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| Prickly Pear - I used to buy these from street vendors and eat them right there with my hands, seeds and all. |
I recently had a serious bout of soul-searching and one of the things that came out of
that was my blog. Specifically, to be more authentic and to post more on my personal blog.
So over the past week I agonized over what to write. After all - people actually read this
(which is terrifying honestly). What I realized, after running countless ideas through my head, was that I
could just write the truth. Exactly what is going on in my life. So here is my attempt to be true to
myself and create readable content all rolled into one post!
Recently I have been struggling with making connections with other people around me.
I work with lots of perfectly lovely people, but I haven’t really made any sort of deep friend
connections. (Outside of work, there aren’t many other places I could meet people.) I
started to really sit back and consider my interactions, and how frustrated I have felt, and
why. I have noticed that people tend to stick with other people like them. For example,
there are a lot of moms (my age!) that I work with. They apparently hang out with other moms.
They also don’t really talk about much else when I ask about their personal lives.
This is a wonderful quality to have...as a mom.
I am not a mom. I do not wish to be a mom any time soon.
And that really puts a barrier between me and the people around me, because I think common
ground is hard to find between myself and this particular subset of people. I think these types
of people aren’t particularly interested in a friendship with me because of the fact that I am not
“settled down.” I am interested in makeup, I absolutely adore traveling, I have a love/hate
relationship with exercise, and my biggest ambition is to be extremely well-read and a writer.
Those aren’t really group activities (mostly), unfortunately. So I am going to have to stretch...and
keep stretching... and move way outside of my comfort zone.
I used to be very active in Taekwondo and salsa. Those are wonderful places to meet people.
Taekwondo, because everyone is a little bit of a weirdo, and I just always felt comfortable there.
This is something I will get back into, but I have a specific timeline in my mind. And salsa,
because you literally have to dance with another person, and that just forces you to interact
with another person. Unfortunately there is not really a community for salsa in this area...so
I will have to keep thinking to figure out how I can jump back into that.
While I was abroad it was so easy to make friends. There are a few reasons for this, I suspect.
For one, no other expat that you meet already has a set of friends. They are already open to
meeting new people. I mean, they did leave their home country to set out in the world to
experience all it has to offer. For another, there is something about shared hardship that
really brings people together. Living in a different country, where you passably speak the
language and learn new cultural conventions daily through humiliating mistakes, is that hardship.
You laugh over a bottle of wine with a new friend to keep away the tears about the fact that
you can never show your face in a particular store after asking for a some "fuck" instead of a
popular soft drink. You connect over an extremely uncomfortable 100 degree train ride that
breaks down so many times that a 2 hour trip ends up taking 8. You can't help but become
close after walking around til the early hours of the morning in the freezing Spanish winter
because you can't find your way home.
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| Wine/Vin/Vino: A Catalyst of Friendship |
How do you bond with someone when there is no hardship? Not even mild inconvenience?
Sometimes I worry that living in the Midwest will make me soft.
So what do I do?
For now, I will continue to try to make connections I suppose. This blog, for example,
is as much for me as for anyone else. It helps me feel connected to the world. I feel listened
to. I feel heard. I can see from my reader stats that at plenty of people do hear me. I was
discussing this with a close (figuratively, she actually lives really far away) friend, and she
suggested to me an app that is similar to Tinder, but for friends. I have discussed with a
few other friends in this same situation - having people you are close to very far away, and
having people close to you feel far away. This seems to be a common phenomenon within
my age group, from what I can gather. So at least that makes me feel less alone in this.
Its funny to note that other people feeling alone makes you feel less lonely.
We’ll see how this week goes.
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