Making friends.

Mid-30's, highly sensitive, introverted, only wanna talk if we're going slightly dark and a little socially risky. kthxbye.

The bell rings and thirty awkward feet shove back from their desks and take flight. I am 10. My only 2 friends both went home for lunch that day leaving me exposed to the watchful eyes of the popular girls on the playground. Or so I imagined. In reality they were probably too busy taking turns smelling the newest Lip Smackers and comparing Beanie Babies to care whether I was there or not. I begin pacing hurriedly around the dusty perimeter of the school, head bowed to hide watery eyes, moving as if I was unquestioningly on my way somewhere important. I knew all the quiet corners protected by a blanket of shadow. And I knew how to evade the teachers lumbering along on their patrol. Afterall, the only thing worse than being caught alone was the humility of being caught hanging out with a teacher because no one else noticed me.  

So there I was, hiding from the mean girls (who were probably lovely but I hated them because they had each other and I had no one) wishing I was someone else, someone cool. Someone who naturally thought of witty things to say, and didn’t blush so easily and knew how to be by myself at recess without wanting to cry. Someone who didn’t have glasses, big frizzy hair and no sign of puberty on the horizon…external manifestations of how awkward I felt internally. It’s hard being sensitive to the world around you. It’s so easy to lose yourself. To practice melting into the background or into other people where it’s easier to pretend that who you are is enough without the mirrors of the world finding your reflection and reminding you that you don’t fit.  

I have stepped in and out of the shadows my entire life, simultaneously wanting to belong and wanting to be alone. Wanting to be liked and wanting to be myself…which apparently still can’t coexist in my brain. The unspoken pressures we feel to climb the social ladder are bricks we pack with us on that very first day of preschool - the first real social jungle we’re thrust into - and continue to lug around, for some of us, the rest of our lives. Such a human thing it is to want to feel comfortable in the presence of others, innocently assuming the best way to do so is to be liked. There are very few people with whom I feel more myself when I am around them than when I am sitting in solitude with my own thoughts. A rare thing it is for me to open myself so completely to another and feel more whole as a result. It's taken 30 something years to tease this apart. To feel safe in my own sense of self without others propping me up or barricading me from the rest of the world. To know who my people are and feel safe walking away from others. But the nervous system of 10 year old me hadn’t yet learned how to access the knowing that lived within her. She still used people as shields and carried bricks of judgment in her backpack. And this day would add to the weight of all she carried, evidence she would return to for years that being alone is unsafe, unsavory, and something to hide in the shadows and cry about. 

Like many, I’ve always felt the dull ache of social anxiety. I put my bricks of judgment down years ago, the need to be collectively adored, but I still find myself tripping over one every now and again reminding me how paper thin my sense of social inner safety still is at times. I wouldn’t say it’s crippling to the point where I can’t fake it for a few hours, feigning confidence as I dodge the loud talkers and create a wide berth for the folks with an aura so dark you could choke on it like cheap aftershave. But I definitely struggle to connect quickly with new people or initiate a conversation that feels worthwhile from a stand still. Exchanges like these often leave a sticky film, coating the polite words exchanged and dividing the things we “just don’t talk about”…from the socially approved things we can. They leave an oily sheen I want to go home and scrub away. I’m simply not interested in neutral chit-chat that doesn’t hold enough space or substance to shift us off the starting line of building a real relationship. Sure, I’ll laugh at all the right places and maneuver the conversation to make you feel good about yourself if that’s the depth you’re available for. The old people pleaser in me can’t resist the temptation. But if you’re not willing to casually explore something slightly dark or socially risky, there will be no p.s. I will leave no forwarding address and no strings will be left untied between us. 

But is that so wrong? Is it delusional to decide that I only want to invest in relationships that challenge me as much as they hold me? Ones that call forward parts of myself long left unacknowledged, even if it feels painfully confronting to do so? Relationships that alter the way I relate to the world and to myself because of the space that exists when we are together as much as the one that exists when we are apart - where everything is allowed and nothing is too much or too little or requires me to buff my edges for the benefit of your unexplored ego? 

