I have written fairly extensively about the unfortunate, frustrating, and bad things that have happened to me this year. I have also written about some of the good things, but much less extensively. While I’m definitely not recovered yet and have enough other BS going on that my recovery is going slowly [I even had stuff that happened the day after writing this that set me back a couple weeks], I wanted to take a little time to focus on one of the best things that has happened this year. As I’ve mentioned, the exhaustion and burnout I’ve been recovering from hasn’t been a result of constant unfortunate events, but because so much stuff has happened. Once you hit your emotional capacity, you’re just as overwhelmed and unable to cope whether the thing that tipped you over was good or bad. The bad stuff just tends to seem more prevalent and constant because part of my emotional processing involves writing about it here. Good stuff doesn’t really require that kind of emotional processing, but I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned three of my top four things scattered throughout the last four months. Number one is being a part of my friends’ wedding. Number three was the trip to Spain I went on with those friends and the entire wedding party. Number four is definitely moving into my current apartment/out of my old apartment. Today’s post, to formally write about my number two thing that I’ve only mentioned in passing (if I’ve mentioned it at all), is about the surprising, powerful, out-of-nowhere friendship I’ve developed with one of the people I met on my trip to Spain.

I’m not going to mention her name here, since she has an online presence under a pseudonym that is currently inactive, but it might come out eventually if we wind up following-through on this fun little idea we had. She’s been wanting to get back into drawing lately and has struggled with actually sitting down to do it. While we were discussing this (since my discipline and regular writing are occasional topics in our conversations over the last few months), she suggested the idea of a challenge where she produces a list of little doodle ideas and rolls to determine which one she does. She started soliciting suggestions, since she was struggling, and I wound up supplying her with a list of twenty ideas that she loved. As she draws them, before she posts them anywhere, she’s going to send them to me and I’ll throw together a small piece of flash fiction to go with them. I love the idea of a collaboration and she seemed to think having someone to work with might help her, so we’re going to give this a try and, if we do it, I’ll probably link out to wherever she eventually posts them.

It feels odd to have gone from complete strangers to such fast friends in less than half a year, but we had a lot in common. We’re both the kind of people who love to listen to people gush about favorite topics and we both also love to talk about our favorite topics with an attentive audience. We both love Star Wars games, though she’s much deeper in the lore of the universe than I am. She used to stream and was invaluable in helping me work through my own streaming process and decision to stop. She’s working on a doctorate and while I set aside my plans for post-graduate education, I’ve always enjoyed academic settings and engaging with even unfamiliar types of academia. We both like video games, we’ve both struggled with our friends being remote, and we’re both excellent conversationalists. It is a friendship that has grown in fits and starts, largely fueled by the intensity of our meeting (spending over a week with a group of new people or one new person in a foreign country is a lot for anyone) and my own need for social and emotional support over the last few months (after all, I needed more people to talk to after the events of the first four months of the year and I was incredibly willing to be the one to take the first steps in establishing an online rapport because of that).

It is difficult to spend a week in close proximity with someone who you generally get along with and not come away as friends. What helped forge the bonds between the two of us more than anyone else on our trip to Spain is that she was the person who wound up doing all the driving during the latter half of the trip, when we went up into the mountains and stayed in a castle for two nights. Since I was the backup driver, I was also her copilot, handling maps, direction, mile markers, and keeping up as much conversation as she wanted. Because we spent about six or seven hours driving over the course of three days, we had a lot of time to just talk and get to know each other. Throw in a bit of minor trauma-bonding as we had a front-seat view of the tiny, winding road we had to guide a van up (her driving and me calling out directions, tight bends, and watching for incoming vehicles) to our final destination and then back down in the half hour prior to proper sunrise, and it really isn’t surprising that we came away with such a strong foundation for our friendship. It was nice, really, since I hadn’t had a chance to bond as intensely and quickly with someone since I graduated college. There just aren’t that many opportunities to spend several days in close proximity to people you don’t know very well. Most of the time, I generally do my best to avoid getting into situations like that since I am less trusting of strangers than I used to be, but this was an exception. It was a lot easier to take this leap of faith with a bunch of strangers since the bride and groom of the wedding party were the focal point for our group.

Since then, we’ve gotten to the point where we’re talking almost every day (which is how an idea like the doodle/flash fiction collaboration could come to pass). As much as my list of friends and regular conversationalist has shrunk over the past year, I’m glad to see that it has also done some growing. I look forward to my list of friends continuing to grow as I get closer with other people, but I doubt any of my other relationships will grow as quickly as this one did. This was sort of a perfect storm of foundation, contact, and development. And sure, we’re not the best of buds or super close yet (it HAS only been five months since we met for the first time outside of a tiny bit of voice chat overlap on a Minecraft server), but I am already very comfortable talking about pretty much anything with her. I just really appreciate this new friendship. I don’t know that she’s going to read this (as far as I know, she only reads the stuff I link directly in our chat and I’m absolutely not going to send her this post because I’d feel super awkward about it), but if she does, I hope she knows and appreciates me saying that our friendship is definitely one of the best parts of my year so far.