Friendships, Loneliness, And Tired of Chasing after people.

I write when an idea comes to me.  In recent months, the concept that a friend is not someone you got to chase after was brought to my attention.

I am in a bad situation.  I have a choice between being 100% lonely or only 97% lonely.

I don't know what to do about things.  If you read some of my past writings you probably know how my life went step by step into the situation I find myself in.  Yet it is hard for me describe it all.

For the past 22 years, I have had only one place to have friends.  That is unfortunately work.  To make things even worse I'm a 2nd shift janitor for a school, and the only people I got to choose from are teachers.  The teachers have their own in group.  And most of these people got lives outside of work too.  Contrast that to me, and I got no life outside of work.

There is restrictions put on me, making it dangerous for me to be friendly with the teachers.  My boss does not want me talking too much to them.  In fact even He avoids the teachers as much as possible.  There is like a culture difference between the Janitors and Teachers.  There is even a culture difference between the teachers and the cafeteria workers.  As a general rule the teachers and the cafeteria workers don't socialize.   As a general rule, the teachers and janitors don't socialize.  These people don't understand each other, and they don't feel the desire to understand each other.  Plus everyone is busy doing their jobs, so everyone has got that as an excuse too.

Any teacher "friend" I have ever had, was because the teacher decided to say "hi" to me, and sometimes If i get extra lucky, they will ask me how I am doing.  If I'm extra extra extra lucky one will thank me for picking up their trash.

What usually happens with these "friendships" is, I feel that I need to try to keep it balanced some, by being friendly back.  Sometimes a little talking will happen.  Eventually the teacher will grow tired of me and slowly the teacher will stop saying hi etc, and the "friendship" gradually dies.

I have been through this cycle so many times I've lost track.

The way I used to cope with this, is I would come home from work, turn on my computer, and try and find someone online to talk to me.  But i would often lose contact with people online.  I have since learned there is a term for that.  It is called ghosting.

Since I am a Christian the ideal thing to do is go to Church and make friends there.  However if you have read my post about Church Hurt, you would know that I am no longer attending Church.  You see here in recent years, that is the number one problem with me going to Church.  I could only "attend" church.  In other words, I could get up early, which is not easy for a person that works 2:00pm - 10:30pm on the week days, and drive to a building, find a seat and go through the worship motions, watch a sermon, and then leave.  That is exactly how my parents and I did Church since 2001.  Nobody there actually cared.  Even when we tried to reach out to them, they didn't care.  And it was that way Church after Church after Church.  I began to look out in the congregations for people that I might recognize.  Sure enough, I saw teachers and staff members from the school system I work for.  I'm like no wonder.  We got a culture here, that doesn't accept my culture.