Distances

Another weekend over and yet another nice time was had. G and I went to the Innocent Village fete in Regent’s Park on Saturday and that was a lovely day. We just mooched about for hours eating food, watching the entertainments and getting lost of freebies. My kind of day! I think it was quite a clever marketing ploy by Innocent as it should make really positive connections in people’s minds and so when they now see the product in shops I imagine it will make people far more likely to buy it – as does getting to try various free samples…

Over the weekend I was thinking about how I got through phases in my life where I seem to hold friends at arms length, which is not a great thing because sometimes you find that they end up totally drifting out of your life. I seem to be in one of those phases at the moment – one where I find it hard to let people in on my life. I am generally quite a private person – no matter what writing a blog may suggest(!) – and sometimes I like to just keep myself to myself. Often on the outside all seems well and I am perfectly communicative and friendly but if I am talking to someone and reach a point where they might start to chip below the surface then a wall goes up and, even though they might not necessarily realise that is what is happening, I just deflect all attempts for them to find out the real details of my life. It always sobers me a bit when I think about it, partly because I realise how easy it can be to push people away, to let them drift out of your life and sometimes I wonder if I will wake up one day and have pushed people away so far that our friendship is no longer in view.

I have a friend who I have known for years and I think she may not be entirely happy with me at the moment. We have the same birthday, so is unlikely to have forgotten when it was, and yet she sent my birthday card late and wrote the minimum possible in the card. She is someone I struggle with sometimes. Sometimes I think that she has this idea of who I am in her mind that if I ever really let her know the truth about me that she would just be so disappointed in me. I don’t even mean me revealing skeletons particularly, more that she just has this set idea in her mind and in my own way I feel a straitjacketed by that and just cannot be myself with her. She phoned me a few weeks ago and I said I’d call her back, but I haven’t – which is very unlike me. I just don’t want to have a conversation with her where I am talking to her for the sake of it and don’t feel that I can talk to her about the things that are really what I am about.

I need to think though because the strategy of keeping people at a distance is a foolish one, particularly if you are doing nothing to cultivate other relationships in your life that are more significant. Instead, what I am really doing is not dealing with it and I need to work out how to start doing that. Time to consider starting to make some phone calls me thinks. Maybe.

But on a brighter note- today is mine and G’s three monthiversary. Yay!