My freshman year at Brown is coming to a close, and I’m surprisingly fine with it. The fact that I won’t be able to use my youthful innocence as an excuse anymore when I fuck up simple activities on campus (“Hi, can I get a spicy chicken sandwich with cheese on it, please?”) is a little daunting, but I’ve actually done a pretty good job navigating the mundane realities of living on your own for the first time. I do my laundry on time. I eat balanced meals and work out. And some days, I come back to my room and find that I’m content to just sit on my computer and be by myself, with no pressure to go out and socialize.
Okay, so maybe that last one is most days.
I’m a textbook introvert. I can’t be around people or in highly social situations for extended periods of time without needing to take a break by myself to “recharge.” This doesn’t mean that I’m shy or cold or unfriendly, it just means that after we leave a fifth party on Saturday night because the squad still doesn’t think it’s fun enough, I might bounce in favor of reading in my bed for a while back home.
The only exception I’ve found to this rule is that with certain people, when we’re just sitting around not doing anything in particular, I never really get to the point where I feel drained–examples include when I’m cuddling with my boyfriend or marathoning Supernatural with my bestie. I guess this is partially because it’s a low energy hangout, but mostly I think it’s because I think you need to really trust someone to be able to chill that hard with them.
Unfortunately, this friendship niche–the people you can do nothing with–is one that I have yet to fill here at Brown. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve made other friends, but our relationships are less eat-pretzels-with-me-while-we-browse-Tumblr-together and more drink-Sprite-with-me-while-we-hold-in-our-vomit-together. Even though I enjoy the time I spend by myself, I sort of miss having people who will eat breakfast with me, who will come to the library and study with me, who will play Smash Bros. with me when we’re supposed to be working. As an introvert, I feel like this is the group I need more than anything, and really, I’ve only got a few weeks left to cobble one together before I’m not a freshman anymore and become doomed to never make any new friends again. When I realized this a week or so ago, I set off on a mission.
I knew that there were people at Brown who felt the same way I did, because during Spring Weekend I had publicly posted my Kik on a Yik Yak confession about someone feeling particularly alone during the parties and concerts because they didn’t have anyone to hang out with. I was shocked–and frankly sort of saddened–by the number of people who actually ended up messaging me because they felt lonely. They ranged from other freshmen whose pre-orientation friend groups had just fallen apart to grad students who didn’t click with anyone else in their program. However, any time I suggested that I meet one of them at Chipotle for a burrito sometime, they balked–for some of them, they didn’t think it would solve anything; for others, it was just too embarrassing.
So, I took to Facebook, creating a club within Brown that I advertised as something you could join “if you want to do the things that friends do without having to exert the effort to, you know, make friends.” It took only a couple days for our membership to rise to a whopping sixteen lonely losers like me. It was so exciting!
And then, of course, I found that many people, although they enjoyed the theoretical possibility of eating at the Ratty with the group, wouldn’t actually commit to it if I actually set up the date. A bunch of them expressed interests in ranting to me about their problems, no-strings-attached, but felt a little too embarrassed when I actually offered. I was admittedly frustrated. Why won’t you people let me befriend you?! WHAT DO YOU MEAN FRIENDSHIP ISN’T NECESSARILY SOMETHING THAT CAN BE MANUFACTURED?!
But then I got a private message from one of the members. He was actually someone I knew before the group started, as we had been in a class together first semester and even sometimes hung out outside of class, and honestly I had always wanted to become better friends with him. He told me that he thought what I was doing was really great, and that he had seen my post on Yik Yak and said it was cool of me to care about lonely people at Brown. When I mentioned that my intent behind this group was basically to make a Brown Introverts Club–a low key hangout for people who just want some consistent faces to be around–he said “That’s amazing,” and offered to help in any way he could. Later that day, we decided we’d get dinner sometime.
Maybe my Facebook group isn’t something that many other people will ever be able to take seriously–I did title it “Friendless Dweebs” and make the cover photo one of those creepy boyfriend pillows, after all.
But honestly, I think it’s already helping me make some new friends–there’s even a fellow Rib writer who I think I’ve become a lot closer to because of it. Sure, it might not be feasible for a club filled with people brought together only by their introversion to automatically become fast friends, but it actually doesn’t seem that different to me from befriending your floormates or your club soccer team. “Being a shy nerd” may be a dorky mutual interest, but you know what? It still is one.
The Friendless Dweebs have their first scheduled meeting–a dinner and de-stress event–in the next couple of days, and who knows? Maybe all sixteen will show up, or maybe no one will. No matter the outcome, I’m not going to give up on culling some new friends just yet. After all, what’s the worst that could happen? I end up eating dinner alone?
To be honest, after all this talk of social interaction, that sounds amazing.
If you self-identify as a friendless dweeb, a lonely loser, an unpopular nerd, or similar, feel free to join us here. We don’t bite because we’re too afraid of opening our mouths around strangers.
