Making friends.
Kids want to make friends. They want to go up to a person, find a thing you like about them and base a relationship on that thing. And that thing can be utterly ridiculous. Bros become bros because when you were both seven, you like dinosaurs, or the colour purple, or purple dinosaurs, or the movie The Colour Purple. Maybe not that last one. Kids don't care. They want to connect, they want to interact, they want to express themselves.
And if you're not friends with anyone?
What do you do when you don't make friends? What happens when you look around as the dust settles on the first few months of school, and you realize you are not paired off, you're not part of a group of bestest buddies? You shrug your shoulders and figure "it will come." Your parents worry, putting more pressure on you to make friends. Your siblings think you're a freak for wanting to hang out with them and their friends. They made the effort, they reason, so they should reap the reward. Besides, who wants to hang out with a younger sibling? In front of their friends? Not many. So, pressure grows ....
And grows....
And you have a birthday party and your parents invite everyone in your class because they know you don't have any friends. So now you're the guy who has a giant swimming pool party with some awesome octopus slide in the Centre, and your school friends show, and they have fun, and they leave, and no one wants to talk to you on the playground. Nothing changed.
And you have another party and your father asks you who you want to come, and you look around and realise you kinda have no problem with one dude, so you go to watch Dick Tracy at the movies, and he has fun, but you know he thinks it weird that you asked him to do something with you. He won't talk to you for a month on the playground, just to be sure..
And this goes on and on and on. School, university, work. You're the guy who packs his own lunch, and eats it in the corner table alone. The other chairs at the table get taken by people who want to sit down at other tables away from you, loud, garrulous people whose opinion of their opinion is often worth far more than their actual opinion. Your desk is nothing more than a hurdle for their voices to be thrown over. Your very corporeal presence gets treated as part of the furniture. Worse, since furniture is used, appreciated, owned by these people. You ever see how vital a stress ball is to a person's daily well-being? You wish you were that stressball. Meanwhile, you're on the phone trying to do work, or look busy, as these apparently fellow human beings are shouting to each other over your desk, into your space, through your soul, about how great it is going to be to get shitfaced at the local pub. Of course you're not invited. It's not even that you're not invited. It's that they don't consider you a viable DNA strain.
And you feel sad, and lonely, and hateful, and hated, and worse.
Stop.
You don't need to make friends.
What is that, anyway? Making friends? Making? Like we are going to build a friendship together? Then I am making a friendship. Make a friend? No, a friend is already there. Make someone to be suitable, shape them, mold them, they end up being something different to the thing you saw before. There is talk in relationships of finding a fixer-upper and changing them. One, no you can't. Two, even if you could, why would that changed being want anything to do with you? Or, why would you want anything to do with them? Make something, it changes it from what it was before. There are no guarantees the final result is is worth it.
I'm not saying that you're perfect, or awesome, or even okay. You're probably massively flawed, with either a G-d complex, or a clinging need, or you smell. You're pretty awful, really. And that's great. I guarantee you someone out there wants those things in their life and at this very moment they wish they knew someone who is not just like you, but actually you. And yes, nine billion people, or a tiny backwoods village. The numbers are not in your favour to find them.
However, if they do find you, it would behoove you to be yourself. If they are going to be your friend, if they are in the for the long haul, if they are going to hang out and do things with you, even if that thing is playing golf, or watching movies, or drinking coffee and quietly draw the girl from accounts that haunts your dreams, I they are going to do those things, it is probably better that they accept you, warts and all.
Make a social circle if you want, make an effort to put yourself out there. Make a blog, or a JDate page, or a Tumblr account. Make nice with the fools in your office, if only to one day improve your opportunity. Make sense of your life, if you really, really have to. But don't make friends. They should come ready assembled.
