For some background I’ve had struggles with being the odd one out and feeling excluded since a young child so when these situations occur I get very sensitive to them. I had a close friend group in middle school however I was the odd one out. Everyone else has their favorites and yet I was nobody’s, not even the friends I considered closest to me. After multiple confrontations of feeling excluded, nothing changed so I stopped being friends with the group. All of highschool I closed myself off and was alone. College came and I didn’t want a repeat of highschool where I felt so lonely so I went out of my comfort zone and initiated friendships with people to make friends. I have a friend group in college now, and also some individual friends outside of the friend group and who I grew close to within freshman year. It’s now sophomore year and J decided to invite my individual friend to go to a hockey game with my other friend/roommate. Somehow at the game I ended up being the one to sit at the end while they sat next to each other. Let’s just say the entirety of the game they did not acknowledge me. They were constantly talking to each other, laughing, showing each other their phones and I just sat at the end in silence. They didn’t try to engage me in the conversation or even acknowledge my presence. There were a few times I even spoke to my friend next to me to engage conversation but she didn’t really try to continue the convo and it just ended shortly. I even started to tear up in the bleachers because I felt like it was 7th grade all over again with the same feeling of exclusion and not being someone’s first choice. My entire life I’ve always put in so much effort to make sure everybody felt seen and included because I know the feeling and have cried at night over it. I was excited to invite my individual friend to hangout with my friend to include her and yet I ended up being the one feeling excluded in the end. I actually got so fed up that I ended up walking away to go stand with some other friends who were there because I felt like they didnt care if I was there or not. Not once they did ever shoot me a message or anything even when I feel like it was visible I was upset when I left. I’m aware that I have to communicate and speak up about this. I just feel like why should I have to tell you to include me just to feel included, I consider them my close friends so they should just naturally include me. I was the one who invited both of them to this event. I was invited by my friend group first and decided to invite them to include them (they didn’t know each other until this event .) I drove with both of them separately from my friend group and seating was packed which is why we all didn’t sit together. This situation just brought me back bad memories of feeling excluded when I was a child. I just feel like i’m not someone that anyone would want to be their first choice, I’ve never had a friendship like that ever. I’ll feel like I have a really close friendship with someone only to find that they are even closer to someone else. I consider them my best friend but im not one of theirs. This really just makes me want to give up on maintaining friendships and just to close myself off and be by myself so I don’t have to deal with the pain.
4 comments
In a way if you just sit silently in the background, you do meld away in it and become invisible. Try to join their conversations , initiate stuff, when they are showing something on their phone to someone else just ask if you can see it too.
Usually the person who is a first choice is the one who “pops up” in their vicinity. Either when the activity “poped up” they were already interacting with the person or were the first in the contact list or they recently interacted and had lingering emotions.
When animals don’t want to be noticed they tend to stop and not move, stay still. So don’t wonder that you become unnoticed if you stay still.
It is a sort of “battle” for attention. If both are moving, then the one who moves the most gets more attention.
You need to interact in order for other people to interact with you.
>There were a few times I even spoke to my friend next to me to engage conversation but she didn’t really try to continue the convo and it just ended shortly.
Were you adding to the conversation she already had or were you teying to steer her into a different conversation? Maybe she just wanted to continue the conversation she was already having instead of suddenly jumping to a different conversation (and leaving the other person hanging without closue).
>Not once they did ever shoot me a message or anything even when I feel like it was visible I was upset when I left.
Emphasis on “you feel”. You have no idea how you look in a third person perspective, you kbow how you look from the first person perspective and from the inside. So it could be that you didn’t look upset outwardly.
Have you tried listening to a recording of your voice? Have you noticed that the voice in the recording is different than what you hear when you talk? This shows the difference between looking from inside and looking from outside.
Maybe it’s the kind of people you hang out with. From my experience, I’ve stopped talking to some of my “Friends” because they lacked self awareness and didn’t acknowledge the fact that they talked about themselves a lot but when I had something to say they didn’t care. It sometimes felt like I was was just there to be a pretend friend just so that they wouldn’t be alone when we’d go out to events and such lmao, sounds silly. ( idk if that’s specifically one for the cases with you too).
Stop giving people your time and energy who are undeserving of YOUR time energy. Think about what’s best for YOU. Cuz at the end of the day all you got is yourself. They clearly don’t care.
Join them when you’re bored instead of feeling “FOMO” fear of missing out.
I’ve been going through a similar situation with my friends recently as well. I don’t know if I have the best advice for this, but prioritizing time to yourself and doing things alone has helped me cope with feelings of exclusion. If no one else seems to care, maybe caring for yourself can help ease the pain a bit.