I've heard a lot of chatter throughout the ORG community that I am a horrible, heartless person who takes delight in being vicious to others for personal gain. This is not true: I am aloof and nervous around people, sometimes nervous enough that inappropriate behavior will sometimes emerge, but it is not intentional. My ignorance is also not intentional, but I am genuinely scared to reach out and I will explain why.
There are times when I reflect what kind of person I was when I first entered adulthood and I hate how I was. I never did anything morally or legally reprehensible, but I was severely impaired in that I was incapable of seeing reality and I was incapable of telling the difference between real and fake. I allowed people into my life who I thought genuinely wanted to befriend me and perhaps be involved in deeper relationships with me, but all they did was string me along or keep me at arms length before destroying my weak social reputation through vicious rumors that were untrue.
I really invested in supposedly trustworthy individuals over the years even up until this last year and confided some deep secrets to people because I thought they were trustworthy by the nature of who they claimed to represent, ie: God/Christ. Unfortunately for me, those people set me up and/or goaded me into pursuing goals that were unrealistic and inappropriate to pursue at the time. They also took personal information I gave them and used it to create a network of gossipy people who didn't have anything better to do than rail on how broken and damaged of a person I was.
People pretended to care about my struggles and then used them against me to make sure I wouldn't have the confidence to pursue decent goals. I'm sorry to those who do genuinely care about me, as my reactions to your ministrations haven't been kind, but I am afraid to trust. I'm afraid to love and emotionally invest in people for fear of being exploited like I have already been. Please forgive me for my brokenness and look beyond the damage to the kind person that wants to emerge, but is afraid to do so without compassion.