Social awkwardness was bestowed upon me as a young child—I know I’m not alone in this.  I always tried to be older than I was to fit in with my siblings which made it challenging to make friends with kids my age.  Not that I didn’t have friends, I managed to secure a great group of people who have been in my life for upwards of 30 years now.  I just didn’t know how to relate to people on a superficial level.  I still struggle with small talk to this day.  I’m always ready to dive in and get deep with people.  Not everyone is ready for that and I know it can turn some people off or even feel intrusive.  For others, they simply aren’t ready to have those conversations.  I think, like many of us, I’m trying to figure out a deeper meaning to it all and I’m overanalyzing people when I just need to relax.  Journey and destination again. 

With all of that being said, I have managed to find some people who I truly value as an adult.  It’s a different thing to find people when we are older.  It’s a fortunate thing to find someone we connect with and care about.  Those people are gifts and meant to be in our lives to bring us to a different level.  They are meant to help us work through things at different phases.  For example, my son’s friend’s mom.  My kid truly connected with her kid, and through their relationship, we’ve developed a new friendship.  It was about the kids at first and as we’ve talked, we’ve learned a lot about each other and we have a connection now.  And one thing I love about our generation is that when we learn to speak to each other from a place of real connection, we see that we all deal with the same shit.  Our experiences, while they happen to us, are more human than personal.  The more we can share, the more connection we have.

I’ve learned that it takes a lot of honesty to form those connections.  Most of us still want to make it seem like we are a certain way or that we don’t struggle.  Some people look at struggle as weakness when it’s an opportunity to come together to find a way to tackle things together.  We’ve forgotten the value of cooperation.  It can be hard to work with people who don’t share a common life experience as us because we each have different expectations of how to tackle and solve a problem.  But the more we share with each other, the more we learn to see other options and other angles.  My adult friendships have shown me that there are always ways to survive, there are always ways to get through.  My own experience has taught me that I can survive things I didn’t think I could and that I have input for others as well.  I value the friendships I’ve made as an adult because it seems there is an openness and less proving. It’s more connecting and that is what we all need: to be seen and accepted as we are.