How do you deal with feeling excluded?

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Hello,

I seem to end up in situations where I am feeling good and a part of some interest group. Then I start to want to help more and I end up participating more than other people seem to want to. Until I am the only one making any effort and feel like other people are indifferent to my presence.

I was on a forum for a special interest of mine, stuff about spirituality, and I was very excited to see other people there that I could talk to. Now I ended up becoming very obsessive about the forum and I was on it every day. It was helping me a lot with loneliness just being able to read the threads and trying to give some information I knew about.

But then, I tried to start topics and found them being ignored, and other members would seem to start new threads with the same questions and get a bunch of feedback. It's kind of hard to not feel hurt by it and I am just trying to stay away from the forum because I feel so excluded there.

This has happened to me before with another forum I used to love participating in, but would never get any real interaction from people there too. And this happened to me with a support group I used to go to, in real life. Lots of women gave me their phone calls and although they did take my calls, only one of them sent me text messages to say hi to me. Out of like six or seven women.

I don't know what I am doing wrong, I make an effort to try to connect but it just always ends up feeling like other people cannot be bothered talking to me. Or they do it just to be nice but don't really seek out my friendship as much as I seek out other friends. It's so hard not to take this crap personally.

I don't really care if people exclude me on forums. I don't know them in real life and they have a right to respond or not. I care a lot more if I'm excluded in real life, which happens pretty often. I either break down completely and get upset with myself and think I'm a failure, or I just get more depressed. One way to deal with being excluded though is to find a group that doesn't exclude at all, some of which exist. I am currently in a friend group with many other autistic people that are not exclusive at all, for example, although it took a long time to find such a group.

I usually end up in tears over a situation like that and especially when I want to join a conversation but I am told that the conversation is private. It also hurts whenever I see people making or talking about their plans right in front of me.

Recently though, I have learned that people like to play social games with other people which I am beginning to see as petty behavior such as in the above. I am have been following a great life coach online when people play these kinds of mind games to do things like

1. Invest your time in people who are interested in you and just be polite to the ones who are rude
2. If they have you on social media, take pictures of yourself having fun with those people and let them see you having fun with others.

Just last week though, I listened to Daniel Wendler, who is also on the spectrum at a conference with his friend and business partner who is an NT. What I learned is that we are not the only group to face exclusion. It turns out that a majority of members of the audience, who were not on the spectrum were not accepted at some point by others at one point or another. His perspective was to reach out to other people who are lonely and that's how he met his best friend during high school.

if somebody doesnt want to talk to me, i am fine about not talking to them) i've had a lot of exclusion trauma in my life, and i guess i kinda grew a thick skin. i dont care any longer. im not 100 dollars to be liked by everybody)

The easiest way is to quote someone and ask them a specific question they might have an answer to. Or ask them to clarify a point that they made earlier.

People might not always respond, but some will. Usually, you just have to ask enough questions.

I really don't effin care whether I'm "excluded" or not.

I always have YouTube to tide me over.

gj!