Please be as weird as me

Making friends as an adult is a scam (like adulthood itself). As a kid, I was under the impression that I'd be friends with my friends forever and we'd live on the same street and our kids would be friends and our pets would hang out. That's what television shows and movies told us. However, it's all a scam. I know this, given my childhood of moving around since my dad was in Army, but I still believed. 

I'm still friends with a small group of people from high school, but most of my close friends are people I met in college. We don't live in the same state, so we mostly keep in touch via social media and the occasional call. Pre-pandemic, we'd try to get together once a year or so. Now, it's Skype or Zoom...which is better than nothing. I've written about making friends as an adult before on my other blog, and it's hard. When structures like school are taken away, it's harder to find people with common interests (one of the things that helps people form friendships). Add in things like work, families, and the other responsibilities of being an adult, and it get harder to form those relationships. 

That brings us to the place most people make friends as adults - work. I'm fortunate to have met some really lovely people at pretty much every place I've ever worked. I've remained in touch with many of them and am close with several people. My favorite thing about making work friends is that moment when I stop referring to them as "work friends." They're become friends, no qualifier needed. 

Today's piece is inspired by one of those friends, who I'm supposed to see today in real life. You may remember Emily from two other pieces about cacti and her dog, Hazel. Emily moved to Virginia several  years ago for a job at the company where I was working at the time. We hit it off during her onboarding class, and the rest is history. Neither of us work at that company anymore, but we've remained friends and she's one of the few people I talk to on the phone (she doesn't live in Virginia anymore, so we catch up with a phone call every now and then). She's visiting family on the East Coast for the holidays, and is making a stop here as well. I'm excited to see her and catch up in person. It seems sort of decadent and weird to see someone I'm not related to in person. 2021...

One of the things that makes it harder to make friends as an adult is the weirdness factor. By the time we're in our early 20s, we like stuff. Sometimes that stuff seems weird or odd to people, so you have to decide how and when you share the weird. As you get to know one another, you slowly unleash the weird. I always hope a new friend will have a thing they love as much as I love embroidery, 70s punk music, watching documentaries about cults, and having an encyclopedic knowledge of movies made from roughly 1992-2000. Maybe we have the same weird thing, like wanting to visit all 50 states and watching Stephen King made for tv movies. I always hope the person will be as weird as me. 

Today's piece is for all my friends who embrace their weirdness or normalness or whateverness and are who they are. Or who are working on being who they are. You're all amazing and I'm glad we're friends. 

Details:
Stitches: back stitch, French knots
Thread palette: Sublime Stitching 634, 628, 644 (2)