"Mommy, how do I make friends?" asked the young shy child to her mother as they returned from her first day at the kindergarden.
That's pretty much how I feel right now. I'm quite ashamed of it, but at 20, I don't really have friends. I don't think I am making them flee, or actually fleeing them. Of course, my deep unease with my own body, name and role doesn't exactly bring me towards others, and my different behaviour isn't exactly a magnet for people.
Also, my
ADD, which makes me take much longer than anyone to complete tasks, ask a lot of questions and get confused, can't help. Shyness and confusion mostly lead to clumsiness and inaction.
However, very few are the ones who dislike me... I couldn't even name one. Most people are friendly, and I have at least twenty people, at school, who I speak with in a friendly manner often when I meet them. And these last months, I have been doing efforts to go towards others. I even addressed a guy on my own to help him with his homework and chat, without any request from him. The people the closest to me in class discuss with me each week.
Despite all that, I don't have anyone I can call a friend. The only people who actually invite me to places or get my contact info are the kind of people who are super friendly with everyone without exception. These last years, my heart was more or less broken by that girl who I considered my best friend when she showed little interest for me, revealing my status as only one of her hundred secondary friends.
Most people have a group of friends they knew at high school or sooner that are close to them, it seems. I don't really have that kind of thing. Of the people I considered my closest friends, one has been mentioned above, another moved to Nova Scotia, another apparently judged me unworthy of her, and the last one is the selfish, swindler of a child I discovered in my co-tenant.
I'm not a very social person, as I get uncomfortable in crowds, hate attracting the attention and dislike everything about parties. Also, my ADD making everything long and tiring for me, I do need a lot of time alone to rest. But I'm not such a solitary person either. It looks wonderful to have people to call friends.
But even though I have overcome the pain of interacting with people as my male self, it still hurts to do so. It feels like lying to myself and to them. So I have kind of decided to postpone active friend-making efforts until after my social transition, when I am able to present myself to people as my true self.
But even when I reach that step... Of course, I am likely to be much more comfortable. I will probably be more confident, too. But transition isn't magical, and I don't see how it would stop me from being confused, clumsy and shy. Even if it did, I think I'm missing something important: how the heck do you actually make friends? I'm one of those people who needs to have pretty much everything explained to them, and that's just too hard a thing.
From the outside, I seem quite socially able, as I can interact with people without obvious failures, like some autists, for example, display. Because of this, people don't usually believe me when I ask them for help, and only think I am having self-confidence issues, or something akin to that. They usually serve me useless things like "just be yourself and it will come", or "just go towards others", or "go to a café sometime and try to meet people.
Those things, however, have all been tried, and do not solve anything in my case. They would help someone who has trouble getting to know others, or engaging a conversation. But even though I won't deny I'm not the best at that, those steps have been completed successfully already. The problem lies beyond.
But there's something major that I lack, and I wish I could put the finger on it. It seems instinctive to most people how to make friends and bond with people, but I don't think anything is instinctive to me. It's like my "default configuration" is always to do nothing and nod; even at my age, I'm still learning simple I've done all my life, like how to fold socks correctly, that anyone else would have easily guessed/observed without any further instruction. And I tend to forget easily, too. My mother has the erroneous perception I don't care about what people tell me and I always want to do it my way, but the truth is that forgot.
In the end, even when I gather the courage to ask someone about one of those simple things, they either don't believe me ("don't mess with me, just admit you don't care!"), overestimate me ("just go for it, you'll figure it out easily") or give me one of those annoying, useless pieces of advice that start with "just" ("how the heck do you want me to take an acceptable amount of time for my shower?" - "just look at the clock and don't use it to relax!")
Just so that you know, the worst thing you can tell me is that I don't care. I take pride in the fact that I pretty much always do care... Even if that's not how it appears. And since my mother is constantly saying that I don't care, she's not of much help. She thinks I'm stubborn and possibly have an obsessive trouble.
Sometimes, I feel the best way to help me would be to have someone observe me and correct me 24/7 for a few weeks, but that's not realistic.
Anyway, getting back to the main subject, I wanted to ask here, since I've always found it much easier to express myself by writing. Also, you people, not having seen me physically, shouldn't be stricken by the plague of my appearances that even diverts professionals' attention from helping me as much as they could.
I would like your thoughts and advice on this matter. Maybe you could also tell me how you actually made friends with people, too?
Topic featured in my blog. The double posting is necessary, since this post is an important element in my blog, but way too few people read it, much less reply there. I wouldn't get any help from a single blog post. Follow this link to go to the blog post.
