Yeah, I used to take great care at maintaining an air of aloof composure. It was pretty tiring. Nowadays I usually just listen to the conversation and interject without much thought when I have something to say. Socializing has gotten way easier because of that.
Hahahaha composure >_> I actually get pretty scared when I meet new people, so I tend to be either a. extremely quiet or b. borderline-manic. Oddly, this hasn't worked too badly thus far.
And, now for a big think:
I think I'm losing/have lost one of my friends. I don't really think I'm depressed or too sad about it, but I'm starting to realize that I really don't care to know what they're up to anymore, and everything they do bothers me. Hmm... and part of the problem is that I don't like being with them, because we fulfill the same social role in a group, sort of. I don't know how frequently other people have similar experiences with all that, haha.
We're just too similar and too different in the wrong ways: both female, reasonably intelligent, hard on ourselves, good at languages and solving puzzles (her recreational mathematics, and me pure mathematics)... similar appearances, even, and similar interests in writing and psychology. But we have very different personalities in subtle ways, despite often being conflated. I tend to be more introverted and serious. I'm less conventional, but I usually don't make as much of a show of it, I think. I'm also more prone to arguing and getting in verbal fights, but I feel like I get out of them more easily because I don't see "positions" and "sides" so much as attempts to educate and be educated. I'm less certain of myself, but I usually show it less. We're both absurdly competitive. I seem to get a reputation for being intelligent more easily than she does, though I don't really know why. And she's the one who's considered feminine, even though I wear skirts almost all the time. Apparently I just give off waves of "masculinity" sometimes
So then, I think we get worried--or at the very least, I get worried--about disappearing in a social sense. I've always heard people say that there really was no reason to be scared about that, but all the same it seemed that there was only one position we could really fill, and when both of us tried to fill it simultaneously we just wound up fighting with each other. There's a strong counterpoint, so that it feels that when people pay attention to me, she is being ignored, and vice-versa, rather than either one of us just not being the focus of attention at that moment.
I really don't understand all of this complex. We end up emphasizing each other's bad points and making each other dreadfully unhappy. I feel inferior because I'm not very conventionally pretty--as she always said, it's like I'm attractive despite my looks, rather than because of them. She feels inferior because she isn't as well-educated as I am, and is never able to seem quite as intellectually gifted when I'm around. I don't know if that's because I'm actually smarter, or because I'm just able to intimidate her into acting like she doesn't quite know what's up.
So... I guess a lot of my troubles right now come from feeling like I'm halfway between two lives--the life of a child and the life of an adult, the life of a single person and the life of a person looking for relationships, the life of someone who doesn't study much and the life of someone who studies a lot, the life of someone who makes friends out of necessity and the life of someone who makes them by choice, consumption and production.
But, because I feel that I understand how things are going right now, suddenly I'm not as worried or terrible-feeling... huh.