Never Take Friendship Personal

So I realize it's been quite some time since I've gotten on here.  My life has simply not been interesting enough to write about (I work at a dry cleaners.  Can you say boring?) and I haven't had any profound thoughts to talk about either.  So I ended up just letting things slide.  As I have often said in the past, we'll see if I can't do better.  Don't hold your breath though, you might be holding it a very long time!

So life really has been fairly boring.  I work mornings, go home, and stay home.  I go out with a select group of friends once or twice a week, but that is literally the extent of my social life.  I'm actually going to see a Christian romance film that's showing for one night only on Monday night and I'm actually kinda terrified because 1) I won't really know anyone there and I don't know the people I do know who are going very well, and 2) it's a romance which is the kind of movie I always avoid because they depress me.  Aaaaah!  Freaking out in 4...3...2...1...days. We'll see how it goes.

In any case, I find my lack of a social life to be rather ironically amusing because I was so much more social when I was younger and I always figured I would have even more of a social life as I got older.  Nope!  How things change.  I think that point has really hit home recently with checking out my Timehop the last couple of weeks and seeing all the friends I used to have and all the people who liked and commented on my various social media posts in years past.  It's just made me realize how much, as I've gotten older, I've fallen out of touch with those people and failed to really make any other lasting friendships.

I've also realized just how bad I am at staying in touch with people.  Someone will occasionally message or e-mail me and I'll forget to get back to them or I'll think about contacting someone and then just never do it.  I used to have a fairly large and varied circle of friends, but now I find myself with three very close friends who are really more like family, a few casual friends, and a lot of friendly-ish acquaintances.  Of course, it's my fault that I haven't reached out and tried to build stronger friendships with these people.  In most cases, it's my fear of being judged and/or rejected as well as the fear of trusting someone and thus giving them the chance to possibly hurt me.  I know that I shouldn't let those fears control me so much, but as it turns out, thinking and doing are very different things!  One of my biggest fears I think though that kind of ties everything together is just feeling inadequate, cause a lot of these people who I'd like to get to know better and be friends with, are ridiculously talented.  Not even kidding.  A lot of them are amazing singers or writers or dancers or play one or (usually) more instruments really well or are super crafty or smart or tech savvy and I'm just like, I can eat a whole pizza and read a lot of books in a short period of time and sing like an off-key whale and sometimes I'm an okay cook and very occasionally I can write something down that doesn't totally suck.  Oh, and I have a deep love for Tolkien and Lord of the Rings and J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter.  Yeah...  I feel like the people I know are in a totally different league from me so I find them kind of intimidating and can't help but wonder why they would possibly want to get to know or hang out with boring, simple old me.  Pathetic, right?

It's just funny because as a kid I would go running up to complete strangers and be like, hey! wanna be my friend?!  And now I'm just like, hi, please don't totally hate me. LOL  Makes me wish I was still a kid, you know?  If someone didn't like me, it was like, okay, that's cool, I'm gonna go hang out with people who actually do like me, later!  You know the saying, sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me?  Obviously pretty much everyone knows that is complete crap.  Words absolutely do hurt, but as kid, it was like they didn't always hurt as much.  You could let the mean things other people said just kind of slide off.  The words didn't linger or haunt as much.  For me at least, I knew I had people who liked and cared about me and what other people said didn't matter.  Not quite the same as an adult though.  I find that I analyze way too much the things people say to me, good or bad.  Not a hundred percent sure why, but I do.  Guess that's something for me to work on.  That and trying to trust people a little more. :)