Wait. I Have New Connection?!

Unexpected

There I am, in the conference room for a monthly meeting, minding my own business, thinking about going home for the day, thinking about what’s going on in my classroom the next morning, and considering a question or two I have for meeting’s facilitator when life takes a dramatic turn.

It wasn’t immediately obvious things had shifted, but it would be.

A colleague from a distant part of the building sat beside me. We’d exchanged pleasantries. We’d heckled a comment or two and had a little laugh at the previous month’s meeting, but that was the end of the story. Before this meeting started, we chatted a little. It started like a lot of teacher conversations do. One of confessed burnout to the other. Then something strange happened. The topic of what we’d do if we weren’t teaching came up, and it turned out we’d had the same thought. A small connection. And we chatted just a bit more before the meeting was adjourned.

Later that evening—or it could have been the next morning—I’m checking social media feeds, and this colleague appears in a “people you may know” panel. I rarely send friend requests, but we had this small connection. We seemed to have a similar perspective, and she made me laugh. What the heck?

“Add friend.”

Isolation

I’ve written on the topic before. I don’t make friends easily. I never have. For most of my life, I’ve been that guy who gets along with everyone but doesn’t get invited to parties. I can talk to most anyone about most anything, but I’m not the person you add to your Christmas card list. In a room full of people, chatting and laughing, I participate, but in the end; I stand alone. I don’t know why that is. There are few topics that have vexed me more.

Many a night have I questioned what’s wrong with me, what mistakes I’m making, why everyone I know seems to have plans with friends and I don’t. Many a year have I dealt with feelings of loneliness and isolation. Those feelings are at the heart of some of my darkest periods. Why am I such an island?

I have theories, but not answers. I went to college online, so no roommates or classmates. I’ve moved around the country since I was in kindergarten. I’ve changed jobs more than a few times. There’s no doubt this contributes to my lack of genuine connections. It doesn’t help I take little interest in sports or church or other social distractions that unite people. I also live in an area where I know I am the minority; politically, spiritually, and philosophically. 

Connection

But then I added this friend. We exchange a couple memes and video clips—teacher humor and news stories. But then we began to just chat. Cue the dramatic music. We chatted. Then we chatted some more. On every topic we seem to share at least some common ground. Every turn of the conversation, exposes a similar point of view. True connections. I’d mostly given up on this very thing happening.

Truthfully, I’d accepted—mostly—my wife and family, an old friend living hundreds of miles away, and the one couple in town we see infrequently for dinner were the extent of my circle; at least the edge of the circle in which true connection lay. She proved me wrong.

Sometimes genuine connection takes years to develop. It requires shared history, weathering of the same storms, a slow progression. And sometimes, people click together like Lego blocks. We chatted regularly for days. We understand one another’s frustrations at work, challenges in each other’s lives, and share easy laughter. I was like a school-boy when I excitedly I told my mother and my wife “I made a friend!” They know how much that means. They know I don’t fit in and seldom feel see or heard. Wait until I tell my therapist!

Lesson

I blogged recently about being told I’d inspired someone to return to blogging after having hung up the pen for a while. It was this friend who said those magic words. And the cycle of inspiration continues. I write something that sparks an idea for her and she writes something that gets the wheels turning for me.

If you’ve read many of my other articles, you know I tend to the look for “the lesson.” Maybe it’s the teacher in me. Maybe it’s a love of learning. In any case, I believe we improve our own lives by finding lessons in our experiences, using them to guide, frame, and understand new experiences, and sharing them with others. So, the lesson here?

No, it isn’t to add every suggested friend on social media. That’s probably a terrible idea. It’s that connections are out there, sometimes in unlikely places. It’s that being yourself, even if it doesn’t seem to attract the greatest crowd, can draw the right the right people at the right time. The lesson is, you aren’t alone.

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