I'm Terrible at Making Friends.

And it's ok if you are too.

How is it that no one tells you that it’s extremely hard to be social and have good friends in adulthood. I grew up with a single mom who put all of her energy into raising me and never went out to dinner with a friend frequently or brought someone over to have a girls night with. I think what contributed most to this is that we moved to a different state, away from where she was born and raised and spent her early adulthood. She has good friends now, she even has a friend she met in high school that has kids my age who we vacationed with all throughout my childhood. So why is it that I now see myself in her shoes as I’m growing up. I don’t have a daughter but I did move away from everything I know and my social life sunk into the deep end like a bowling ball. I want to hug her and say thank you for being my role model and my best friend through everything and I want my future self to hug me and say that it all turned out all right.

Let’s be real here, I suck at meeting people. I have very specific interests and if I feel as though I don’t have a space to talk about them, I’m gone. I’m running away so fast it’s like my potential best friends never saw me. When I first moved to LA I decided to shop for friends on the internet as a Gen Z would. It’s so stupid that it’s so difficult to meet people organically. Everyone says to get out there and do things you like and you’ll meet the perfect people to hang out with on the days you have off. What they don’t account for is that when I go to the library. It’s either small children or middle aged people that I don’t really relate to at all. They have bustling careers and have traveled the world and have read every single classic novel known to man. The type of people who wear glasses so low on the bridge of their noses while they’re reading that I wonder if there’s an invisible wire keeping them up. Just sitting there casually defying gravity. When I go to a cafe it’s people doing work, their noses so deep into their laptops I swear they can smell the artificial colors coming through the blue light. Or there’s the people that pay way too much for terrible matcha and complain to their friends that the thrift store they went to last week stunk of mold and mothballs and the farmers market was boring because who even wants to stare at fruit at 9 in the morning anyway.

So yes, I went and created a profile on Bumble BFF. I’m 19 so the pool is pretty small. It was typically always college students at UCLA who were specifically looking for people they could go to parties with and hotbox their Nissan Altima at an ungodly hour. That is not my type of thing and if it’s yours I’m sure you have lots of fun and have a booming social life with a ton of funny drunk stories. My idea of fun differs from what’s considered normal at my age. I like coming home from work, getting in my comfy clothes and sitting down to do word searches and the New York Times wordle. I’m not joking when I say that sometimes it’s the highlight of my day. I like staring at a wall thinking of what I’m going to post on my blog next and talking to myself like I’m answering interview questions. I like to take long showers and journal until my hands cramp so bad I end up massaging them for a half an hour at least. My idea of a night out is going to Trader Joe’s to get my gluten free snacks and sitting on a sofa waiting for my turn in Wii bowling. Sometimes I’ll get a little crazy and decide to bring out my last resort of having dinner at the same place I take everyone to dinner to because it’s the only restaurant I know exactly what to order from.

I’m not exciting, maybe to the right people I am but I don’t know one singular person directly who takes pleasure in the things I do. I don’t know anyone who wants to have long conversations about the little things in life or reads the same books as me which I can definitely have long conversations for hours about. I’ve started to lose hope that there’s anyone out there at all. Lately I’ve been feeling adventurous and have been talking to some of my boyfriend’s female co-workers. We even hang out routinely with one of them who I actually like and feel like I can talk to. We go over to her house to eat good food and play Wii sports which was mentioned previously. To me, that’s absolute bliss and if I could, I would play Wii tennis forever. I also dm’d a couple of the others (which I’m super bad at because how many times can I ask how someone’s day was before I convince myself that they’re getting bored of me) and it never amounted to anything. I think I have a little voice in the back of my head telling me I’m the most boring and dry human being who has ever lived because socializing and meeting new people isn’t the easiest thing for me and it takes a while to get comfortable enough to open up.

I had a friend in school who told me that I was dry on many occasions. That basically means I talked about absolutely nothing and was terrible at responding to texts with wit and humor. It’s ironic because when I was younger I was deemed as too much for most people. I was called annoying and was ‘spazzy’ just because I would want to hop into every conversation and would dance around when I felt like it. I miss her. So because a certain number of people have equated talking to me like ‘talking to a brick wall’ I would say that’s how this whole inner voice thing came to be. I think from the sheer amount of opening up I do on here that maybe I’m not a brick wall. Maybe I’m just bad at conversation and maybe I’m just bad at this whole people thing.

I’m still on the search for new friends. It would be awesome to have someone to do things with. I miss that. I miss human connection but not the starting out part. The small talk and the getting to know you games and the trying to present yourself in the best capacity. I wish when you begin with someone new, you could just start by saying ‘hey, in fourth grade I convinced myself that leprechauns were real and told my entire class we had to make houses for them.’ I personally think that would be way more interesting than ‘wow it was really sunny today’ or ‘my favorite color is periwinkle’. My favorite thing that someone’s ever done to get to know me was sending me their Spotify playlist. The best way to get to know someone without getting to know them is through the kind of music they like enough to add to something they listen to everyday.