Consuelo: I don't want to speculate long distance on why you feel isolated, but I recognize something of the same sort in myself. My take on it is that it has nothing to do with either my gender ambiguity or my sexual ambiguity.

It seems to me the issue is whether that feeling, whether we call it isolation or just being not attracted to the behavior in question, is something you can accept, or whether it is something which you dislike about yourself. I think that whether a person is drawn to a group of people originally begins with whether or not it is part of one's personality to desire to bond with a group. I'm not sure whether that is a "Nature" or "Nurture" impulse, and don't really care for purposes of this thread. I do, however, think that if one who is a loner listens to too much American pop culture, that it can engender feelings of guilt because it isn't behavior which the Consumer Society encourages. I refer, just as an example, to the BW3 commercials about the "gang" praying for overtime so they can stay around the saloon and guzzle more beer and burgers and hanging-out together. Even if the last damn thing you might choose to do on planet Earth is drink beer and watch sports in a bar, a person tends to get a feeling of false nostalgia for the experience (feeling a sense of loss for a place or activity which one has never actually experienced).

I tend to be a loner, and enjoy doing things which can be done alone: e.g. hiking, road bicycling, downhill skiing, reading, playing video games, listening to music, and working out at the gym. I mostly avoid things where there is an element of Good-Old_Boy'ism, such as regular weekend Golf foursomes, poker clubs, and such. I'm not anti-social, I can be a regular Chatty Kathy in conversations with both women and men, but I really don't seem to need social intercourse with other people to survive happily. To be simplistic, I've been part of groups, but have never felt that any group was part of my identity. And, as best I an tell, this personality type is applicable to both my feminine and masculine parts. I've been with groups when there have been 3-4-5 women and I'm the only male, and I've had fun, but the feminine side of me has never felt the need to be part of that type of bonded group.

I know that there are people who just feel better about themselves when they are part of a convivial group, but it's not me. Most importantly, I don't feel guilty about not wanting that.