It is an amateur radio club. Ours is very civic minded. We assist with parades and other events in town for traffic control and the like. I like the technical parts of radio much more than I like the people aspect. This makes radio kind of boring for me, because I'm not a big vocal person. I'm much more a writer, as you may have noticed.
It was fun enough watching the very drunk woman get more drunk and devolved, but at nearly the end of the whole thing, one of the guests of a member started talking about herbalism, meditation, and Buddhism. This made my evening! Those are subjects I'm very much into discussing. We didn't get to speak long, and I wish we had, but what I got made sitting at the far end of the table, being quiet and feeling so out of it, left out of it really, and likely by my own choices, worth it. I went from the feelings of isolation I had in high school and all school really, to feeling included. Noice!
So this ended well. I became a person for a little while tonight, almost 7 or so minutes! Victory.
I came back into my parents' house and was immediately cut down about something I had said I'd do but wholly forgotten because of the events earlier today. I apologized and started at it. Even with the crap I walked back into, I had a moment of being human, interacting in a normal people way, like normal people.
That's the title of an amazing book that tells the story of a family with a mentally disabled daughter. I recently found and read "like normal people" and am still in awe of how well the story is told the author, Karen E. Bender is amazing. I've started another of hers and it's a story about hurt so far. Sometimes we need to experience others' pain and sorrow, and their joy, to find our own more palatable.