Some people are best left behind

Harry, from Best Scandal Ever, got in touch today, and immediately demanded a phone call.
Since the last time I spoke to him was in the middle of the family crisis, when my siblings tried to rob my mother, and he declined to either be supportive or help, I was wary.  I was right.
It always alarms me when I discover that people that I have spent years of my life with, have not listened to or correctly interpreted anything that I have said.  To be fair, I often give up speaking, especially when the hearer is racist, stupid, inadequate, or just plain nasty.(Harry only fits into two of these, I am speaking generally.)
As a very shy person – I have only really stuck my face out of my shell to experiment with cross-marketing for Wolfe’s benefit – I did not start out in life as a particularly outgoing person.  Not that I am particularly reticent when I want something badly enough, or when I am in a managerial role, but I am not one of the world’s great socially dominant characters.
For several years I spent time with a number of male friends who I regarded as social equals, and treated them as such.  They apparently did not agree, and spent their time with me looking for problems.  Harry announced in the course of our conversation that I was a cold hearted economist, and that he was immensely surprised that I have a social conscience.  I have at no point demonstrated otherwise.
It alarms me that for some people, the deconstruction of a concept is meaningless.  The great comfort of economics is that you look on people as performance units rather than thinking, feeling beings that you have to care about.  This has no implications for applied economics, which is what one’s government is supposed to practice. It simply means that there is the mathematically correct option, and then there is the applicable option.
I hid my various talents on the basis of the response from Aldous and his brother Harry, who assumed that as what I did was done by someone they knew, it must be substandard or insane.  Little did I know that they were making a personal statement.
At one point in his attempt to con me into getting in touch with him, Harry assured me that I was not that bad.  I do not require his validation.  I should never have waited for anyone’s validation.  You can imagine what it is like when your family and friends have an attitude like this, especially when you have already declined to connect with the wider community.
Beware of your shyness, as you are shutting out people who might actually make some effort to understand you with an open mind, rather than allowing their own hang-ups to make you miserable.  There are always people who will seek to make you unhappy, deliberately, or just to ensure that they have some company in misery.  Haters gonna hate, you need to quickly learn when to put rubbish firmly in its place.
Again I have cause to thank Wolfe, for being imperfect, for teaching me how to revel in my own imperfections, and for freeing me from a state of mind where I was unable to flourish, and where nothing would have ever seen the light of day.  Thanks to him, I love me, never mind him.