Today was certainly a very bizarre day. I had a meeting with my learning mentor (with whom I discuss life in general) every week. This session was a bit weird, I suppose, because she immediately refers back to the conversation from the prior session and starts to, essentially, preach about online safety after I had divulged things that have occurred 5 years ago where I had engaged with dubious environments online. I consequently expressed frustration with the direction in which the conversation was going and then stated how I felt as though it was a mistake to divulge matters relating to my past if we are going to have what is, in my opinion, functionally a scripted conversation about online safety when there is massive discrepancy between me: a 17 year old in the present, and the person who was having questionable online interactions in the past aged 12/13. Naturally, I am largely more mature and understand why that was a bad environment to be in, and also expressed in last week's session how I felt it held back my social development to the point where even now, I am more socially inept than I otherwise would've been if I had spent that year interacting with people who behave in an appropriate manner.
Anyway, the conversation quickly spiralled from my initial frustration to anger, as she made me privy to the fact that she plans to have someone divulge the nature of my past online interactions to my parents. This definitely irked me, as in the past nobody has ever been privy to these situations. In addition, I have strict parents so, despite the fact that this occurred a long time ago, I'm not exactly aware of any sort of statute of limitations policy existing within our household (!!), so it's not exactly out of the question that my parents would impose restrictions on my internet usage once this comes to light, nor is it out of the question that my siblings, who are younger than me, would needlessly have stricter rules enforced on them such that it would hamper their ability to enjoy themselves online. In hindsight, I should've known that one cannot trust teachers to keep anything secret whatsoever. While nobody would ever know if she chose to keep things in the room, a few rude words slip my tongue, most of which emphasise that my mentor is not the sharpest tool in the shed... (read: I called her retarded).
I did decide on this being our final mentoring session after, for I have no interest in interacting with someone who, already providing negligible value to me, is now disclosing secrets, especially secrets of this magnitude. While those online experiences during the pandemic certainly were an impediment for me, a lot of factors make this unlikely to affect anyone else such as the lack of autism present in my siblings and also them being able to experience normal social interactions during their early teenage years, of which I was deprived due to coronavirus. Having reflected on it, the one aspect of my personality that remains that I find is largely a derivative of my pandemic social experiences is just my taste in humour (both in the jokes I tell and the jokes I have the most affinity for). I am a huge fan of saying/listening to things that have some level of shock value, and my jokes tend to get more unhinged as time goes on. This does hold me back somewhat socially, but hey, those who can't take a good joke were never worth interacting with anyway!
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