I’m really happy that you love your new friends!! Because you’re in school, every change is an opportunity to make new friends and you should feel good about being able to make new friends so easily.
Even very bashful kids can make a few new friends. All they need to do is be open to it.
When you think about it, do you have as many friends now as you thought you would? What if you kept up with all of your friends from pre-school until now? Do you even remember them all? How many friends would you have with perfect maintenance? A couple of hundred?
Friends require energy and time. Let’s say it’s a formula where:
When your energy is high, you can keep some friends with just a little time. If you have minimal energy, but lots of time, you can have maybe .02 friends. Wait. What?
Make some friends that are better at math theory. Nobody wants to consider two-percent friends.
My point is that you will find that keeping friends is easier and more rewarding than constantly making new ones.
Some people say that they don’t need to make more friends because they don’t have the energy or the time. This usually happens once they are involved in one or more very demanding relationships, like becoming parents.
Babies will crap all over your social life, but they also provide so much… noise and barf. Also-also, they really do provide opportunities to meet other people that you might not have met otherwise, but that’s not the phase you’re dealing with yet.
Whatever your future circumstances, keep in touch with the people who really accept you and treat you kindly.
I pine regularly for my best friend from third grade, but I have to admit that she beat the crap out of me, and she did that more than once. It’s probably just as well that we lost track of each other.
Now that I’m reflecting on it, I am actually not very good at this friend-retention at all, so this is a case of “take my advice, I’m not using it.”
Call or write or text–whatever you choose–but do it every couple of whiles. People who bubble up in your thoughts might even need to hear from you. Just because they haven’t called or written or texted, that doesn’t mean they don’t care to hear from you.
Unless, of course, they have beat the crap out of you a few times over a stupid board game. In that case, just try to enjoy knowing that you really did conquer Asia without cheating.
Love,
yermom
askyermom 