I’ll be 28 soon and I feel like my youth was wasted. A lot of my school years were filled with bullying and rejection from my peers. I have high functioning ASD and I was never able to connect that well with others. The bullying that I experienced turned me into a loner, and I decided to just do homeschooling for high school. I missed out on a lot of things as a teenager. I never got to experience having a big friend group, going to a house party or bonfire, never got to experiment with alcohol or have sex, never went to prom, stuff like that.
Now that I’m older, I feel like the window to have all the wild, reckless fun that I missed out on is gone. I have a great career, a house, a significant other, and an overall decent life now but sometimes I think back to the fact that I was pretty much a “loser” in my youth and it pains me. And before you say “all that stuff is overrated anyway, you didn’t miss anything”, that’s easy to say when you have experienced those things. I would’ve liked to experienced those things myself and make my own judgments.