THE ART OF FRIENDSHIP

My therapist said that I should make new friends. New friends. At this hunched back, graying, short term memory losing age of 21, she wants me to make yet another painful attempt at the terrifying adventure sport that is making friends. I suggest that maybe I get a lobotomy instead, but she says that they don't do that anymore.

Apparently face to face interaction with friends is essential to maintain a good state of mental health. This is…upsetting, to say the least. How can I achieve this face to face interaction with friends when every single person I like lives untravelably far away. I point this out to her and she suggests that I make new friends. She says it so casually, like it's nothing, like it's not a nightmare come to life. Do other people find making new friends to be a simple, uncomplicated task? Is it not daunting and uncomfortable? Does it not make them break out in a sweat and micro-hyperventilate? Is it EASY for everyone else? The thought that it might be is even more upsetting.

I've attempted to make friends twice in my whole life. Thrice, if you count all the tinder matches who decided that I had great friend potential, but 0 date potential. The other two were:

1. School, and

2. College

Making friends in school was easy enough.You find kids who like the same cartoons or sports teams or TV shows as you and decide to sit with them at lunch to talk about your mutual love for Super Robot Monkey Team Hyper Force Go, or whatever and then before you know it, you guys grow up together. And they all become indispensable parts of your life because they shaped your journey through your most formative years. We end up being tied to our childhood friends with some invisible string that binds us together, no matter where adulthood takes us. I think that's what they mean when they talk about soulmates.

My oldest friends have seen me evolve. From a hyper pre teen to a mentally ill teen, from an optimistic youth to a mentally ill adult. They have seen me make Say No To Drugs posters as an 8th grader and then grow up to be the girl who does not shut up about going on Trips in Kodai. They have seen me go from a child who hated girly things to an adult who fell in love with girls. And vice versa too. I have watched my most "oh I hate romance" friend fall head over heels in love. I have listened to my friend who was extremely freaked out by the chapter on human reproduction in 8th grade tell me about her favourite scenes in 365 days. I have been reprimanded by the 21 year old version of the most straight edge, god fearing school girl I ever met for having left a few seeds in the crushed mix. I have witnessed all the hair transformations of all my friends, from self cut bangs that we instantly regretted, to the bright reds and blues that adorned our strands, which eventually faded into copper browns and rose golds. We have watched each other grow and wither, lose our petals and then blossom.

If my friends from school were a classic sitcom, my college friends were it's reboot. Similar in essence and emotion, but with brand new characters who could not be more different from the original cast. I left school with 3 wonderful girls as friends and I walked out of college with 2 impossible boys, one who I was madly in love with, and another who had the unique ability to unlock new levels of my fury.

But that's not how it was in the beginning though. College provided me with a chance to start fresh, to redefine who I was. And so I donned the avatar of a people pleasing extrovert and started collecting friend groups by the dozen. Each one knew a different version of me and I was okay with that. For a while. Till I got sucker punched straight in the gut by a behemoth of an identity crisis. I existed in so many new flavors, I started to forget what the original tasted like. And then as a final blow, a realisation dawned on me, that if everyone knew a different version of me, then no one really knew me. And if no one really knew me, then no one truly loved me. This can be rather reality shattering for a people pleasing attention seeker.

So I forced myself to put an end to my people pleasing tendencies and I narrowed my endless list of friend groups to a single one. The one that got to see my most authentic self (of the lot). I mean, this was the group that always met at a few minutes after 4:15, and it was quite difficult to be anything other than yourself at that time.

But the toils of new friendship did not stop there. Plagued by a scary whirlwind civil romance (civil as in civil war, not civilised), a (probably) haunted place of residence and a deathly pandemic, we dropped in numbers. In the end it was just the three of us that was left standing, and that was enough, because they were the ones that I loved the most anyways.

Now I'm out of school, and I'm out of college, and all my friends are in a different state than I am, if not a different country. And I'm still here. Not part of any social setting. Void of forced proximity that makes it imperative to make friends. The only new friends I have made are random stray cats and I think I'm too young to be a crazy cat lady. Sometimes I fantasize about new neighbours moving in, and there being someone my age, who strikes up a friendship with me and rids me of this loneliness. I have started to miss the feeling of human connections. I think I'd like to have some face to face interaction now, please.

So, do any of you know how to make new friends? Asking for a friend.