Ever feel like inanimate objects were your only friends?

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I felt that way a lot when I was a kid. I spent my early childhood in a neighborhood where there weren't any other girls my own age, and the only kids my own age were these two little boys who loved to spot me playing in my front yard (they lived right across the street from us) and come running over to torment me (drenching me with water guns, pushing me down, yanking on my arms, etc.) They knew that my mom would let them come over since she wanted me to have "social opportunities" and wouldn't interfere, and that I wouldn't do anything to fight back (except maybe scream at them) so this was a regular occurrence with them.

When I started preschool, I would find myself literally being fought over and pulled between two groups of girls who all wanted me to be their friend (there were a couple girls in one group who had issues with the girls in the other group and bla bla bla). As I was literally stretched b/tw the two groups of girls, I heard them yelling, "She's OUR friend, and she wants to play with US! etc, etc."

I was always relieved to come home to my stuffed animals...they didn't push me around, yell at or intimidate me, and I didn't have to have the same kind of "fear" around them that I had around real people. I took them everywhere with me, talked to them, played make - believe games with them, pretended to feed them, and slept with them. They were literally the best friends I could have had...perfect for a quiet, imaginative kid like me who was pretty much SOL when it came to interacting with my peers and asserting myself. Not only that, but they really helped me when my parents divorced and sort of became my "substitute" family when my real one became fragmented.

Not only were my stuffed animals my best friends growing up, but so were my die cast Cars....I started collecting them when the first Cars movie came out, and I'd interact with them the same way I did with my stuffed animals....except for maybe taking them to bed.

How about you guys...were your stuffed animals/favorite toys/favorite inanimate objects your best friends when you were young (and maybe they still are....) ?

How did you edit the name of the thread?

I just went back and went to the "edit" button in the upper right - hand corner of my original post...I thought I should edit the title to include inanimate objects in general, since people might have other objects they regarded as "friends" that weren't necessarily stuffed animals or toys. The title is more inclusive that way.

My toys were my best friends as a child and honestly they still are. I have one small brown bear that I take everywhere and talk to regularly, I would call him my best friend.

Not really. I created invisible friends, the main one being Kim, a blonde pixie-sized girl who was happy to play in the mud with me. After all, toys can get taken away from you at any moment, but things in your mind are yours alone. I did have one toy I was ttached to though, he was a white teddy bear named Cyclopygus, because he had one eye, and I wanted the name to be longer than regular old cyclops. I hid him under my pillow so no one would carry him off.

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I also like horses and dogs. They are somewhat local, but the bike waits to take me far away right now. Just knowing that the tank of gas will take me 300 miles, an Asphalt Cure, removing me from the problem, is security.

Computers, printers, binding machines, my social circle.

No humans have ever added to my life like machines do.

I love objects as much as I love people and almost as much as I love cats.

I have inanimate friends but I also have real friends as well.
Personally I think we just realize that inanimate objects are alive as well.
It has been proven that water is alive. I think electromagnetic lifeforce energy runs through everything.
Animals including humans have a certain kind of concious energy.
Water is like a collective concious.
So is air and elements such as fire and electricity
Plants are collective as well but are connected differently.
Objects collect the concious energy that is put into them.
Example if you love your car it will become a positive item bring you good luck.
If you hate your car and talk negatively towards it it will collect negative energy and bring bad luck such as dying in a horrible car wreak.
Everything feeds off what is put into it.

My favourite friends when I was a kid were my stuffed toys. I used to play with them for hours. When I started psychotherapy aged 9 I communicated with my therapist through the stuffed toys she had. I continued to do that with her until I was 18-19. Now, me and my sister communicate through the two Totoro's she's bought me. Chibi (the smaller white one) is really ADHD and always running around doing silly things, the older grey Totoro is very kind and wise. Chibi also communicates with my girlfriend, he'll start jumping on her stomach every time "auntie" is visiting. Totoro sometimes comes to the aspie group, bows at everyone and speaks japanese (but very little since I don't know much japanese). I can't take Chibi to the aspie group, he's too wild and might scare someone.

I can get very fond of objects and talk to them as though they were real, and I feel as though they are alive and have their own personalities. However, logic tells me that those personalities and emotions they transmit must be caused by my own imagination, since they cannot truly be real.

I have a theory that my brain perceives objects as being alive due to the human need inside me to socialise with other humans. Autism means that socialising with NT humans makes me ill, so I have to withdraw, and thus I have to meet my socialisation needs some other way. It seems to happen by me becoming sensitive to objects, and treating them as friends.

I once saw a film starring Tom Hanks about a guy who got washed up on a desert island and became so lonely that as a coping strategy he turned a football into his best friend. He talked to it and hugged it and drew a face on it, and really started to think it was alive. Then one day he got angry with himself because deep down he knew it wasn't really alive, so he beat it up and threw it into the sea. But the loneliness was too much for him again, so he went and fished it out and gave it a hug and cried and told it he was sorry. Or maybe he lost it accidentally. I just looked up the plot online, and apparently it was an accident. I can't remember. Anyone else seen that film?

Here is a clip:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHtgKIFoQfE[/youtube]

When I was twelve, I was so lonely that I'd hug my Nintendo Gamecube incessantly to recreate the feeling of love.

I used to prefer the company of my Dalek action figures to that of other children. Admittedly, I often still do!