Fear Of Making Friends

Moving somewhere new is always a challenge. It's overwhelming to pick up whatever roots you have and replant them in a foreign environment. Snagging a place to live, making it more than a place to live, finding replacement dog walkers, doctors, grocery stores, libraries, restaurants, getting used to new routines and generally just feeling comfortable amongst different sidewalks, buildings, trees, humans, and license plates. More difficult than all of that is creating a new network. Finding people to (gulp) be friends with. 

I can't imagine how people who are seeking partners can navigate the maelstrom of the dating world. Trying to make friends in your thirties in a totally new environment must be at least a tiny bit similar. Not identical and not as difficult but similar nonetheless.

I've never been skilled at making or keeping friends. I'm an introvert and more often than not am terrified of social interaction, even with people I truly like, much less those I haven't spent enough time with to know. I would hope that my little cozy network gets that about me, but sometimes I fear that regression into my shell is interpreted as apathy in cultivating those relationships.

Anyhow, making friends here is at constant odds with wanting to camp out in my shell. There's the challenge of even finding potential BFFs but then, at this stage of the life game, you gotta put in some serious effort. Some serious extroverted effort. Some serious the idea of this potential awkwardness hurts so bad I want to scream effort.

This article in The New Yorker called "Everything I Am Afraid Might Happen If I Ask New Acquaintances To Coffee" really nails these feelings. It's a really funny read - check it out. Meanwhile, I'm going to call someone. I mean text them. I mean send them an email. I mean play solitaire on my phone.

Visitors to the Pond

I've surprised myself by taking photos of actual guests, both human and non-human, that have accompanied us at Round Pond this summer. I have not surprised myself with the slogginess of my blogginess. My vision of languid summer days with minimal work is not reality and things have been wild. Alas excuses are stupid. Lazy-man photo recaps are not.

A Poem For A Thursday

When I read this one, every cliche involving hearts, heartbreak, tears, and sadness filled my brain. My heart broke, it dropped in my chest and ached, I was flooded with sadness then burst into tears. See what I mean? All the cliches. All of them. Mistreated dogs, possibly more than any other sad thing in the world, do this to me. Humans? Forget it. Dogs on the other hand. That's my main sadness trigger. Dogs all start out so good then people ruin them. I really believe that dogs, more than anything else, want to make their peoples happy. And we do things to them to make that impossible. I just can't think about them suffering with no voice and what a person must be composed of to create their suffering. It hurts. This hurts me.

The Puppy

Wesley McNair

From down the road, starting up

and stopping once more, the sound

of a puppy on a chain who has not yet

discovered he will spend his life there.

Foolish dog, to forget where he is

and wander until he feels the collar

close fast around his throat, then cry

all over again about the little space

in which he finds himself. Soon,

when there is no grass left in it

and he understands it is all he has,

he will snarl and bark whenever

he senses a threat to it. 

Who would believe this small

sorrow could lead to such fury

no one would ever come near him?

Returning From The Pond

More on a wonderful week at Round Pond soon, but I wanted to share this little scene from last night. After a rambunctious holiday weekend of power boats, jet skis, and fireworks, our loons seemed a lot more at peace in the post-chaos calm yesterday. The female continues to guard their nest and it seems that chick hatching may be any day now. The male has been all over the lake fishing like a champ and I caught him doing some preening in the peace of a quiet sunset. 

i - Issues

I've developed some clarity around my relationship with my iphone on vacation this week. It's not pretty. 

I am addicted to it. Simon and Anthony are rolling their eyes and saying "Well, duh!" But at least now I can admit it. I turn to my phone in any empty moment...a lull in conversation, TV commercials, stopped at a traffic light. I'm certainly not saying I'm the only one, but what I am saying is that I don't like it.

I think the phone has changed me. Prior to having it, those empty moments would be time with myself in conversation with the world, not in some kooky way where I'd chatter with the trees or prance through fields of daisies but those moments would be little bits when my brain actually did something. Thought about something or even just idled but in a way that's different from a game of solitaire, checking my work email, or scrolling through social media platforms.

Social media. Yikes. I realize that when I look at Facebook, I slowly start to feel bad. With every swipe of my finger, as irrational as it is, my brain starts saying things like "why aren't you doing that, why don't you look like that, why is everyone else so happy?" I know that Facebook is a curated collection of users' best moments and that the non-satisfactory aspects of their lives are not posted, but I feel insecure, doubtful, and generally crappy when I use it.

So I removed it from my phone. But that doesn't really solve anything. I've been checking my work email while on vacation this week and those little creeps of bad feelings come in then too. Until yesterday, I found I wasn't at all relaxed or checked out of the office. I really needed to be. Being halfway involved wasn't giving me what I needed or achieving the purpose of the break. So as a baby step, I looked at email twice during the day yesterday, not 47 times. I felt bad about not replying to messages from family, but had to force a break from the constant feeling that I needed to be present for work. Newsflash, they're FINE without me and when people who send me email receive the out of office message, they're FINE not hearing from me until next week.

They're small changes but I really want to try to fix this. Fill those minutes tethered to a device with moments attempting to understand the actual world, not a streamed, electronic version that isn't reality at all.