5 Secrets About Friendship Introverts Need To Know

I’m an introvert. It’s not easy for me to open up to people, but this doesn’t mean I don’t care about others. There have been times when strangers thought I was “cold” or uninterested in them just because I was too shy to socialize. I’m ashamed to say, there have been friends who thought that too. I admit, I live in imagined worlds far, far from the physical locale of my body, and not everyone understands that. But I don’t want to be so preoccupied my with my own worlds that I ignore the people I care about.

When I was in school, I found it easy to maintain friendships, because I was forced to be with friends. Now, however, it’s all too easy to drift apart. I have friends on the internet, but even then, it’s easy to let those relationships be no deeper than a Facebook post or a 140 Twitter characters.

So recently, I’ve made a private pledge to keep in closer contact with friends and people I care about. Here are the five things I’ve learned — often the hard way, through losing friends — about what it takes to maintain a friendship.

1. Friendship needs no excuse.
There was a friend I meant to call for the longest time. I kept postponing it. (I have a phone phobia!) The longer I procrastinated, the harder it was to do. I felt like I needed some “good” reason, that it would be rude or weird to just call out of the blue. Finally, I just did it; I just called. It turned out she was going through a really difficult period in her life. It was important for me to be there for her–that was more than reason enough! But I wouldn’t have known that reason if I hadn’t connected in the first place. I know, this should have been obvious, but to me it wasn’t.

As an introvert, I always worry about “bothering” someone, even a friend. But connecting doesn’t have to be a bother. It can be a life-raft.

2. Friendship takes time.
If you want to be a friend, you have to take the time, weekly, daily, to talk to your friend. If you can, see your friend in person; if not in person, then over the phone; if not over the phone than over the internet. Yes, it does take time. If it’s been a while — and I’ve let friendships lapse, so I know this too well — it will take time to build back the intimacy of true friendship. As an introvert, I have a low tolerance for small talk, but the truth is, it takes a certain amount of small talk before you know you can trust someone with bigger secrets. And let’s face it, sometimes we want to just bitch about shit. It’s great to have someone who honestly doesn’t mind hearing you rant about the traffic or whine about your conviction that you’ll never be a “true” artist.

3. Friendship takes honesty.
When I was younger, I didn’t get this. I tried to be the person those around me expected me to be. I tried to please people. I acted different depending on what group of people I was with, and I felt disconnected from all of them, because I wasn’t ever truly myself. I learned better through dating. I used to be just as fake with guys, if not more so, but when I started searching for a soul mate, someone I could live with and love passionately for the rest of my life, I realized that wasn’t going to cut it. I had to find someone who would love me, not a mask I wore. I stopped trying to please dates, and just tried my best to be myself. (It’s a lot harder than it sounds.) It meant that some dates went down in flames, but it also worked. I found my soul mate. I realized I owed the same honesty to my friends. I might not spill every innermost thought with every person, but whatever thoughts and emotions I do express are real. If I come across as a geek, so be it. A real friend will accept me as I am.

4. Friendship takes advocacy.
It’s one thing to be honest, it’s another to use that as an excuse to tear someone down. As a writer, I know the power of words, and I strive never to use words as weapons. That’s obvious, right? Not to trash your friends, either to their faces or behind their backs? I hope that’s obvious. But I had another problem. See, I’m  really good at seeing both sides of an issue. Sometimes my attempts to always play mediator (or devil’s advocate) caused problems, because I would try to talk my friends out of their conflicts. My friend would say something like, “This bitch at work is trying to undermine my authority,” and I’d be, “Well, I’m sure she’s trying her best too–maybe it’s something you’re doing?”

A good friend in college had a completely different philosophy. “If your boyfriend dumps you, then I’m not going to defend him. I’m your advocate, not his.” I realized this was exactly why she was the one I wanted to go to for comfort if I had a problem. She’d actively take my side. It’s not that she wasn’t capable of mediation or seeing the other person’s point of view. Actually, she was a great mediator, if that’s the role she was asked to take. But she didn’t assign herself as mediator unasked. That made her a better friend than I. So I started trying it her way, and being my friends’ advocate, not their mediator — unless they asked me to mediate.

5. Friendship takes passion.
This is related to honesty. I used to avoid any controversial subject with my friends, especially if I suspected we might disagree. If they said something, I’d nod, even if I didn’t share the opinion. This kills friendship. Sure, it’s okay for acquaintances, and I am not eager to trod toes of people I don’t know well. Also, there’s such a thing as agreeing to disagree. But I think the best relationships are those where you can have a knock down argument and still remain friends. A friend who won’t speak to you again after you’ve told her how you voted in the last election–that’s not much of a friend, in my book.

There’s an important corollary to this. It goes for life in general, not just friendship, but it’s critical to friendship, and that is remaining open to changing your mind. If my friend and I disagree about some point of politics or religion or relationship or economic policy, I don’t just assume I’m right. I listen to the arguments. I try to admit when I don’t know. I change my mind.

There’s a fine middle ground between being a reed who bows to any breeze and a bullet that needs to overpower whatever it touches. I think friendship only blooms in the middle ground.

goals

I have a lot of goals.

How many words to write each day.

