Friends

Blogathon time! Yay! Ok. On to my topic. Another post from earlier this summer that I'm dusting off.



Friends. No, I'm not going to talk about the TV sitcom that was so popular in the 90's and 2000's. Just to clear up that possible misunderstanding.

What I am going to talk about is, well, friends, and friendship, and the oddities that come along with these core, inevitable (except perhaps for hermits) aspects of life.

I suppose what I have to say isn't really ground-breaking or life-shattering. It's just, well, my experience.

My experience with friends has actually been a little limited. Perhaps my introspective, introverted personality is evident from my writing. I'm definitely no social butterfly, and although I have been shifting on the intro/extro spectrum (towards extroversion), most of my life and friendships have been formed around my more introverted characteristics. But I'm not here to talk about personality according to Myers-Briggs or Carl Jung or whoever made up that stuff. So. Friends.

I didn't really learn how to make friends as a child. But I don't know if children really learn how to make friends - at first they seem to do it just by accepting someone they interact with on a regular basis as a friend.
Sure I had friends like that - at church, kids of families my parents kept in touch with and invited over. But the fact that I was home-schooled did make it more difficult for me to interact with a wide variety of kids my age. Not a bad thing, but it left a bit of a lack in my relationship skills.

When I was a teenager, I socialized mostly with other home-schooled young people. Some of them were fairly normal, but others were more eccentric. Whether they were eccentric because of being home-schooled or just because they were eccentric is not particularly determinable. (Perhaps they were home-schooled because they were eccentric.)

But, as it turns out, those were the kids I got along with better. They were smart, goofy, and weird. And they were comfortable with themselves. They didn't feel the need to develop any sort of social ladder or pecking order, they didn't create drama, and they expressed who they were without fear.

But I still didn't really learn how to initiate and maintain friendships. I just didn't have the knowledge or experience of thinking about people to spend time with and ways to spend time with them.
I became much more aware of this once I was out of high school. I met many others my age at junior college, but I didn't interact with them much. My interaction with the small group of young people from my small church was structured enough that I didn't feel a huge need to try and spend more time with them outside of church activities. But I began to want more friends. I didn't know how to find them. Or make them. Or whatever you do to have friends.

Now perhaps I understand what it takes to make friends. From spending a few years at my university, I have met many interesting, intelligent, interactive people, and many who do not have one or more of these qualities. (I think of smartness and intelligence as slightly different.)
By the time I arrived there (2009) I had pretty well established what a good friendship contains for me. I enjoy people who are open, like to have conversation to share their lives, and are thoughtful and even intellectual. They think and talk about life, and growth, and share about themselves.

The people whom I've grown closest to are all nerdy to a large extent - interested in the details of learning and dissecting life and different aspects of it - music, writing, spirituality, music, science, math, music, and so on. And I am too. I love learning about life. Discussing the fine details. The precise definitions. Nerding out. Geeking out. Getting excited about what makes the universe tick.

But it still mystifies me somewhat exactly how and why my close friends are who they are. There are usually important similarities but often large differences. Some of them continue to surprise me with things they say or think about. But I suppose that's part of what makes them good friends - never a dull moment.

I think I'm learning though. I'm learning how to invite people into my life. How to do things together that are not super structured but give a chance to get to know others.
And I have learned how much of an effort it is for me. I only have so much energy to reach out to people, and so I need to keep myself taken care of. I've also learned that I need to put out a lot of energy persistently in order to have people begin to respond in kind. Some never really do. Accept it, adjust priorities and focus accordingly, and keep living life.

So, to friends: may they always be loving, strange, exciting, open, honest, intelligent, and fun.