Do you ever look back on high school and middle school and realize your behaviors and attitudes back then justifiably made you unpopular?
For instance I think back to some of the blanket assumptions I made about certain people in high school because of their social group or appearance or interests, and even when I was not explicitly mean to these people on the surface, I know my held stereotypes colored what I said and didn't say to them, which led to stilted and unengaging conversations wherein they felt misunderstood or subtly judged or not seen as a full person.
And like just because a popular kid hung out with some crowd with one or two kids who were mean or haughty to me, I had my guard up around the popular kid even if they were very nice and cool, and they in turn were guarded towards me because my own body language or preemptive coldness put them on the defensive.
And I did in fact indulge in forwarding rumors about people I didn't actually know, and let those rumors color my view of them, which then made them too built up in my head to even talk to in person. Furthermore, since I sought to impress certain people by talking about others harshly behind their back, or cursing or being extra crass because I thought cool kids did that, I was turning off people quietly who considered me a nasty person, and remained blissfully unaware of this because the other party just nodded along politely in the moment but didn't hang out with me again.
Anybody unpack all the self-inflicted loserdom of their youth instead of tell themselves they were totally nice and not jerks and were ostracized entirely unfairly?