How many pounds I want to lose in three months.

How many tummy-crunches I would like to do each day.

How much money I want to make each month.

How long it will take me to pay off my student loan or save for a house that actually has a yard so my kids can have a puppy.

But there are other goals I have too, and I don’t always write them down. Spend time with my husband and children.

A Little Sketch

Just a little sketch I did on Photoshop.

Can Writing Pay Off Your Student Loan?

Original Principal Balance: $39,077.28.

Holy shit.

That’s how much I owed the day I graduated. Forty thousand dollars, for a liberal arts education. And that’s not counting grad school. Since I wanted to be a writer, I refused to get a “real” job, like a responsible person, and instead just dicked around, taking minimum wage jobs that left me plenty of time to write. Oh, and let’s not forget my fave method of survival, mouching off gainfully employed relatives and friends.

Really pathetic, now that I think about it.

Was it worth it to go to college? Did I need to pay $40,000 to learn to write? Honestly, I don’t know. I did learn to write much better in college, and I learned to do historical research, and I learned to identify bullshit, of which there was quite a lot. (Don’t get me started on postmodernism.)

The real question is, can writing ever pay off the debt incurred? I avoided the issue by being so poor, I could defer payment, or by going back to school to defer payment. When I married, I still owed pretty much everything. My husband, bless his patient soul, essentially took over paying the debt for me. That’s not fair to him, though, and I’d like to be able to pay it off myself with my own earnings.

It’s Finally Starting To Look Like The Future

This century started out poorly, let’s be honest. Barely a year in, and what have you got, but morons flying planes into buildings, war, more war and economic depression. It seems like at home and abroad there are fanatics trying to drag us back into the dark ages. Hello, was this what the Twenty-First Century was supposed to be like?

Heck, no.

Here, however, is something that finally makes me feel like I’m living in the Twenty-First Century I was promised–3D printers for your home! How awesome is that? Only $1300. We had to get the plumbing fixed in our home (which was built in the dark ages), so sadly this is not something we can afford. But some rich yuppies somewhere will buy it, and help bring the price down for the rest of us. (See? There is a good use for the idle rich!) In a few years, I hope, this tech will be better and cheaper and I will buy one.

You may be thinking, “Why do I need a 3D printer in my home?”

This is the beginning of having replicators in our homes. Instead of having to go to the mall and pick out from a selection of shirts with hideous patterns, one in a size too large and one in a size too small, you will be able to shop online, get any size you want, with a selection that is not limited to what huge fashion conglomerates decide is trendy.

Think of how publishing has changed due to ebooks, and now imagine that applied to everything else. Think what this will mean for home designers. Just as indie authors suddenly have access that large publishers monopolized previously, so indie designers will be able to sell their designs for clothes, furniture, toys, gadgets, tools, and devices cheaply and competitively.

For instance, my brother has designed cute little bug robots. They are fun. But it’s not worth his while at the moment to attempt to distribute them beyond his own family. If he could simply sell the design and anyone could purchase and print the bugs, it would be easy for him to do so.

Now, I just want to know one more thing. When are they going to apply this technology to FOOD? I am so sick of cooking dinner everynight. I would rather pay one of YOU out there to design healthy and yummy meals for me, and let me just buy and print out dinner. I don’t know who “you” are, but I know you’re a better cook than I, and I am just waiting.

* * *

Other good news: The Unfinished Song: Initiate is now FREE on Amazon.uk! Yay! I have made the first book free in the US for a while now, and have been hoping to do the same in the UK. Now this dream is a reality, so if you are in the UK, or know folks in the UK, please, please help me get out the word that this is a great time to grab the first book in The Unfinished Song epic fantasy.

Now free on Amazon.uk.

Finding A Character’s Voice

I have a neat little thing I’m doing in my wip (Book 5, Wing), which is introducing each chapter with a special scene, told in first person. A few of these scenes show a dramatic event in the character’s life. Others simply establish a mood or a central symbol. All introduce us to the interior life of the character, which is what I like about these scenes, and why they are important to the book.

The other thing that I like, but which is also sending me in circles about my own tail, is that there is no faking it in these scenes. Unlike the more standard, third person, plot driven scenes of the novel, characters cannot hide behind their current predicaments to disguise who they truly are. These scenes demand that I know the voice, the history and the deepest concerns of the characters.

This is a problem, because there are one or two I still don’t know.

There’s one in particular who is hard to catch. I’m rewriting his scene over and over again, in a different voice each time. Sometimes I play with the tense/person too. Does it sound “truer” to his character to speak in a languid drawl, in clipped staccato, in lazy profanity? I haven’t found the perfect tone yet.

To help me, I’ve also been shoveling through other people’s books on my shelf, and through public stories on the internet, and poetry, and even old volumes of Mark Twain, not so much for direct inspiration as much as to re-acquaint myself with a diversity of styles and think what defines them. I’m hoping that can help me clarify what defines my character. Hopefully, he won’t just come out sounding like Huck Finn. Especially since these days, even Huck Finn isn’t allowed to sound like Huck Finn. Do to protests, certain words in his vocabulary have had to be replaced by less obstropolous terms like “zombie.”

Huck Finn and Zombie Jim.