Friendships

I'm feeling a little down at the moment, no obvious reason for it, just a bit sad. Maybe its the change in seasons, although I love autumn, that is bringing me down. Who knows, there could be many reasons I guess.. I've been wanting to write about this for a while and now seems like the right time, I may delete it later if I get into work and read it back and decide that its just too much for a Monday morning!

Jodi's post about friendships recently got me thinking. I've made lots and lots of good friends online since I've had this website. Some of them have crossed the boundary and become friends in real life, others I know I'll probably never meet but I still consider them friends. It is at the same time both easier and harder to make friends online, easier because you can choose what you share of yourself and harder because you miss out on the important pieces of communication like eye contact and body language that tell you so much about someone.

I would consider some of my online friends to be closer to me than some real life friends who I have known for years. Isn't that odd? I do find it hard to make friends in real life, I think I can come across as snobby when really I'm just nervous about fitting in. That doesn't apply to friendships made online as much though does it?

Standing outside school with all of the other mum's for the first time in a new village can be terrifying. When we moved out of London nearly a year ago, everyone in the new teeny tiny village we moved to seemed to know each other. The children had all been through playgroup and nursery together, the mum's had met at prenatal classes, playgroups and coffee mornings. Standing outside the school in the middle of 30 people who all seemed to be friends, to know each other was horrible. I didn't know where to start. Who to talk to. What to say. Why would they want to be friends with me, they had each other?

The fact that I was one of the few working mum's also made it hard. The other mum's would drop off the children and leisurely hang around the school with their younger ones in pushchairs, chatting while I would run through the playground to hopefully make it to work on time or at least not too late. At first, my life seemed so different from theirs which only made me feel more like an outsider and less likely to know what to talk to them about.

It only took a few days before the "be friendly and talk to anyone" side of me won the battle with the shy, keep your head down and pretend you don't need any friends" side of me and I started making chit chat with anyone that I saw. Now out of that group of mums I have one close friend and a whole pile of people who I chat to in person outside school, on the phone when making kid arrangements and at birthday parties. I no longer feel as though I don't fit in.

That doesn't really happen online does it? I get emails every day from people who I've never met but who read my site and I love it. Some of them become close friends and some of them I never hear from again but it doesn't matter. I love leaving comments on people's sites that I've never emailed before, I love finding a few sites that really touch me and trawling back through their archives to find out more about them and read more of their entries. Although it is much easier to be brave and approach someone by email than it is in person, that doesn't mean that the friendships that are made are any less real.

Recently I've fallen out with one of my close online friends and that devastates me. What makes it worse is that it was totally my fault, I didn't think something through properly and ended up hurting them and I don't think it will ever be the same. That upsets me because deep down I want everyone to like me, I can't stand the thought that people will think that I am not a good person. I'm very intolerant with myself and find it hard to accept that I can make mistakes, I find it easier to forgive other people's mistakes than I do my own. I am a bit of a control freak and don't like to not be able to fix something, but in this case its not up to me to fix. I'm learning to walk away from situations that I can't change, and not let them cause me too many sleepless nights. Having apologised and tried to explain myself, now there is nothing else I can do...

On the whole, the experience of blogging has been amazing for me. Over 3 and a half years (gulp) I've made so many good friends and I'm really thankful for that. Its sometimes scary to think that there are people out there who I don't (and will never) know, who read this site and feel that they know something about me but at the same time I love doing that with other people's blogs. I think I've been almost as excited about Amanda's pregnancy as I was my own, I love to live vicariously through other people's experiences.

Here's to making friends online and in real life. Both different experiences but both can be as good and bad as the other.