Dear anita,

You said: “It is my guess that you were not born with an abnormal need for deep interactions that a normal family could not satisfy. It is my belief that you are very likely to have been a child with normal needs and your family, your parents did not satisfy your normal needs.”

Possibly. But I am not sure. There are so many factors that could have made things happen. I don’t think I can blame most of everything on my family. My siblings have turned out more socially adapted. They have their own problems, and their problems are simply different from mine, that much I can say. So in that sense, why did I have the problems that I had, and my siblings did not have the same problem?

In terms of what I know from family history, my parents did not change very much. Maybe they worked more, perhaps, and got older and more tired when they get home. But that would be speculating.

Maybe it’s just the age gap. They’re now in their 60’s. I just turned 20. Perhaps, the larger the age gap, the less there is to talk about. If you noticed when I talked about my siblings, my brother, who’s 37, became most similar to my parents in terms of life direction (he has his own interests and hobbies of course that are different from my parents).

It might also be because my dad would have more to talk about with my brother, compared to us daughters. My mom seems to be just there to care, not really to talk.

You also said: “Maybe you now have a need to … be different and so you present thoughts that I can’t follow, thoughts that are too difficult for me to understand, like in your last two paragraphs.”

I’m sorry about that. Haha. I’ll try to explain. I just mean that in my old social context, my old school, there was less diversity, and I did not really see any people that I feel “drawn” to. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t interested in becoming friends with them. But I had more insecurities back then, and I wasn’t really sure I can relate to them. In my current social context, that is, college, I start to see more people who I really, really wish I could get along with, but now realize how inferior I feel in comparison to them. I have not been blessed with like-minded friends when I was younger, so now there really is a GAP in our mental developments. It’s like I see these people (the ones I yearn for) as being like me, however, being a more “mature version” of me. But since I have not matured in this age yet, I am very, very nervous when I try to talk to them. So it’s sad because social isolation in the past begets more social isolation in the future. It’s a spiral effect. Unless, of course, I work hard to break the pattern. Definitely, some patterns have already been broken. I just have to keep at it.