making some people not like me very much. Then I have the gall to feel sorry for myself about it later.

I know. I know. I'm working on it.

That's a problem I was working on in my last round of therapy.

My secret on DU is I can write slowly and think a long time before I post something. I often write things I never post.

I'm still a master of the socially inappropriate and awkward comment. I've been that way since childhood so mostly I've learned to keep my mouth shut. For my middle and high school years keeping my mouth shut and being invisible was actually a survival mechanism. I suffered a great deal of bullying of the worst physical sort, so I quit high school as soon as I could.

Maybe one of the things that saved me as a weird kid in a "Lord of the Flies" school environment was that me and my pack of siblings were pretty much feral children. There were too many of us for my perpetually disorganized parent's to devote much attention to beyond feeding, clothing, sheltering, and teaching us the basic "facts of life." By the time we were teens we were self-sufficient wild things. I felt some obligation to my youngest siblings so I wasn't one who flew the nest when I was sixteen.

There are shortcomings to that kind of childhood but maybe that's how I escaped the crippling self doubt that seems to torture so many people. As a kid I may have been neglected a bit, and there was a whole lot of crazy in our household that was reasonable to run away from, but I was never rejected. Because of that all the bullying I suffered at school was something outside of myself. I always had a safe place to retreat to in my head even when someone was smashing my face into the mud or holding me down as my homework burned.

A quote Buckaroo Banzai used is Wherever you go, there you are.

That pretty much describes my sense of the world. Wherever I go, there I am. This might be an unfavorable autistic trait that has interfered with my "success in life," but it does keep me sane even when I'm hurting.

Well, that's more of my story, and thank you for the support!

I had a tough childhood, too.