At the beginning of 2010, I concluded that I must go into silent retreat to get away from all the relational obligations I had accumulated over the days. I never managed to go away completely, but after a short rest I gave myself permission to only re-engage with the friends I felt excited about. To my surprise very few aged friends made it back to my life. I just wasn’t interested in having the same old conversations about the trials and problems of their life or mine, across a hotel table.
The most important thing to me is my friendships. It is real that I don’t have some friends. I have found this to be the most excellent way. Having some friends always looked like a crazy thought to me. How can you be anticipated to give time to yourself and some friends with not burning yourself out?
My theory has a major flaw in it, which I am only just discovering. What happens when you discover that the few friends you have are people with whom you no longer have anything in common?
This year (2010) has been a rather strange one for me. I have noticed my desires, wants, and wishes are shifting and changing. They no longer match what they have been for so many years before. This shifting is starting to cause cracks to appear in my friendships and creating a void between them and me. Have you ever experienced this and how did you get through it?
The most striking thing that has happened is how I feel and view my friends. As cruel as this may appear, I am finding my friendships unfulfilling, uninspiring, unchallenging and boring. They are terribly stale. Is this normal and just something that comes and goes?
After spending the last two weeks in Turkey with three friends, it has seriously brought my feelings about my friendships to the centre of my thoughts. Very often, I was bored rigid with their company.
They were happy to sit, read, eat, drink, sleep and read some more. I was craving stimulating conversation and exploring the area of Turkey we were staying in. How was I supposed to compete with Stephen King, James Herbert and J.R.R. Tolkien? Trust me, I tried but in the end, I was fed up with trying to start conversations. It was clear that out of the four of us I was the odd one. I desired conversation and interaction and they preferred solitude and to disappear into three different worlds of fiction. For me, the real world is far more interesting.
I discovered a very private and quiet Turkish village up in the mountains. I would love to have shared that with a friend – I was apparently on holiday with three people who hold the title of friend but the shops, drinking, pool and books were far more appealing than exploration, or my company. Am I reading into this all wrong or is it actually I that is the problem?
Death of Friendship
I never enjoy ending a friendship because I love the person or we would not be friends in the first place. My problem is that I am beating myself up over the real motives behind my change of feelings. Why do I no longer find such trivial stuff that interesting and why do I crave more meaningful and "real" issues? Why do I instantly switch off and grow bored when I read or hear about sexual encounters, X Factor or how much drink a person has consumed in a very short space of time? Why do I look upon these people as tragic and sad and think they need to grow up and get a life?
Is there a solution to this? Is it simply a case of I am changing and drifting away from my present friends or is there something else going on that I have overlooked? Is this something that has already happened to you? If so, how did you deal with it? Must I really take the drastic step of ending the friendships that no longer give me anything?
The other fear is that I will simply end up being a lonely person because I will never find friends to whom I can relate. Clearly, the risk with this thought is that I settle for second or third best and remain unfulfilled, unchallenged, uninspired and very unhappy, which cannot be good.
Whatever the solution or whatever happens is clear that I am changing and my desires have shifted. I will never be able to get excited about sexual conquests, X Factor, Kylie, Madonna or how much drink a person has damaged their body with. Going out to gay bars and nightclubs will never excite me or interest me and I will always appear homophobic because of my alternative views.
I suppose I have to make a few hard options or just admit the change and variances and see if I could make all of it work. If you have been through this or are going through this I would be so pleased to hear what you must say and how you dealt with it.
You can certainly find a lot of people out there who don’t have much going on and live preposterous life, but you never know if you explore somebody that you may find a depth they have been hiding. For me, I assume there should be other people who suppress their profundity the same way I do. Some versions of introversion take the form of a false public friendly individuality when in fact the person is hiding their real self out of coyness.
Copyright by Lucy who likes shopping online, going fishing, often searches nike air max ltd and michael jordan sneakers on the Internet.
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