Everyday NhanSense

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Everyday NhanSense: Each day, I will blog about something that comes to mind. My goal is to practice writing about my hobbies, my interests, my opinions and so forth.

Day 28’s Topic: Friendship.
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Friendship has always been something important to me, even when I was a little kid. Being the shy, social anxiety-stricken child who would keep to himself meant a lot of the other children would, not avoid me per se, but think twice about approaching me.

It’s not like I was the rat-eating kid or anything weird like that. To be perfectly honest, many kids probably just thought of me as the quiet, Asian guy and just left it at that.

I was often just there in the classroom or playground taking up space in a sense, always being extra careful not to get in anyone else’s way. I just kept to myself by default, so this meant I rarely initiated the attempts at making friends with others. Shyness made me reluctant to do things a normal kid would attempt, such as striking up the key conversation that blooms into a sudden friendship.

“Hey, do you want to play a game?”

“Wow, that’s cool. Can I see that, too?”

Looking back at it, most of my initial friends as a young boy just stemmed from other kids taking me under their wing at some point, and I guess I just rolled with it. Not like I was complaining, though. I still had my group of friends who I always ate lunch with, the ones I would hang out with during recess, the ones I would always partner up with in class and all that jazz.

I wouldn’t say I had no friends, but I was far from Mr. Popular. Long before a thing like a friend counter existed in the form of Myspace or Facebook like what we have today across various social media, kids on the playground just knew who were popular by the sheer look of it. These were the kids who always seemed to have their respective legion of “friends” tag along with them everywhere like mini-posses.

But did I want that? Honestly, the answer would be no.

Especially during grade school and all the way through high school, I was perfectly fine with my friends who came and went out of my life. I won’t go as far and say each friendship was precious or anything mushy like that, but I guess you can say I respected each of those individuals for willing to be friends with someone like me.

As I always emphasize on this blog, I am “different.” But different in what kind of ways?

Well, it’s just too complicated to sum up in one concise word or term. Yeah, I have social anxiety. And by all means, I am a dork, geek or whatever kind of way you want to call that kind of person. Even then, I know there is more to this than what’s on the surface.

All I am really saying is … especially during the days when I was a kid, my friends were all cool in my book, and I am just thankful they were part of my life. All of those talks about TV shows, video games, movies, girls, the random activities like school field trips or sports we played together. The random experiences and events we kids all go through … I guess you can say I still remember them (for the most part, fondly.)

But alas, all of that stuff is in the past. For me right now, with living in a new town, I just think it’s ample time I set out to meet some new people to call friends.

“Get good. Be better.” – Nhan Fiction