Adam Anders #7227

In high school there was always that one group of people that you wanted to be friends with and you didn't know why.
Once you get to college, there isn't really any one group because groups are everywhere and they don't really know each other.
Unless, of course, you go to a small private christian school the size of a large high school. But that's another story.
Every now and then there is still a group that you want to be a part of even at the most massive of colleges. There are people you want to be friends with that you feel separated from somehow. There is this invisible bubble around them, and as soon as you try to enter this bubble, it bursts and the magic of the group vanishes in your awkward presence, as you stand in front of these people who know that you do not mesh with their obvious chemistry.

Yet in high school, this chemistry is always seen as superior. This group wears the cool clothes you can't afford. They have the cool parties. They date the cool people.

But when I went to college and found a group of Mass Comm kids, they weren't necessarily superior, just tight knit. And maybe it was the fact that they were doing something with their lives that I really wanted to do. They were all diving head first into the unknown of a life in video production. But I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted to be friends with them. I don't think I really had that many friends in college. I knew lots of guys who would masquerade as my friends because they wanted to be my boyfriends, but I didn't have anyone I could call simply because I didn't want to watch the next episode of American Idol all by myself.

Inevitably Adam Anders and others went off to their lives in tv, and I went off to mine in teaching. But I always wondered what would have happened if I hadn't been dating like a rabid animal and had actually shown up to the couple of events they invited me to. I wonder if, with their influence, I would have switched my major to Mass Comm. I wonder if I would be making endless copies of repair and commission invoices, or if I would instead be living off of my creative juices. In some capacity anyway.

I've never really put much stock in making friends. I'm bad at it. I always have been. Friendships have always just happened to me, often as the result of some endless source of conversation by way of some deep ingrained thing we had in common. Its exhausting if there is none. One might wonder why it was so easy to date people who were totally wrong for me if I could never come up with anything to say. But I really don't have an answer for that one. I was great at getting dates, and bad at making friends. And I missed out on them. Adam Anders and others. I missed out, and I still don't know how its all done.

How do you make friends with people if you're so uncomfortable around them?
How do you convince someone that you're worth knowing if they don't think so already?