Rethinking 1: making room for more friends

I just got back from a couple hours at the Downtown Sangha, and I have a variety of thoughts kicking around in my head.

 

A couple days ago I mumbled to you that I want more friends, and I said the same thing back before Christmas.  But I also raised the question – back before Christmas – whether I make room in my life to allow friendships to form, and I see one way in which I don’t.  I am awkward at small talk.  During the break, a woman came up to introduce herself to me … apparently she had waved to me in a bookstore a month ago and I had looked puzzled, as if wondering “Where do I know you from?”  And of course, she implied, where I knew her from was Sangha – but since we’d never exchanged names, obviously her face didn’t register with me.

 

I didn’t want to tell her that I had no recollection of the wave in the bookstore, and in fact that I didn’t even recognize her from earlier evenings at Sangha.  Clearly she recognized me.  (I’ve commented before that this is a running theme in my life … since Son 1 and Son 2 have started to experience the same thing, maybe I should call it “The Curse of the Tanatus”.)  But this is all beside the point.  The point is that we chatted for a couple of minutes, I made a friendly joke and she laughed, and then the break was over … and I have no idea how to follow up that exchange with another conversation where we might have a chance to get to know each other.  This has happened before.  Clearly I have openings to make friends.  Probably there are enough times that I don’t recognize that I might as well conclude the Universe is flinging friends at me.  But I feel self-conscious and awkward and I don’t know what to say next.  I can maneuver the immediate exchange pleasantly enough, if the other person initiates it.  I can make a nice joke and we can both laugh.  I’m good at that part.  But what that means is that I am good at a kind of social smoothnes that leaves no room for a handhold, nothing that lets either of us hold on and talk some more.  Come to think of it, I wonder if people feel like I’m brushing them off?  But I don’t know how to do something else instead. 

 

Suzie is the exception to this rule, but there were so many extenuating circumstances there it’s not funny:

• We both walk home from our volunteer work, and we live in the same direction; so we walk together for at least a half an hour regardless.
• Suzie talks a lot about herself (kind of like Wife); and (also kind of like Wife) she spills over rather easily into the kind of stuff that some people would find too personal to discuss.  That actually makes it way easier for me, because on the one hand I can listen sympathetically and offer advice; while on the other hand, those very topics (family drama, relationship drama) are the ones where I figure I have something to add to the conversation from my own experience.  And since she has already opened the door to talking about intensely personal stuff, I don’t have to feel self-conscious about saying, “It’s funny you should mention that because the same thing happened to me throughout my long, painful, dysfunctional marriage ….” 
• On top of all that, she’s Pagan.  Paganism is still enough of a minority phenomenon that it gives us something to talk about right there.  That first night we met, we spent the whole walk home talking about her experience with the Pagan community compared to mine.

 

There may be lessons I should extract from this experience that would help me talk to people who seem a little more mainstream, but if so I haven’t extracted them yet.

 

I also grumbled about wanting more interesting work.  For the sake of clarity (or to inflate my post-count) let me spin that off into a second post.