I have a set of “not-cartoony dragon” avatars that I rarely use on VRC despite paying for an elaborate custom reskin, because it’s like 7’6” and I feel guilty and self-conscious about looming over people, being inconvenient, and taking up too much space.

I don’t know how much of it is related to being used to being short so it’s a weird experience, being familiar with the discomfort of being mistreated and disregarded for being short and not wanting to trigger thoughts of that in anyone around me, and how much of it is just my general social anxiety that makes me feel really guilty about taking space or attention or oxygen.

Although now I’m musing on the emotional experience that leads me to just sneak out of large social groups: the increasing certainty that I have no place in anything anyone is doing and the entire environment would be much less awkward without me and people would have more fun if I wasn’t there, but people might feel disappointed and bummed out if they _noticed_ me leaving, but at least VRChat - unlike the physical world - means I can just log off from any semi-obscure corner or nook, rather than having to make my way to the door which is often a social bottleneck under active monitoring making it impossible to just sneak out without being a downer

anyway, this started out as a toot about musing on how different my mindset is from that of folks who prefer macro or pseudo-macro avatars and detoured into why nobody should invite me to parties so I should probably shut the fuck up about now