friends

i realized the other day, i don't have many friends.


and i'm being honest about this. honest because i'm not sure how i really feel about it, and how i really should feel about it.

i had a friend for years who, after i got married, became my only friend. i just didn't feel like keeping up with anyone else i used to know, especially since i'd known a lot of them in a time of life i wanted to move past. therefore, always a person who'd had a decent amount of friends- i became a person with only one friend.

(let me add that this does not count my family, because being truly honest they are my best friends, especially my mom and my sis. this is purely about non-familial relationships)


well this one friend and i ended up becoming really, really weirdly dependent on each other. we hung out more than my husband and i did. we hung out even when we didn't want to, until everything that made us friends seemed to be gone and in the end we only made each other angry.

needless to say, that friendship bit the dust. and since, it hit me that i didn't have very many friends and the ones i had i didn't see too often. or, they lived far away. it sort of baffled me. i wasn't someone who'd ever had a hard time making friends. i thought about before i got married, and how i used to be the one that made everyone laugh in groups of friends. i remember being at my friend jesse's house and entertaining a whole room of people like i was some sort of stand-up comedian. and i wasn't trying to be the annoying person who took all of the attention in the room lol, that was just how it ended up.
i thought about that, and then wondered....what the eff happened?

i never wanted to be one of those people who got married and never hung out with anyone but their husband. i'm not from the school of beliefs that once you're married, you don't have friends. but somehow, only hanging out with that one friend so much and the onset of my social anxiety tanked me having friends. and it's weird.

part of me thinks, after the horrible experience with that dependent friendship, that i'm afraid to make friends. it's not necessarily that i'm worried it will happen all over again, but i don't want to be the person who got away from that only to fall into the exact same pattern with another friend. and though i honestly don't think that will happen, because it's not in my nature to do so....part of me still thinks 'what if'....

part of me also thinks that i've just gotten good at isolating myself. and i think about my family, and how my mom and my sister really are my best friends.

but then i think, i really do have friends. i remember when it was my birthday this last year, and so many people wished me happy birthday on facebook. i was surprised anyone even did, for some reason i didn't expect that at all. it reminds me i do have friends, i just have gotten used to being alone and making people outside my family an afterthought. it's kind of horrible i think, and i feel bad i've been that way to people i care about.

and then of course reading that wonderful book, (7 habits) i decided i need a paradigm shift where people and friends are concerned. and so being a friend is my new goal- to people i've just met, and people i've known all along that i haven't been enough of a friend to.


and that is that.