Old Friend, New Friend

"We'll be old friends until we are senile. Then we'll be new friends evey day thereafter."

All I can say is, thank goodness I'm not senile. I don't think I'm ready to make new friends of my old friends every day of my life.  I'll just have to look at this as practice for old age.

Someone once asked me what it was like meeting my friends and family for the first time again.  What I think they really wanted to know was "What was it like for them?" Well, I'm not fully in my own head, so don't go asking me to crawl around in someone else's head to try and understand them.

I can tell you what it was like for me....unnerving. Imagine meeting someone who can tell you almost everything about you (more than you know, really) when all you know about them is their name, and maybe the name of their spouse/kids or anything else they've chosen to share on Facebook. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad my friends know as much about me as they do. Without them, I'd still be in the dark about a lot of things, like my former marriage and the fact that I've been crazy (a.k.a weird) for a long time, it just chose a different way to manifest itself. Apparently my brain decided that it needed the whole world to know how unusual it could be, not just the select few that knew before.

I'm always nervous when I meet someone again for the first time. I never know how they're going to react. For the most part, it's been good. A couple of people were uncomfortable/nervous and some people have chosen to attempt to cut all association with me (I stubbornly wouldn't let a couple of them, but I had my reasons. Mainly cuz I love them and refuse to let them take the easy way out of everything in life.) Most people are even more nervous than I am, because they don't know what they can say to me without offending or upsetting me.

I am now going to share the biggest secret in the history of our planet...it takes a lot to offend or upset me!!

Amazing, I know. But it's true. Who'da thunk it, right?  Apparently I used to be this really emotionally unstable person, who didn't know how to handle anything that life threw her way.  Actually, that might explain what happened to me. Lack of stress management. Easily panicked. Angry at the world for what a select few people had dumped into my life.  Well, that's not me anymore. I've been told by more people than I can count that I'm a stronger, happier person now than the person they knew (and loved anyway.) I've been told by people who knew me before those certain people got ahold of me and erased the tentative faith I had in myself that I am who I was when I was a kid. Who I should have and would have become if two people in particular hadn't been able to teach me to hate myself for so many years.

So, if you get a chance to see me so I can "meet" you, and you have something you want to ask me, by all means ask away. In fact, it makes it much easier to get to know each other again if you make an effort to get to know the new me. If I don't like the question, I'll let you know. I won't even snap your head off when I do it, I'll just tell you. If it's something I can't answer, I'll let you know, but I will also do my best to come up with an answer that is as honest as possible. If you didn't like me before, give me a chance. We may not adore each other, but it'd be nice not to be judged on the personality of the virtual stranger that I was.

Social anxiety will not win out. I am a strong woma and I like having this opportunity to make a new friend from an old friend, and to make new friends that are just that...NEW!