The Friend Manual: How to make friends when you're bad at it

So….I’m having this problem.

It’s like this. The world is hard. Mental health is hard. Working full time is hard. And my job takes most of the energy I have in a week, so I spend the weeknights and weekends recovering. The last few years have felt like I’ve been sprinting a marathon.

When life is harder, I have to make my world smaller.

I’ve had to reduce the amount of stress and activities I join in order to shore up my mental and physical health. Running at a deficit for too long burns out the motors and the gears and now I’ve got a leaky tank and worn out shocks.

Now, add to that the fact that I’m writing a blog about how to make and maintain friendships. So, I’m thinking about this during a good portion of my brain-active free time (not that much time considering the above job brain power suckage, but still…) and so I’m constantly thinking about what I could be doing differently.

So, I’m building up this momentum to go out and be social. I wake in the morning and get all optimistic. And then I sign up for something, which is inevitably online, and then I go to work. And I have to sit still and focus and use all my social power to be nice and measured and engaging and respectful. And by the end of work, I have to cancel that event that I signed up for. I just can’t take 1-2 more hours sitting still and staring at a screen.

I’m chafing at the edges.

I drove around last night running errands and was surprised to see groups of laughing people sitting in brightly lit restaurants. I had forgotten that was a thing people do. And it brings up a wistful melancholy – nostalgia, I believe – for when I did that a long, long time ago.

And I wanted to do that. Right then. Just step into a restaurant and a bunch of friends around a table. Like stepping into a high-end beer ad. But there are so many steps between that table and me in my car at that moment. So many edges.

And the edges are protective. But they also suck. So…like I said, I’ve got a problem and I’m not sure of the solution.

Because this problem is the solution to something else.