God yes. Family can be great to talk to but when they're all gathered together and interacting together (especially as a group of aunts and uncles who all grew up together with my grandparents and it's like picking up where they left off as a big family that I was never a part of) I feel like an outsider who's looking for an opening to say something while also wanting to completely disengage from any conversation and just huddle in a corner. Family gatherings tend to get hella old after about five minutes.

Im depressed that I only got to see my sister for literally 15 mins :/ we talked about the sign shes planning on making me. this was like 12 people, we counted chairs before everyone got there but it didnt click that, thats 12 people in their living room/kitchen.

so i packed my laptop up. grabbed some food and left. still got to see them before everyone came over but i just also sort of freak out in my head if everyones doing something and im not :o: i wanted to stay over to atleast 8pm

I just kinda tend to find a chair to sit in and just be there for a while and it's awkward and stressful but hopefully there's beer in the house to take the edge off (cause otherwise it can be almost physically painful how awkward it is to just be in that environment with nothing to say to anyone for like thirty minutes at a time) and then move to a new place to hopefully not attract attention for a bit, rinse, repeat. If there's something barely watchable on TV to absorb a few family members like a football game so that I'm not conspicuous in not saying anything to anyone for long stretches of time then that's a godsend but otherwise it can be pretty torturous. I mean there just aren't other members of my family who are on my wavelength and if they are they aren't speaking up (obviously) and they don't come to family gatherings. Maybe some of my cousins would be better to talk to since they aren't from big talkative families but my oldest cousin is a decade younger than me and most are in high school. No wonder my youngest uncle, probably the closest to me in personality generally only shows up at the tail end of gatherings and is gone within an hour.

That sucks. My family gatherings, while endearingly annoying in their own way, are typically pretty fun. But we're a big group of party people.

I feel bad for just not trying harder to stay longer, ima smoke 3 bong rips and hope the saddness goes away. idk what to do about myself. :o:

i do fine when its just my sister and her future husband and my parents. thats awesome but when its lots of people, idk what happens to me

My family are painfully middle class and insist on having boring middle class gatherings where emotional warmth is avoided for the sake of maintaining middle class propriety even though at heart we're trash who should really just break out the booze and cut loose with the defenses. I think the real problem is that we're Irish Catholic emotional islands who are on some level trying to prove to the English that we're not just European redneck messy drunks even though we haven't been Irish for a hundred years.

Gatherings are terrifying for some people and you just have to accept that that is who you are even if it's not fun.

It takes like 2 seconds for my family to either say racist **** or try to convert me to Mormonism so I don't really **** with any of em.

Except for the Mormonism that's my family. Last family gathering I was at my grandfather somehow managed to work in that his college (Columbia Medical School) was asking for donations from alumni so that their next graduating class wouldn't have student debt, and he was refusing cause he saw the graduating student picture and there weren't any white men. He wasn't going to kick any money to the people who were "superseding" his people. I know he's a racist but I didn't know he was on some white replacement ****.