Coming back to social life...

When I was much younger I'd had this idea somehow cement itself into my soul that said one day I'd have a time in which I'd lose all the friends I had.  Because I was transgendered, or because I wasn't a pushover of a girl, or because I'd finally reach that stress point where my emotions just fractured or any other conceivable fear-based "reason".  

I was right...but...I was wrong as well.

Recently I've been trying to reengage with the world as best as one can from the relative confines of the home.  There's no real social scene up here in the frosty north-half of MN, and most everywhere up here is rural anyway.  So I wasn't going to find success immediately or easily.

I reached out online.  Tried web communities here and there, slowly bouncing from one to another in a procession that resembled...

• Join site, fill in profile, join in chat.
• Continue chat with strangers making no genuine connections
• Meet some very nice people but find them or myself wanting
• Eventually become disenchanted with the community as a whole
• Slowly back away from community and fade into cyberspace
• Abandon community  

Rinse.  Repeat.  Ad nauseum.

Looking back over my history and Bookmarks I've spanned a healthy selection of the social support and socializing sites for women of my nature.  Obviously, I had some men's attentions but to be perfectly honest, a healthy percentage of them would likely most easily settle for the gentle caress of a gym sock.  Not all men online are bad/weird/stalkers/murderers/aliens/people that think traffic cones are clever Halloween costumes, that I will readily admit.  However, I wasn't there to meet men primarily.  

I just wanted some friends again.  I'd retreated from the social scene in response to past issues and prescient realities (to my mind) and had realized I needed to get off my backside and see to that.  For my own sake (never mind the overwhelmingly altruistic desire to afflict myself on the general public at large) as well as wanting to invest of myself in humanity again.  In people that I could value and bond with like I had those from my past only more openly and sincerely. 

Recently, I'd returned to one that I'd had the least painful dismal failure at, completely of my own doing (you don't get results if you turn tail and run from anxiety the very next day).  In doing so, after only a handful of days, a few weeks at most, I signed in today to find that I was the second highest rated girl on the site!  I honestly don't know why, it being a measure of popularity, but you know what?  I'll enjoy that. :)  I met another girl that once we started talking it was like we'd been friends since school and just ran into each other after having lost touch for years.  Like we'd never been separated.   It's wonderful.  Energizing.  Is already opening windows on myself, our community and other people all the same.  I feel like someone else really understands and I've not had that in ...sooo long.  She's one of those wonderful beautiful people and ..I'm thankful that in my return to where I started, I found a soul with common ground enough that it's easier to open up to a potentially fabulous new friend. :)