I don't think I was unique in spending my early teen years (in the late '70s) convinced that nobody had problems like mine or could possibly understand my problems, and that everybody else fit in and I was the only loner in the whole school. I'm pretty sure the only ways you get over things like that is to talk about them or to realize that they're just not true, and both of those require social interaction. For me that came at a gaming table. Suddenly I understood that there were a lot of people just like me with problems like mine (or different, but we all had something) and that there *was* a group for me, too. One day before gaming, sitting at that table while we were chatting about the teenage horror du jour, I had an epiphany: Probably everybody in school felt just the same as I did at that age, regardless of who they were. The same conversation we were having in the local library's basement was also taking place in frilly pink bedrooms, garages, football locker rooms, the art labs and the data processing room. None of us were really different at all, which meant that none of us were really alone. That thought is what helped me get through being a teenager without ending up in juvie or worse.