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| Photo by Jared Sluyter on Unsplash |
I love writing. And I love writing this blog. I’m gonna go a little “inside baseball” here, but I get to read Sue’s take, when you guys do, and I love it that way because sometimes we have two versions of the same opinion, sometimes we have very different opinions, and sometimes we take the subject in two totally different directions. I think this week is gonna be one of those weeks.
Making friends isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do. Far from it. Most friends of mine come from work-either coworkers or customers, or people that I went to school with. In school, I ran with the Drama Club. Our motto was “please don’t punch us in the face, we’re in the arts.” My reason for joining the Drama Club was because I didn’t make the basketball team. If I remember right, I think the coach cut me halfway during the first practice. Since there was no extracurricular activity where you could talk about comic books and watch Star Wars, I went out for the Drama Club. Another reason I chose to join was that they pretty much took anybody. There, I met a pretty good handful of people that I would remain close with to this day. My co-author being one of them.
About 5+ years ago, some of us got together to have a little get together after a little over 20 years, and I know it’s cliched to say, but it was like no time had passed. It was great to hear how some of them had left our small little town and done awesome things, how some has lived all over the country, how some had started families and how one ever had her own freakin’ band!!!
The coolest part was, as I was catching up with a girl that I’d been casual friends with, we kind of connected in a way that we never had before. I always knew she was awesome, but that night I learned that she was even more awesome than I thought. Imagine making a friend all over again, but this time even better than 20 years earlier. I really hope we can get together again sometime, it was really nice to catch up with them, and I genuinely care how they’re doing.
On the flip side, let me just give you one piece of advice that I want you to write down and put in your back pocket. Co-workers are just that: Co-workers. You may have the best of intentions, but people get different jobs, they move on, they get transferred, they get fired, ect. No matter how much you promise and swear and tell the other person that you’ll be different….you won’t. That’s just a fact of life; I’m not trying to be a prick. It becomes a case of out of sight, out of mind. When you don’t see a person every day, it becomes a game of phone-tag and trying to update the other person on the last six months of your lives over a twenty-minute lunch at McDonald’s. Co-workers are people you talk to about the game that was on the night before or if they’ve seen the Motley Crue movie on Netflix yet. Friends are always there for you. Even when they’re not.
Her Take:
I can’t decide if we’re absolutely the right people or completely the wrong people to tell you about making friends.
On one hand, I’ve known my co-blogger since he was Five and I was Six. While technically we weren’t ‘Friends’ until high school, we were in close enough proximity to each other for most of 12 years that we didn’t make a conscious decision to be friends, we just started being in the same place at the same time more and more until eventually we were choosing to hang out on purpose.
On the flip side, when he graduated high school, he moved away, and now (a large but undisclosed number of years later) we’re still friends. Not just ‘friends’, close friends. We’re in a very familiar, very regular routine of talking almost daily and we’ve been able to share our lives this way for a long time without losing touch.
So, whatever we did, we did it right.
I’ve managed to make other friends since First Grade but, you know, I’m not great at it.
There was a whole, embarrassingly long period of time between high school and my late thirties (seriously) that I assumed I had all of the friends I would ever have. Not that they aren’t perfectly amazing, but it made me a little sad that I wouldn’t get to experience those talks where you go:
“YOU LIKE THAT THING???? I LIKE THAT THING TOO!!!” and you get to be giddy for a minute because the universe dropped this other person who likes the same things into your path.
But I was raising kids and being a responsible adult who worked a responsible adult job and thought things like “You don’t come to work to make friends.” and “It doesn’t matter if the people at work are your friends.” or “Other people who want to make friends at work are dorks.”
It was a lot of that kind of self-talk. I know it’s pretty subtle but do you sense a theme?
It tore me up to see other people making friends when I felt so totally incapable of it. I felt alone, even though I spent all day, every day surrounded by people. Since I didn’t make friends then, I assumed I couldn’t. So I got angry.
“Screw these people! I wouldn’t be their friend if they BEGGED me. Let them leave me out and have secrets and do fun things and they’re stupid and they smell funny and it’s ALL SO IMMATURE.”
Yeah, it went on like that for longer than I really want to admit, and I wasn’t happy.
It would be really convenient right now if I could end this on ‘Then one day it all changed because I learned about the magic of friendship and everything was rainbows and cupcakes..’ but the truth is messier than that. I had to open myself up, and I had to be vulnerable, and I had to stop pretending I was someone I wasn’t. I’m a chaotic-good mess of a human being and when I try to be something different, someone better organized, measured, calm, and logical, I’m not happy. And, the people who want to know someone like that, and not like me, aren’t worth my time.
Once I was able to embrace how I moved through the world, how my mind worked, what things might fly out of my mouth before taking a quick check in with my brain, I was able to make friends at work. Not everyone, god knows, because not everyone gets me, but the people who do… damn, they really get me.
Most of it was a gradual things but I do have good advice for you. There was one day that actually did break this whole Making Friends thing open like a piñata for me.
My job took me to a ‘new and exciting opportunity’ in a different department. (That’s the way it was pitched to me by the person who wasn’t going to be my boss anymore because I was going to be someone else’s problem.) For a couple of weeks, I moped like a child and generally made it hard to be within 100 feet of me… which was probably awesome for the only other person in the department who really did want my help… and then I decided I was sick of being miserable.
First, I think, I started to do the work and not be mad about it. I enjoyed working in our little two-person department because the other guy was smart, talented, and funny, and the work was good. Then, finally, one day I looked him in the eye and said something like:
“I hope you know that we’re friends now and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Aggressive? Yes. Off-putting? Possibly. On Brand? Totally. Oh, and it worked.
Maybe it’s just the kind of guy he is because, even though I sensed some skepticism that day, he’s never really bucked my pronouncement of our friendship. Despite the fact that I decided, without his prior agreement, to issue a Friendship Decree and hold him to it, he’s held up his end of that all the way. And I think that’s what it means to make a friend, even if you have to do it in your own weird way.
This is the lesson: The people who get you, get you. Those are the people to pour friendship energy into. If you can be who you are and that doesn’t scare them away, those are your people, whether you’ve known them since they were Five or just met them five years ago.
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