About Friendship

I've been thinking about friendship lately. I always found it difficult to make friends; as a child, I was the one on the sidelines, never quite fitting in, and usually picked last. I didn't seem to see the world the same as other people, and I didn't like the same things.  Looking back now, I can see that I grew up with a very small number of people (in elementary school, my class had (I think) 12-15 people). There simply wasn't enough diversity within the group to accommodate someone who wasn't quite the same, and there were a couple strong personalities to dictate how things were done. Growing up, though, I didn't understand that and I thought that there was something wrong with me and that I would never quite fit in. I think that it kept me from reaching out for a long time, because I was afraid of being rejected.

This is what I realized this week: I have a lot of friends now, ranging from "casual acquaintances for light, surface talk" through "pretty good friends" to "friends who are like family" and "she who knows way to much about me for us to ever stop being friends".

Some of them came from others reaching out to me, but a lot of them came from me not being afraid to reach out. I started inviting people over for dinner (starting with families of my Sunday School students, and then other families in the church), and getting to know them. Sometimes it proved that we could be friendly but not really friends, but other times it's resulted in an unexpected friendship as I learned that we thought alike in many ways, that we laughed at the same jokes, and that we were all "of the race that knows Joseph" (see Anne's House of Dreams by L.M. Montgomery).

What I've learned is that "if you want to have a friend, you have to be a friend" is true, although you have to accept that not every attempt at reaching out will end with a friend. Sometimes you just don't click, and that's okay. It doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with you or them; it just means that you need to try with the next person. And sometimes other people are afraid to reach out, and it's nice for them if you do the work of starting a friendship.

Also, it's okay to not have a lot of really close friends. I'm pretty happy with a very, very small circle of "kindred spirits" in my life (see Anne of Green Gables). If you look at friendship as a set of concentric circles, there are only a couple people in my inner circle, a few in the next circle, a lot in the third circle, and then the others start to blur together (it gets too hard to categorize friendships after a while). That's the way friendship works.