1. I’ve always been the awkward friendless outsider. I will always be the awkward friendless outsider. Four years of college, four years of graduate school, and over 15 years in the professional world. And I still can’t seem to carry on a conversation without being awkward.
I don’t have any friends, which makes life pretty hard when I’m going through rough patches. Coworkers quietly go to lunch and hang out after work without inviting me.
In-laws and extended family all have these meaningful relationships and go on vacations together. I’ve spent my entire life watching from the outside and it’s so depressing.
Why would my parents do this to me? It’s like they never thought I would grow up and have my own life and need actual life skills. They just wanted to make their own perfect little world and they didn’t even think about how their choices would affect us in the longterm. Oh right. That’s because they didn’t think the world would still be standing when we grew up because the antichrist was supposed to be here cutting off our heads already 🙄
I will never forget how bad they made me and my brother feel for not having better social skills when we were teenagers after they kept us completely isolated in the fucking woods for our entire lives.
I never got to develop a personality. I have no idea who I am. No matter how hard I work and how much I try to find myself in the world I just feel even worse about myself.
I just want one friend. That’s it.
2. When I was like 8, I used to go onto the Petco website and use their live help chat to ask a bunch of random questions I already knew the answers to, just so I could talk to someone outside my family. I just randomly remembered this the other day and it’s just sort of sad… but it made little-kid-me very happy. So, thank you, random pet store employees.
3. Deciding to homeschool your kids doesn’t make you a great parent. It is choosing to give up being a parent in favor of being a teacher. That means that when your kid has a tough day at school they do not have a parent to talk to about it. If the teacher is difficult and is bad at teaching, your kid has no one to talk to. If the teacher is having an off day and is mean, or lashes out, the kid can only internalize the pain and shrink. If heaven forbid the teacher is abusive and manipulative, the child has no where to go. They are trapped.
Learning is hard for every child. Why would a parent give up their divine right to care for and be there for their child so they can play teacher.
Because homeschooling, in most cases, is goddamn selfish.
4. Dear “Normally”-schooled kids
While you were chatting with friends about the music you liked, or flirting with that cute guy on the wrestling team, or having to figure out some way to manage your homework I was at home, with my mom, being yelled at for willfully not understanding the math that she barely understood herself.
From right after breakfast until Dad came home from work, who proceeded to complicate the math even more and get angry at me when I didn’t understand. I’d be there until bedtime, when I was sent to my room, thoroughly scolded for not learning. “You just don’t want to learn it!” my mom would tell me, like I was this wicked child who simply hated her and was torturing her on purpose.
She’d cry and weep and silently rage, slamming doors and grieving the daughter she wished she had, having to settle for the one she got, who hated her because she wasn’t learning math at home. Tutors? Doctors? Nope, no money for such things. ADHD testing? Nope, they’d force me to take drugs that would ruin me. She knew best for her child, and that was to keep her isolated from society so she could grow up to be a good, subservient woman of god and not be poisoned by the devilish sins of the rest of the world.
When you hung out with other kids in the neighborhood, I was outside, alone, pretending trees were my friends and hoping my parents didn’t come looking for me because if they were it’s because they were angry with me.
When you had friends over, I was alone, stuck in my fantasies, and all but abandoned by my family who beat me into the doormat because I was “the baby” of the family. I had no right to have needs, an opinion, or a voice of any kind. No one wanted my side of things. Any issues I had with sisters or the few other kids was always my fault and never theirs.
Shamed by my mom for not being a perfect social butterfly. Shamed by my dad for having emotions and not being functional. Shamed by my sisters for just wanting to be around them and be accepted by them, which was annoying to them apparently.
I feel inexplicably broken and it constantly haunts me. No one except internet strangers understand. Everyone just wants me to fit in, but I fucking don’t. I never will and I’m tired of pretending that I can.
5. Because of continuous homeschooling (after dropping out in Grade 1 to Grade 10) for a decade, I am a total misfit. I can perceive this more clearly when there is any party (like Farewell Party for our seniors today). My classmates have given me the nickname of ‘mentally disturbed’. There is so much experience that I lack – it is hard sharing a conversation.
I had almost never had a friend (except for a few months), have little experience with teachers, never played a sport, never attended a wedding etc.
Homeschooling is shit. It should be illegal
6. “My kids play sports and are involved in clubs”
“My kids are better at talking to adults, which is a better life skill anyways”
“We just had this one dance (which my daughters probably looked forward to all year because of their extreme isolation) and my daughters were extremely friendly and eager to be around people, see, they are perfectly socialized!”
Allowing your kids to be around your adult friends every once in a while is not socialization.
Allowing your kids to play sports will not provide them time to really grow and learn with their peers in most circumstances, and even if it did many sports are too expensive for many parents. Particularly those homeschooling on a single income.
Finally, Mom and Dad, “allowing” me to be involved with activities from my local homeschool group and maybe meet up with people even a couple hours twice a month in order to learn how to dance did Jack squat at helping me learn how to exist in society.
