Infinity, The XX

I’ve always taken a long time in gaining friends, keeping them for a long time as well.  My best friend and I took almost a year before I considered her a friend, and another few after that to consider her my best friend.  While I trust my instincts, the people in my life have to earn a level with me.  More and more, as of late, I have been trusting my instincts in building relationships, mostly out of necessity, yet none of the recent additions have proven false.  My instincts with people and events are things I trust almost more than anything else, but it was not always this way.  There were times where I willingly choose to ignore instincts, out of necessity, out of desire to prove myself wrong, out of pure stupidity.

When coming into the Peace Corps, my primary goal was to build a relationship with my community, build experience and understanding, and to be able to come back to the United States with the network and community of Peace Corps.  Secondary goals were friendships with other Volunteers, and to be able to maintain the relationship with my community.  My third goal, a secondary offshoot of the first two, was to build my resume.  I value education, experience and other things that end up building my resume.  In regards to friendships, my feeling on building these relationships is always different than most others.  Friendships will bloom where they do and where they will.  You cannot force it, and I’d rather go into a relationship being myself than to reveal it later.  We all have our first impression selves as well as our real selves.  There are few with a realistic combination of the two.  My sense of humor seems to be dry – I’ve heard it described both as harsh and as quirky – and I am aware of my strengths – as well as my weaknesses, though I try to hide them.  Close friends see my humor, yet as combined with my sarcasm, my confidence in myself makes me seem cocky.

I often observe women hide their strengths and show their weaknesses, mostly because our society encourages this behavior.  Women are not to be impressive; they are to be impressed.  A woman who knows where her assets lie is conceited and others do not want to be her friend.  She can be an asset in a professional world, but in a personal life, she will be far lacking.  If a woman wishes to act as she is supposed to and show intelligence, it is to be done in a careful manner.  To voice surprise in being asked to teach, feign ignorance when a work receives honor.  The Mean Girls stereotype – to acknowledge a compliment with a thank you means you agree, to deny is the proper response.  A true woman cannot have pure strengths and successes.  I traded my professional intelligence and aptitude for a personal life and surrounded myself with people who did the same, until I discovered that having both lay in finding the right people.  I can finally say that I have the right people in my life.

But these are not the people with me.  My community admires me and is excited to begin working, or so they have said.  The young women and girls in my community love that Peace Corps continually sends in women who are driven, who want to work and who, thus, will succeed.  Goal one, in part, is on its way to being achieved.  Goal two, within my community, is also on it’s way.  They see me as a foreigner who wishes to learn from them, to share with them and to live with them.  I have people here I consider friends, people I confide in, who I trust.

Within my peers, however, I have fewer.  There are ones who I go out of my way to contact.  Who I, at this point, wish to keep up a relationship with, post service.  Yet there are others who still do not seem to understand me.  Or see what I have revealed and do not like what they have seen.  I thought that this experience may open me up to a new world of people, but as it turns out, it is the same.  Those who I will stay friends with: I need not change who I am.  For those I am not friends with, maybe it will develop with time, but I won’t be heartbroken if it doesn’t.

As cynical as this may sound, what would you prefer – numerous friendships without depth, communication or reality, or few with great depth?