How can I meet people like myself: a bit older, still young at heart, and looking for friends?
The great secret of making friends is that friends are made through shared bad experiences. No, really. That’s what you make so many friends in school, in jobs, and all the rest. It’s the whole point of those god-awful ‘team building’ things. You can’t properly make friends with people if you haven’t been through something together. Sure, you can go meet some strangers in a bar, but they’ll always just be tolerant acquaintances, you know. And you can meet people at hobby/arty things, and it’ll be nice, but they won’t be the lifelong kind of friends. If you believe this little theory of mine (admittedly I have many slightly wrong-headed theories, but roll with me here), what you need to do is volunteer to do something difficult — or even better, somehow be forced to do such a thing, so you have that whole ‘we’re all in this together’ spirit and can make some real friends. I’m not sure what to suggest (I imagine committing crimes and getting banged up in jail is out of the question here
…And I have such this awful feeling about myself that if I meet people… There’s the issue. You don’t like you (when it counts) and others are just following your example. Some people have the skills to feel like shit about themselves and still create relationships. You are probably not one of those people. If you have these bad feelings about yourself, your loneliness and Grinchy push-away behavior is completely rational: you’re being kind enough to protect people from this low-worth person (you)! These awful feelings likely come from your internal dialogue. This book has a structured approach to rebalancing internal dialogue that has been “proven” to create bad feelings. Watch out for that mental circuit that goes “Count friends. If low, berate self, feel bad.” Somehow, it’s really easy to brutalize ourselves based on some time-count of friends. Something to consider: Go volunteer somewhere unpleasant, but NOT with