I didn’t learn a bit about what society was like until I got my first job, and that was a traumatic fucking dive into the deep end. So thanks for that, genius fucking homeschool apologists. Go to hell.
7. Walking past groups of kids my age at the mall.
Normal people can’t understand how painful that is.
8. I was homeschooled up until high school, and I’m in college now.
My mom recently made a comment about how all the public school kids who had to do online school during 2 years of covid are going to turn out awkward and weird as if 9 years of isolation didn’t have any bad effects on me and my sister.
9. Anytime I discuss online how I literally never had a single friend or socialized irl from age 1-20, the response is always “So?” “So go out and do it now?” “Just go talk to people”.
Or the best one ….“There’s no way you don’t have a single friend, you are just exaggerating”
Why does nobody realize how serious that is? No it isn’t just “lol I’ll just go talk to people now and be normal tomorrow” it takes years. Is it really that hard for them to understand just because it didn’t happen to them?
10. Homeschooling Stole my Childhood. And I’m profoundly broken as a result.
Coming to grips with this fact has been heartbreaking and liberating. Heartbreaking because I am now aware of an aching loss that can never be filled. Liberating because for the first time in my life I can understand why I’ve failed and why I’ve struggled so much, and it’s not because I’m deficient as a person, it’s because I was set up to fail.
I was home schooled until graduation. I did take online high school classes my senior year (Which I nearly flunked because I had no ability to study or work under deadline.) Afterwards I somehow managed to get admitted to a state university in a different city. In some ways this was the best thing that happened to me, because it gave me a chance to grow and be a person for the first time in my life. But it was also an opportunity that I had no chance of taking full advantage of.
How do you explain a childhood filled with loneliness and isolation to someone who hasn’t experienced it? It took me 33 years to understand it myself. 33 years to realize that it’s not normal as a kid to have no close friends your age. 33 years to realize that a kid you say ‘hi’ to at church each Sunday is an acquaintance, not a friend. 33 years to realize that other people had childhood friends they saw everyday and hung out with.
33 years to realize that other people got invited to birthday parties when they were kids.
Even after leaving home and going to college where I was around people for the first time, and in situations where I should have been making friends, I didn’t.
The most profoundly isolating feeling is watching other people make friends as an adult. Watching how other people seem to naturally grow closer as they hang out in a group.
And realizing, after 33 years, that whatever process is happening to them is not happening to you.
It’s hard watching your group of acquaintances become close friends with each other, while you remain a stranger. It’s hard watching this happen over and over and over and not understanding for 33 years that it wasn’t a personal rejection, but feeling no comfort from the realization, because you are still lonely.
It would take far to long to list all the ways I am academically stunted. I struggle to spell many common words. It took me 15 years after leaving home to get my handwriting into a semi-readable state. I failed math classes in college, but not because I’m bad at math. Because I was literally never taught it. I was just handed a Saxon book and told to learn. As a child I read voraciously. I have so much book-knowledge, even today. But it took me 33 years to realize that book-knowledge is just the beginning of education. You still need someone to guide you, to show you were you are going wrong, to teach you the limitations of, and how to apply all that book-knowledge.
There is only so much you can learn, trapped alone as a child, handed books and told to study.
Professors in college assume you are at a certain level of basic proficiency. They are not there to teach you study skills, hold your hand while you learn how to write a research essay. If you can’t keep up with the class you will get left behind and fail, because they have 300 students and you are just a number.
In a lot of ways I got lucky. I got out, in some sense.
I have a good job. Not a high paying job, not the job I was promised as a ‘smart kid,’ but a good job. A job I’m good at, where I’m respected. A job were I’m making a positive difference in the world.
I have a long time partner and a relationship built on mutual love and respect. They’re often literally the only person in the world I can talk to about certain things, but at least I have one person like that in my life (It’s a big change from decades of zero).
I have friends. I don’t know if I can call them close. I think some of them would consider themselves close with me. I’ve found that structured activities, like D&D, are a great way to hang out with people when you don’t otherwise know how to socialize. I still don’t know really know how to talk to them, I still don’t really know a lot about them even after years of playing together.
I want to know. I want to know what their favorite foods are, I want to know what kind of music they like, I want to know their life story, I want to know what their dreams are, what their regrets are. I’ve always wanted to know, I just don’t know how to have those conversations.
I don’t actually know where I’m going with all this. I’m sorry if my rant is unwelcome here. Finding out that I wasn’t alone has brought things into focus in a new way for me. I’ve had all the pieces for a long time, but it’s only recently that they’ve started coming together. It’s only recently that I’ve been able to grieve for the loss of my childhood, my education, the life I was promised.
I love you all. I’ve never met you, I don’t know you, but I love you all. Stay strong and keep fighting.
— B.
Theodore Lee is the editor of Caveman Circus. He strives for self-improvement in all areas of his life, except his candy consumption, where he remains a champion gummy worm enthusiast. When not writing about mindfulness or living in integrity, you can find him hiding giant bags of sour patch kids under the bed.