I guess this is why making new friends as a mid 30’s highly sensitive introvert is so fucking heinous. Most people I meet (until rather recently) don’t spend nearly as much time thinking about how they relate to the world around them as I do. I don’t say that to boast about how “woke” I am…in fact I wouldn’t use that word to describe myself at all…I say it because this is a very real barrier for me in forging new friendships. Who I am is emerging and dynamic. The people I invite into my life hold the power to shift me, to offer me a new way of orienting myself in a loud and hard world. And they hold that power because I give it willingly. I want to be so exposed and vulnerable that you change me simply from knowing you. Otherwise, what’s the fucking point? This is true for anyone who is open to it, the unwillingness to invite in an energy that is going to shift me in a direction I don’t want to move in - namely, to a past people-pleasing highly-masked version of myself. It’s just that most of us walk around open to anyone who wants to feed on us, to use us as their shields for the things that they fear. So I test the waters in an attempt to discern rather quickly if we are going to “work” or not. If you are going to feed on my soul or feed my soul.  I guess this is the equivalent of talking about marriage on a first date. It might feel fast and bold, but I’ve done the casual thing and it’s not what I want at this point in my life. I used to feel guilty for cutting off possible friendships before they even had a chance to get going. I still do sometimes, especially on lonely days where having anyone to talk to would surely feel better than no one. But here’s the thing, my intuition has rarely been wrong about people, and a part of honoring myself is not settling for surface level banter when I know the depth I crave. That doesn’t mean I’m placing myself above the human tendency to make assumptions that turn out to be incorrect, in fact I love when my ego is challenged. I love when I’m wrong about people. Because usually that uncovers a blind spot in myself I get to explore and soften around.  But this is what I mean about being challenged by people. I want that. I will always show you who I am before I put my armor on. I will always give you the chance to show me who you are. But when you do, I believe you.  

Also, as a slight aside to the whole making new friends as an adult scene…traditional social settings are horrendous, ok? They just are. Listen, they are mostly designed for the funny ones. The charming ones. The ones who say hi first and will drop an entire unrehearsed TedTalk about face serum just to fill the silent space around them. I am none of those things. I never have been. Even as a child I was always the skeptic, the stand-off-ish one in a corner somewhere coloring when all the other kids were downstairs playing some imaginary game I never cared about, with rules I never tried to understand. I have always preferred to hold people at a safe distance, dipping my toe to test the temperature of their inner waters before engaging in meaningful ways. I think before I ever really knew what to call it - energy, intuition, resonance, an educated guess perhaps…I suppose I still don’t know what to call it - I have always been able to “feel” you before I “know” you…that is, the version of you you want me to know. I have always been able to discern from a distance whose energy wouldn’t engulf my own, but rather harmonize with it. This, as you might imagine, has left me feeling quite alone on many playgrounds throughout my life. The challenge, of course, is simultaneously wanting the comfort that would come from what it is I intuitively reject…and trusting my intuition anyways. In other words, wanting to be a part of something that also doesn’t innately feel good. 

Bless the ones who flit about, shamelessly taking pieces of others as it suits them, and discarding what doesn’t feel additive to their experience. The ones who have an obvious kind of power, pulling hesitant hands onto their private dance floor and twirling us to a song only they can hear. I have always wondered how they expect me to keep rhythm to a beat reverberating through their body alone. Choosing for both of us the cadence at which I would be required to match. Though, I wonder…perhaps they feel compelled to fill the quiet space around them with words and movement and plans because they themselves also don’t want to feel alone. Perhaps we have each acquired different ways of accomplishing the same thing - comfort in a moment primed to be uncomfortable. Regardless, I’ve decided that these are not my people.

Maybe little me knew more than I’m giving her credit for. Maybe, even though she wasn’t equipped emotionally to hold the magnitude of her knowing, she has always been self-discerning about who she felt safe with, even when she didn’t feel safe in the company of herself. I have found that over my life, the more I accept who I really am and what I truly need from a friendship, the more I attract the right people to me. The ones who aren’t fickle, devious, or concerned with how the world sees them. The ones who also do the work to know who they are. The ones whose sharp edges match my own, requiring neither one of us to dull our blade for fear of harming the other. Maybe little me felt safe with only a few others at any given time because she has always wanted to go deep instead of wide. She has always craved intimacy over popularity. And games never interested her because the rules never made sense. Maybe I needed to be alone in the playground all those years ago to witness myself survive it. Maybe all the playgounds since that have felt desolate and unkind have been placed in front of me as junkyards for the bricks of judgment I still carried. Opportunities to set another one down and leave it behind. I don’t know.

What I think I know is that making friends as an adult feels hard perhaps most of all because I don’t need another friend to feel whole anymore. I no longer require the approval of the cool kids to approve of myself. And so friendship is no longer a shield I pick up out of desperation. I refuse to ignore the pieces of others that minimize pieces of myself. I refuse to hide in the shadows when I am alone, afraid to be judged for my solitude. And I will not concede my truth for the comfort of anyone else. I used to judge my standards as impossibly high. A bar surely no one would reach. But you get to a point in your life where you are no longer willing to lower the bar you spent years digging out of the mud. And the thing is, eventually I saw other women holding their bars at the same height I was holding my own. I never would have seen them had I not spent so much time and energy fighting to raise my own up. We were signaling to each other that we not only saw each other, but we had done the work to hold our agency, our sense of self, in the presence of each other. A burdenless friendship where the space between us is filled with aliveness, rather than expectations and social norms. What a beautiful thing to fight for, I think, by first fighting for ourselves.

x Laura