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

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• Cartoons / Comics Events & Doing Things Social Skills Uncategorized

  When small talk is animal talk

  What if a conversation subtext makes more sense as a nature show soundtrack? Like, when we’re chirping at each other. Or, when we’re just pinging. Maybe we’re trying to prove something. Or share good feelings.

  December 21, 2025
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  The Big Thing! Conundrum

  The longer you live on the earth, the more times you will experience interruptions in friendships due to big things happening. Everyone has big things happen. Maybe they need to go somewhere different, like off to another college. Or maybe they have to go on a personal quest or discover…

  December 14, 2025
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  Friendly places

  I’ve been thinking about whether you can make friends with a place. If I keep going to a place, and I enjoy it, do I become its friend? I’ve got friend energy and it needs to go somewhere or it’ll fester (she says fester and rot in meg ryan’s French…

  January 25, 2025
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  Chasing Patterns

  I spent years painting intricate patterns trying to explain the way I heard cicadas speaking to each other, or, singing really. Because I heard them as a whole. Together they expanded a net through the trees, they filled the forest. I walked back and forth beneath the trees, learned how…

  January 12, 2025
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  Voice in friendship

  Voice? Voice? What’s this voice? I’m not talking about physical voice, but voice in the way we speak about it in writing. In writing, voice is the thing that makes your writing specifically you. The way your soul and brain mixes with words and grammar to create a fingerprint. All…

  January 8, 2025
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  Consent in the Ask

  I love to talk about consent in the world of friendship. Consent is often relegated to the spheres of romantic/sexual relationships and work relationships. But it belongs in friendship too! Here are some basic rules of consent: Consent and Social Risk An element of social risk is involved in both…

  May 19, 2024
• Event Stages Social Skills Uncategorized

  Diagram of an event – Initiation part 2

  This is a continuation of Diagram of an event – Initiation. We’ve discussed what an initiation ask is, now we’re going to discuss the response to the ask. People can either accept or decline the ask, but, as per usual, it’s a little more complicated… I’m going to discuss the following…

  April 14, 2024
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  How do you keep friends when you’re in the pit?

  The last four months have been the roughest of my life. My health collapsed. My mental health collapsed. I’ve been to over 50 doctors, psychiatrists, and psychologist appointments — 30 in the first month. I’ve been poked with needles and scanned and transported via ambulance and given bottles upon bottles…

  January 21, 2024
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  Welcome to the introvert hermit cave & the power of metaphor

  I think that using easily recognizable metaphors may be an integral part of my ability to make friends. At the end of this 2022, I was completely burnt out. I had used all my positivity and friendliness and energy that I had and was just grumpy and tired and unable…

  January 3, 2023
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  Scheduled break

  Hi y’all, I’m taking a scheduled break to refill the creative coffers. 2022 has been like this: Yikes. So, I’m just gonna see how many naps I can rack up, how many dumb books I can re-read, and if I can watch everything that was ever made for tv, while…

  November 23, 2022