Support and Validation

 Having another parallel past and present moment.

So it's 23ish years ago, and I am at a baby shower. (the fact that I can even remember being at a baby shower is hilarious for many reasons, but anyway). I am, at best, a decent acquaintance of the guest of honor; this means that I know perhaps two or three other people in the 25 or so odd people in the house.

I'm remembering exactly two. For context, back in the dark ages before children we had a group of friends we ran with--these were hubby's people.  Things went fine until I ran afoul of a friend of a friend, who made my life miserable with the women of the group. One of those women were there; the other was the person who hubby and I had to prove ourselves to time and again. And under these circumstances--where she knew the other person as well--she chose me I suppose as the lesser of two evils. 

The other woman seemed fine on her own, chatting up the MIL and other relatives, so I didn't give any of it a second thought. 

Until one of the husbands (whose wife wasn't even at the shower and whom OW would have hung out with) quietly chewed me out later for "not supporting" her.

I didn't quite know how to say at the time that no one was supporting me.  Maybe I did.  I can't remember how the rest of the conversation went, but I remember feeling a little annoyed that I needed to treat that lot better than they ever treated me. And this was one of many episodes, for which the present day me would have stuck around for maybe one before cutting the whole crew loose. (and the fact that hubby doesn't even want to talk about these people tells me he feels some of this, at the very least).

There's way too much here to go into in one sitting, but this kind of goes back to being told by FOO and other people closer to me that I "bring things on myself."

It's worth mentioning that the thing I brought on myself that cascaded into a whole bunch of crazy was me getting the person I ran afoul of a job as a favor to the "unsupported" lady, who promptly turned on me and turned my whole department and this particular group of friends against me.

But again, I was the "problem."

This whole gaslighting thing runs deep. 

So how I got here is that a whole support and validation story is happening now, and I just don't wanna.  Don't wanna participate, don't wanna engage, don't wanna do any of this stuff again. The one blessing of autism is that whole raft of people mentioned above cut loose pretty much as soon as autism became a spoken thing.  Fair weather friends and all that. 

Past is indeed prologue.