I'm Lonely

Of course, this is nothing new. I get lonely pretty easily, even when I'm surrounded by people. What's different about this is that I'm NOT around people so much these days, and that definitely makes things worse.

Today, I went to church. After church, there was choir, and after choir . . . well, I just hung around for another hour. I finally decided that I just wanted to be around people who were my age, since I went from constantly being surrounded by my demographic peers to hardly seeing any of them at all. Everyone kept asking why I was there: if my name was on the interview list, or if I had a meeting. No, I was just enjoying being around people.

Introverted as I am, it's interesting what a social creature I am. That's not to say that I don't have my moments when I like to be alone, but back in Provo when I had three roommates and all my neighbors were people who were my age, and in my church community AND my school community (some to a greater extent than others), my solitary time was much more limited than it now is. In fact, it was downright rare. Now the tables have turned, and I don't feel like I'm the part of ANY community at all.

I don't even feel like I've been integrated into the ward yet, though I've been back here in Denton for more than a month now. It may not help that for whatever reason, my attendance in the 5th ward has been spotty, and I keep forgetting about things like Institute and FHE and so forth. Part of it, too, is that the ward is so fluid, and I'm having a hard time figuring out who's actually in the ward, who's just visiting, who's going to be here next week, who's leaving in the Fall, etc.

Still, the fact remains that I spend my weekends hanging out with my parents (Friday night, we watched Madame Butterfly on DVD, Saturday night we went to the Dallas Sympony), and while I enjoy that, I still somewhat wish that I were hanging otu with people from my own demographic at least on occasion. Oh, that people liked me.