I'm someone who has struggled with friendships my entire life. Lately I've been really trying to figure out why that is. The easiest reasons that have come to mind all fall under the "external forces" category. If i sat here and tried to tell you all those reasons, we'd have another whiny post about why I think the world isn't fair. So that's why this time around, I'm trying to be as genuine as possible in my introspection and self reflection. In other words, I've been allowing myself to explore the fact that I could be the problem. Myself, aka the ultimate "internal force", could be the reason why I've never been able to cultivate and keep the type of friendships I've always wanted.
I feel like my desire has always been having really close friends that I fall in love with. Not like relationship love, but I definitely seek soul-mates in my friends. Basically I've always craved being very close to my friends where we'd do cheesy things like maybe go on a road trips, travel together, have sleepovers where we'd stay up all night. Or cuddle up all together in a blanket fort.
I realize now that to cultivate these types of friendships, you have to be someone that other people genuinely enjoy spending a lot of quality time with. And I also realize that most of my life, I may have been more of an emotional burden on my friends, rather than a source of happiness, connectivity and support; which is definitely what I look for from friends to be able to fully foster those genuine connections that I crave.
I left the US in the spring of 2017. And while there are still many people back home that I would still call friends that I also still love to death, and probably always will....well, the fact is, it's been a while. And face-to-face encounters on a regular basis do matter to me when it comes to these close friendships I want in my life.
Since then, it was definitely during my time in New Zeland that I feel I was able to cultivate some of pretty genuine friendships. Unfortunately, those friends are either Kiwi natives, or travelers themselves as well. And while they are definitely friendships that I will cherish my entire life and will always make the effort when I can to see them, again, they don't exactly fill my social calendar while I'm here in Valencia, Spain.
Now this may sound kind of anti social and angst-y, but I'm really not jumping to find these "soul friends" any time soon. I'm still at a stage where I recognize that I have some work to do on myself, and I basically need to figure out how I can improve my mental health, emotional stability, and self confidence enough to where I would want to be friends with myself...If that makes any sense. But of course, things don't always happen the way we plan, and the universe might chose to introduce someone (or maybe even a few people) into my life that I have a strong connection with, and I'll just have to go with the flow.
