I Get By With a Little Help From My Friends

If someone asked me to describe myself one of the things that I might bring up is that I am an introvert, and if you've spent any amount of time with me recently, you might find this hard to believe.  These days my social calendar is a lot fuller than it used to be.  I would say as recently as a year ago, I would go out or spend time with friends maybe once a month.  There were a few close friends from time to time that broke this norm, but it seemed like they were usually very busy themselves, and in one instance, the friend moved away to go to college.  Admirable of course, but it really cut down on the amount of social activities I engaged in for awhile.

Now it seems like I'm doing something almost every week, and with a much wider variety of people.  I go to plays and see movies, I host game nights; the photo above is legit, we played Scrabble and those were the first two words set on the board.  This summer I will be performing in a local musical production at our playhouse, and the rehearsals in the evenings are so much fun I'm bubbly and energetic when I get home from them.  This is very different from the days when I could expect to get through an entire season of a T.V. series in any given week!

Big changes like this don't happen overnight of course.  I've been working on being less introverted ever since I started college roughly five years ago, because I recognized that the key to success in almost any job market is networking.  You can't make contacts if you never talk to anyone, but talking to work colleagues and going to watch a friend perform a album release are two very different things.  

Once you start it's hard to stop too.  Where I used to find myself stressed out by going to events, I now find that if I go a couple of weeks without something to do, I get bored and lethargic.  Not to say that I don't still enjoy some alone time, few things can beat reading a book on a rainy afternoon, but now I'm just as likely to enjoy an evening playing the ever demoralizing yet hilarious Cards Against Humanity, or trying to figure out how to beat a certain friend at Zombie Flux (you know who you are!).

I really appreciate this new change in my life, and all the new friends that I have that make it possible.  This post is dedicated to you.  Thank you!