I am pleased; my efforts of putting myself out there these past few weeks are starting to pay off. While I have blessedly not been inundated with messages, I have been contacted by a handful of friends since starting my recent campaign of saying, ‘I’m here, say hi.’

I am sure that there are those who think me doing what I have been doing is incredibly self-centered and egomaniacal, and you know what? I actually don’t blame them in the slightest; from an extroverted point of view, it looks very demandypants – come to my show, etc. And I know that that is exactly how some extroverts view it; my mainly disowned sister actually once sent me an incredibly nasty message fronted with how selfish I was for trying to coax people into joining me where I was comfortable talking about myself. Apparently, that wasn’t okay because [[insert reasons here]] that were completely erroneous to the argument at large. And perhaps, to her and members of my family, it appears egomaniacal because I have never forced them to pay attention to myself, to define my boundaries and insist that both are valid and worthy of discussion and acknowledgment. There is nothing inherently evil in this, but I can empathise how it can give the appearance that I’ve suddenly gone very spotlight (even if I haven’t). I obviously am going to disagree – I’m putting myself out here to share not because I want attention, but because I am trying very hard to engage with other people, even and especially the extroverts and their boggling and strange ways.

I also have to admit that I hope none of my friends in particular are feeling bullied by all call. With the way the Internet is and how far apart we ‘all’ live, it is difficult to maintain a quantity of relationships to quality levels. I put out my call with nobody in particular in mind; I just wanted to make sure people knew that my door was open to visitors. And I do accept that we all value each other in different ways and on different levels, and how that can make reconnection awkward. What if the person saying ‘Come on it!’ didn’t actually mean me? I mean, I like them a lot, but do they like me back? And from the position of the caller, I know I’m at risk of being saddened because specific people won’t take up the invite. They aren’t at fault at all – how could they be? Their lives could be falling apart, or their ability to contact me could be down, or who knows what. And even the best of relationships can fall by the wayside – it’s just the nature of existence. We are lucky if we can maintain a core of friends, but even of those, we can be surprised and upset to realize that a relationship that might have once defined us is no longer valid or important.

But that’s just life – I’m changing, your changing, and all the little changes add up over time. Gulfs can and will grow no matter how hard we hang onto our memories of ‘the good times’. Or sometimes, we can find that the relationship was truly at the cores and is fine and valid years on; I find this exhilarating and perk-tastic.

Otherwise, I think I have some local feelers finally, so the other thing I need to think about to achieve parity with the above is things to say to people that I want to say hi to. I know, some would argue the ‘hi’ is enough, but it isn’t’ for me; I want to have some sort of base conversation fodder beyond the banal, ‘How are you?’. We’ll see; I think I’m going to try to commit myself to at least one random hello this weekend – we’ll see how it goes.

And otherwise – a good Friday to y’all. 😀

<3