During a recent camping trip, I was invited to sit down around a camp fire to join a friend of mine.
My lovely friend had other friends with her, people who had grown up in the same town together and possessed staunch but narrow views on what constitutes normal and abnormal.
One member of the group looked at me with disdain when I first sat down and launched a series of questions to her familiars, asking as to whether they thought loners should try to join a group simply so they could say they were "a member". She continued on to say perhaps loners should realise that trying to be like members of a particular group was a mistake because wanting be just like them would never work. Parental influence was discussed and how social skills are developed. The consensus by those present was that loners were who and what they were because of bad parenting.
From personal experience I am now a loner but not by choice.
My daughter has Cornelia De Lange Syndrome and with all of her autistic tendencies, her strange facial features, her inability to talk and her rather bizarre way of walking when in an unfamiliar environment has forced me to become a loner simply because society in general is in a quandary on how to act around human beings that do not fit 'the norm'. They don't really know what to do or say, so therefore they reject any interaction at all.
A loner because of my parent's upbringing? Pff! I don't think so.
I didn't even have my daughter with me at the time. I wonder what her theory about certain persons invading a group's presence would have been if my daughter was there with me? Any more compassionate perhaps?
I doubt it.
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