Sometimes I feel alone in a crowd, especially in situations where I shouldn’t be alone at all.

In planning for Oasis, I posted in the forum about organizing a grocery run the day before the party started. There weren’t very many bites. Okay, that’s fine, but I’ve been to spanking parties before and I know a lot of people do want to go to the grocery store so they don’t have to spend a ton of money on restaurants. I tried again when I arrived on Wednesday, and while I did manage to hook up with someone it seems like it took a lot more work than it should have done.

Once I had my grocery store plans made, though, I wanted someone to go to dinner with, just to hang out and talk. After all, I’d been basically alone since 9am eastern time, and it was getting close to 6pm pacific time (which is 9pm eastern). Sure, I’d been around other humans, but it didn’t really count because I was traveling alone and it’s kind of weird to just randomly chat up the person in the airplane seat next to you, especially when they already have their headphones in. So I posted in the chat, and got no takers. I’m estimating there were at least 50 people from the party already here, and no one even said “no thank you”. They just ignored it altogether (which is of course their prerogative, but I’d always rather hear “no” than nothing). Some folks had made plans to go elsewhere for dinner, and that’s totally cool — I could probably have joined them, but I already had my grocery plans for after dinner. But how could there be no one who wanted to go out?

Finally, after I got back, unpacked, and showered off the travel stink, one of my spanking party friends came by my room so we could catch up. No spanking, just talking; if she’d wanted to play, I would have obliged, but what I needed more than that was the validation that I’m not some sort of pariah. We had a great chat, hung out for about an hour, and then she went back to her room to go to bed. That’s when I finally decided to lie down and read myself to sleep.

Now, I’m 100 percent sure that this is all in my head. No one looks at my messages and is like “ew, that guy!” But this isn’t the first time this has happened at a spanking party — or any other type of event. I don’t have clinical anxiety (though I do have clinical depression), but I do have some anxiety about being in groups. Not because I’m afraid of being mistreated, but because I’m afraid of being ignored. It brings up feelings that have been ingrained in me since my school days. I was never popular in school, and not really in college either (although I was in a fraternity, which meant there was always someone to hang out with). Those feelings persisted well into adulthood, and even now, when I have tons of friends and acquaintances, I still feel alone in a crowd at things like munches and events unless I have “a person” to hang out with. Fortunately, I usually don’t have to go to events alone, and for Oasis, my long-distance partner was driving in the next day. At TASSP, she was there, and so was Partner 1. At Frolicon, I had Partner 1 and Partner 2, as well as several play partners who I was already acquainted with, and my fellow writers on top of that.

Even then, though, when there was no one around, I felt lonely in a group of hundreds of people.

Stupid anxiety.