Groups

[aj]

Just happened to be looking at someone's photos on Facebook of her traveling. Seems that she's one of those people who's been everywhere and she's only a year or so older than me.

I notice that her sister went with her to all if not most of these places. Presuming that the girl I'm talking about is the younger one, would she still have traveled like that if her sister hadn't been into it?

Because it seems that every person falls into one of lots of little groups when they're at school, and everyone in that group will tend to stay together, go out to the same places etc. They're also a member of their family of course. Then you get overlaps between these groups with people knowing other people, whether it's in the same building or across the world.

When you can't make any friends and you don't have any, you get left out and it's unbelievably hard or impossible to get back into a group again.

I can understand how it must be for someone who moves school or something, being left out in the cold. But most people are able to at least make some friends again, eventually.

If you look at it, maybe everyone in each group has a role and that's why you end up feeling like an absolute waste of space when you're not in one. Especially when you have no personality to make a role for yourself in the first place. Maybe that's why I don't get anything out of going to the pub with people from work.

It always seemed like this to me and it still does now. Now it's with people who work together in different bits of the building. Obviously I know it's not black and white and there are a million shades of grey. As I feel I never fit in anywhere it could well be me transferring it onto everyone else.

It's like I'm trying to pick a life. It feels as if I'm observing everyone. Take going to the pub or nightclubs as an example. The people who go there most likely first went there with their friends a long time ago. In the absence of any friends at all, I'm doing it the wrong way round, I'm sort of looking at it, saying 'I want to do that' and trying to join the people who are going there.

When I've said before that I'm not sure if I could even cope with having friends, it's because I'm petrified of getting stuck in one group and not being able to have a change, because I can't make friends of my own like a normal person would. That's why (other than the fear that's there with social things anyway) I'm so scared to even go for a drink with a couple of people from work.

Oh my :lol:

 

[Slothrop]

Approaching people "cold" is hard for most people over the age of (say) 8, so don't beat yourself up over that. Most people don't know how to "make friends" except by being thrust together by circumstance, such as work, school, church, family, etc.

As someone on a Social Phobia forum, I'm perhaps not the best example, but my all of my friends are people I went to school with. The one exception being someone that I met through one of those friends, who she only knew because they went to school together! And then there's my roommate, with whom I'm developing a friendship, who I only know through the circumstance of needing a place to live at the same time she did. I didn't "make" any of these friends, I was just acquainted with them for one reason or another and we happened to talk.

That's the point of people inviting work colleagues out socially. The hard task of basic introductions is already taken care of. You may not be friends, but you're acquainted. By even attending, everyone is making the statement that they'd like to know others better. And where there is alcohol involved, there is an implicit understanding that everybody is a little nervous and needs to "loosen up". You don't have to fill a role or have some particular kind of personality, you just have to seem like you're enjoying yourself and not be so obnoxious that you keep others from enjoying themselves. That is literally all that is expected of you in situations like that. As anxious as you are about it, realize that the cards are stacked in your favor.

Whether you form a really valuable and lasting friendship out of situations like that is a matter of time and luck, but that's how they usually happen. If you choose to deny yourself the opportunity, you'll never know.