Expanding my friendship circle

I am lucky enough to have a great group of really close friends. Most of us met at the residential college we all attended in our first years of Uni, while some are friends from my school days that have become blended together into a supportive and loving group.

Despite this, I sometimes find myself noticing that I don’t really have many friends from my field of work and study. Whilst I am friendly with my colleagues at my job and am beginning to form some friendships with fellow PhD students, COVID-19 as well as just good old plain social awkwardness have so far prevented these relationships from blossoming into real friendships.

I am aware that I am certainly largely to blame for this. While I consider myself an extrovert and often crave a good conversation or activity with someone, I can easily slip in to a mindset where I find myself declaring such things as ‘too hard’ or imagining the usual social awkwardness of any interaction too much to overcome. I will often imagine, if say sharing a coffee or meal with a new friend, that we will either run out of things to talk about giving way to the dreaded prolonged silence, or else find that we vehemently disagree on something of importance to the other, leading to even more awkwardness.

In recent days I have been trying to challenge these notions. I am generally capable of filling any silence with some potentially useless (but in this case most useful!) piece of information, and so should back myself to be able to hold down a basic conversation with most people. Secondly, to disagree about something is not inherently bad – I think somewhere in my mind I crave conversations that include different perspectives, especially when it comes to my work/study life, where I can get stuck spending so much time in my own head that I start to lose sight of other perspectives.

As a result, I have decided to force myself to take more social ‘leaps’ – to plan dinners, coffees and activities with budding friends. Let’s see how it goes, but I am confident the rewards will easily outweigh my, often at least partially imagined, burdens.