This hits wayyyy to close to home. I was "that weird girl" at school. It started with the derogatory nicknames and the insults. I ignored them, reading my books alone in my corner. They got bored of not having a feedback, so one of them tried to physically beat me. That I could manage and I hit back, hard. I'm a hardcore tomboy, practiced martial art and have a brother and older male cousins. Fist fights are right up in my alley. But they kept coming. Then in 4th grade I sent a boy to the hospital with a broken rib. I got in trouble at school, but my parents intervened and calmed things down. The physical assault stopped, but now I was that "really fucked up girl". This is when they started ignoring me. The few friends I had distanced themselves. I had no one to hang out with on the weekends, no one to invite to my birthday parties. My teachers had to pick the teams themselves for teamwork assignment because no one would ever volunteer to be with me. I often asked to do work alone anyway, it caused way less trouble.
I went to a private high school for my first year of high school. Everything changed. I met kids who didn't know my reputation, they became good friends. But I got expelled. Went back to public high school in my town. Except for one, my friends from the private high school started to ignore me. Bullying resumed. I met other bullied kids. We started to hang out together. 4 girls and a gay boy. One day the bullies made one of them cry. I never had friends before, not like those. So I went full psycho on the group of mean girls. I walked directly inside their circle and when they started calling me names, I barked and growled at them, running them down the corridor. I decided to play on my "weird and dangerous" reputation. I shaved my head, started wearing combat fatigues and boots and blasting deathcore CD's in my portable CD player. Eventually they left us alone. Columbine wasn't that old of an event, and some kids reported me to the school saying I was probably gonna shot the school one day. Thankfully I was a girl, with excellent grades, well liked by my teachers and my parents were really involved in school activities, etc. The social worker deemed me "quirky" but saw right through my defense mechanism and called me out on it. Instead of fucking helping with the bullying.
My new friends saw me as their protector, but sadly not as a friend. I could not be my old stoic self absorbed in my books because that would mean giving up on the sole friendly human contact I had. So I had to be the "protector" and I embraced my role. Eventually we grew out of that teenage awkwardness. Some of my friends blossomed out of their shells, some of them find solace in other places (older boyfriend and kids at 17, drugs and parties for another, fabulous gay lifestyle for the other one, etc.) They didn't need me anymore, so they started ignoring me too. This hurt way more than all the bullying.
Thankfully I met someone when I was 18. He was the first person to treat me like a real human being. We hanged out together because he liked to be with me. He started inviting me to his place to enjoy my company. We hit it off. We're celebrating our 11th birthday together in a couple of weeks. He honestly did all the job. He did all the first steps, and I'm so thankful for that because I would have never done it myself. Too much risk. It took a couple of years before I became comfortable with the fact that our relationship was real and he wasn't playing the long con to deceive me. Despite this, our relationship isn't "normal". We are not a "couple". There's some wall I cannot let go of. There's things I cannot give up. But he's comfortable with my conditions, and I'm comfortable with his condition. We both know this is the happiest we'll ever be, even if it's not perfectly what we wants, it's what can actually work in the long run.
Even now at 29, I have the hardest time getting friends my age. I did 4 years of university but only started hanging out with a guy my age after being introduced by an older lady who adopted me as her teamwork partner after seeing me working alone in class. I'm friend with the guy. I like him. I enjoy his company so much we even hanged out after school. But I could never see him again and I wouldn't care. We've been friends for 4 years now and I still doesn't have an emotional attachment to him.
I don't think I'll ever be able to form an emotional attachment to someone.