I hope your Thanksgiving went well. It’s a bit weird writing this after Thanksgiving (especially having a post about loneliness right before this post LOL), but I just had a Friendsgiving this past weekend. It really encouraged me to write about how I am thankful for my friends (and having friends).
Let’s go back in time a little bit…say like 2021-ish. I was feeling pretty miserable in my job and decided to focus on changing careers to software engineering. I decided to put my friends and my social life on the backburner. For a whole year and a half, I rarely met new people or hung out with my old friends. COVID also really helped with this…
Fast forward to February of this year – I successfully transitioned to my new software job. I joined a new team that was full of young people like myself. We were hanging out both in and outside of work. I honestly thought my social life was going well until I changed teams in August.
My team had less younger people and I was starting to talk to less of my old team. I didn’t have the drive to hang out with them or meet new people. That’s when I realized how much my social life had taken a hit. I didn’t invest any of my time and energy to making friends – I only did when it was convenient.
It felt uncomfortable to ask people to hang out (and to be honest, it still does right now…just not as much). Meeting with my old friends felt a little awkward because it was like me saying “hey I’m back! I haven’t talked to you in over several months – let’s hang out”. Almost like this raccoon just randomly popping out of the trash can:
I definitely felt discouraged trying to hang out with people during that month of the transition. Sometimes I wouldn’t hang out with anybody for the entire week. I would spend a lot of weekends in the house – maybe going out once or twice to throw out trash or get a quick breath of fresh air.
At some point, I realized that I didn’t want to keep shutting myself out and started to look for ways to hang out. It wasn’t easy.
I started asking people to play volleyball or join board game nights, but these were like “small” meetups. I wasn’t socially confident to kinda place myself in a big party. Thankfully, my company had an indoor volleyball league start up in September so that was a nice sort of way to get myself back to meeting new people. And indeed I did. I even won my league’s division!
Fast forward to now, my social life has been doing better. It’s not just being invited to parties like a Friendsgiving. It’s also about having friends to hang out with when I try to set something up. They definitely lighten up the struggles I currently face. They make things like volleyball more enjoyable because I’m sharing a passion of mine with them.
As you get older, you’ll realize it gets harder to hang out with friends because they either get married or travel or work more. So having friends who not only set aside time for you but who also share the same values as you has been something I have been more thankful for.
I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new
ralph waldo emerson
What are you thankful for? Let me know in the comments below! I’d like to hear from ya 🙂
