Trusting Friendship

I tend to find myself mildly surprised when people actually like me.

I ought not to feel this way. Even in high school (the absolute low point of my social history) I had friends and classmates who seemed to like me, who willingly made conversation with me and were interested in my life and were happy to talk to me about their own lives and were sometimes visibly excited to see me.

But even though my friendships have only gotten better since high school, and even though I feel I've overcome most of those teenage self-esteem issues that everyone goes through, and even though I know I have some very good qualities, and even though I know that I'm not the only one with imperfections, I still often find myself just a little bewildered that people would like me, and me specifically.

This is something I have only become consciously aware of recently - maybe even just within the last few months. This particular blog entry was inspired by a moment of surprise yesterday, when a friend in the ward (one of my favorite people in the world) came up to me and asked if she could sit with me during sacrament meeting and made conversation and was genuinely sad to learn that I was leaving a week earlier than she thought I was. What caught my attention about the situation was not so much the surprise I felt, but the fact that I really shouldn't have felt surprised at all. I know she likes me - I like her, too (and her whole family, in fact), and she's one of the people I will be sad to leave behind. And we've had good conversations before, and there's no reason I should expect her to suddenly stop liking me.

So this led to a second realization. Maybe it's not so much that I am surprised when people like me, but that I am surprised when they keep liking me. It's very easy for me to like a person and to know that my opinion of that person is not going to change even if they do something stupid, or if I find something out about them that I didn't know, or if they lose contact for awhile because they're busy. I'm going to keep liking them unless they do something seriously and intentionally hurtful (and quite honestly I don't think that's ever happened to me).

But I don't trust that other people will do the same with me. I don't trust that they're not going to turn around and change their opinion when they learn that sometimes I can be painfully shy, and sometimes I can say something incredibly dumb, and sometimes I ignore phone calls, and sometimes I don't know the right thing to say, and sometimes I disagree with a friend, or sometimes I disagree but pretend not to, and sometimes I lie with the best of intentions, and sometimes I am boring, and sometimes I am selfish, and sometimes I am whiny, and sometimes I am absent-minded, and sometimes I am just not a very good friend.

And even though I know that sometimes I am not any of those things, I still tend to get scared that people will see me at my worst (and admittedly I tend to be the harshest critic of myself) and realize that I'm not all they thought I was and maybe they don't like me that much anyway.

This is not a healthy attitude, because it leads to fear of friendship. I get scared at the beginnings of friendships because I assume in advance that it's not going to last, and so sometimes I will shy away from people because I am afraid that if they get to know me too well they'll stop liking me. Or I'm afraid that I'm going to have to start putting on a show of sorts, that every interaction will be a painful balancing act of trying to do and say the right things, with the constant dread that I will slip and blow it with a single misplaced word or a single moment of silence where I should have said something or a single misunderstanding of what the other person said.

Now, I should add that this is not an all-consuming problem. Despite my fears, I have some very good friends that I fully intend to keep in contact with for the rest of my life. And despite my fears, there are many people I meet and feel comfortable with, with whom the balancing act isn't really an issue. I don't live my life in fear of other people or of friendship or of committment. But recently I've realized that the fear is there lurking in the corners, and I believe that when I become suddenly aware of something that I've lived with for years, it's usually a cue from God that I really ought to start taking care of it because a) I'm at a point in my life where I've resolved enough other issues that I can take care of it, and b) I'll be much happier and much more able to fulfill my purposes in life once I do.