Friend Requests

Every once in a while, I'll get a little notice on my Facebook homepage saying I have a new friend request. When I first see this notice my first reaction is "Yes! I wonder who finally got a Facebook," and for the first few months that reaction was the most common one. But these days, now that everyone and their dog has a Facebook profile, friend requests are scarce and when they do happen, they are usually from random people at school. Not that I have anything against random people asking me to be their friend. I consider myself a friendly person so, by all means, the more the merrier but I have to wonder, does passing on the way to Color Concept constitute friendship? Friendship in general has always been a tough subject for me. In some instances, I can be quite the extrovert. This usually happens when I am very comfortable with where I am and who I'm with. In other instances, I stay very contained and quiet.
In elementary school, I never really had a true, undeniable group of friends. I would float from clique to clique, never really fitting in with any of them. I was always on the outside of the "cool" circle but too "cool" to be accepted in the lower classes. I wasn't very fast, I hated running more that five or ten feet and I couldn't kick a kickball to save my life so friendship through sports was definitely out. By middle school, I had become a lot more outgoing, especially by eighth grade. By that time, I thought I knew who I wanted to be, and who I wanted to be with, unfortunately that person was a jerk and those people were even worse. By high school, and freshman band camp, the real me began to come into the light. Here were people who acted like me, laughed with me and genuinely wanted to be around me, an entirely new concept, to say the least.
I was (and remain to this day) apprehensive. I have a hard time justifying to myself why anyone would want to become good friends with me. When I look in the mirror, I see nothing outstanding and when I set down the mirror and look even deeper, I just see a quiet perfectionist who likes film scores, art, and Chipotle: nothing extraordinary. And yet I was surrounded by so many awesome people, people who wanted to call me friend and I often caught myself asking "why?" By my senior year of high school, my circle of friends had grown ten-fold and had come to include a singer, a dancer, a painter, a metalhead, three boyscouts, two sisters, two "sisters", a techie, a Trekkie, and a whole group of people who willingly shared parents. Looking back, I still can't believe how lucky I am. These people have come to mean so much to me, living life without them right here beside me has become a lackluster, if not unpleasant experience. Luckily, college has provided an entirely new set of friend requests to accept and spending my days with them has eased the pain of being torn from my old circle. For a while I was worried that making new friends would mean losing old ones but I have since proven that theory wrong. Actually, even from miles apart, several of my old friends have become as close as family, a fact by which I am honored and humbled. I still wonder why.