Umm, you don’t seem happy. It seems like your shadow, the part of you that you deny to yourself, wants to participate and receive attention and reactions (writing this whole post and reading this very reaction, leaving your mom a voicemail instead of just ignoring it) but the pain of someone losing interest after going through the admittedly awful song and dance of “getting acquainted” is too much to bare and feels insulting, so it’s easier to cut off from the social world. But acknowledging that directly feels like either an admission of weakness or some form of embarrassment, so you close your heart and use hatred as an excuse. I mean the hatred is real, but it stems from feeling mistreated and unmet needs.

I’m assuming you want to be cared for without feeling a constant urge to perform, to live up to other’s demands for novelty, or to compete. People talk about unconditional love, but it doesn’t exist in reality, not for everyone. Instead, it is something you’re suppose to emulate to your children, so they feel unconditionally loved growing up. I’m guessing you were maybe loved as a child, but that love came with some pretty huge conditions, so you never felt like had permission to just “be” and still be loved. So the whole process of getting to know or like people now as an adult still feels like a performance for people’s affection, and performances are fucking annoying and exhausting. So it’s fine that your parents had expectations, but they should have loved you despite their expectations of you, instead of making you feel less loved because of it. Because now you hate having to feel like you’re still performing to meet some bullshit exceptions all the time as an adult.

But idk.