Campfyre Stories

It’s always just been easy for me.  I enjoy talking to strangers.  When I was 4 I asked my mother why we shouldn’t talk to strangers because if we never talk to strangers, how are we ever going to make new friends?

So I meet new people on a regular basis and I make new friends fairly easily, but lately I’ve been finding that it’s not as easy as it used to be.  People are not as receptive and I don’t know if my radar is off or if I’m doing something wrong or if the butterfly mojo is simply gone.  Whatever it is, I don’t like it one bit.

Not that anyone does, but I don’t do well with rejection.  That’s an understatement.  I take rejection incredibly personally and wind up obsessing on everything that I’ve said and done that caused me to be rejected in the first place.  It causes me to put up a wall and retreat inside myself to lick my wounds, but the real problem is that it’s been happening so often lately that I find myself becoming more and more cocooned and reluctant to put myself out.

Thankfully I have some really good friends who not only get me, but get the whole thing.  The psychic tendencies that they display are also helpful as they wind up filling in the missing pieces…  the pieces I’m forgetting and remind me that those are the more important parts.

But, you know, I thrive on human contact.  I really enjoy talking to random people and having a passing conversation - on any topic, really.  (Except sports, I don’t really watch any sports enough to be well-versed.)  I talk to the guys at the bus stop, or the bus driver, or to the person ahead of or behind me in line in a store.  I talk to clerks and to people I pass in hallways, I talk to people in the laundromat and to the the people who say hello passing on the street.  I MAKE the effort.

And I can’t even blame it on the holiday season, because this has been going on for a while now.  The problem is that *now* it’s starting to affect me, to make me question my inner butterfly and that nagging feeling has started pestering me that it’s not worth the feelings of rejection and I should just give up.

Not only do I not want to give up, I honestly don’t know if it’s even possible for me.

But I don’t know how this can be reconciled.  I find myself thinking in stereotypes about men and women and, while it’s almost all based on personal past experiences, all it really does is continue the cycle and make me less interesting in seeking out the interesting stories of people I haven’t yet met.

I feel like I’ve lost something, but something intangible.  Grace or charm or any one of those things that is either there or it isn’t.  I don’t think that charisma is something you can learn to have, then again, had you asked me three months ago I would have said that I didn’t think it was something you could lose, either.  At least not without a good reason.

So is there some kind of resolution to end this on?  Is there some bright spot or hidden answer that has come about from tackling the challenge of saying all these things out loud?  I’m afraid that the answer to that is no, but at least I’ve gone ahead and written about it, because it really is plaguing me.