The three circles

There are three circles of people in my life right now, they are in no particular order:

The Work Circle

The Family and Friends Circle

The Others Circle

The boundaries are slightly blurred between the “The Work Circle” and “The Family and Friends” circle.

The Work Circle

These are obviously my work colleagues. This is where the boundaries I mentioned earlier become a little blurred. There are some work colleagues I would like to socialise with outside of work so they would hover between the two circles, they might not neccessarily be my friends, so for want of a better word they can be also classed as acquaintancies.

However on the flip side of the coin there are people I work with that I would not socialise with, now do not read into this too much. It does not mean you are bad person or are going to cause trouble, it is just that we do not have a common bond, nothing that interests you interests me and vice versa.

The Family and Friends Circle

The name is obvious, these are my family and friends. My immediate family I love no matter the ups and downs that we gave faced over the years, the disagreements we have had in the past are soon laid to rest never to be brought up by me again.

Now onto my friends. Quite a few of my friends I have got to know them over the years on the internet. I have gone on to meet some of them in the “flesh” and I have had a very enjoyable experience meeting them. 9 times out of 10 when I meet these people for the first time in the “real” world, my mental picture of what they look like is completely wrong. I am not going to say whether that makes that friend better or worse in my minds eye because that would call on me to make a judgement, I do not like to make judgements, I have done so in the past and have been completely wrong.

I have met plently of friends away from the internet, they have come and gone over the years, I guess what once held us together is no longer there and we just drift apart.

I am not one of these friends who will turn tail and run in the opposite direction when times are tough. I have only ever done that a couple of times in my life, due mainly to the fact that I was about to be dragged into something in my opinion that was going to be dark and dangerous.

Don’t be my friend because you feel sorry for me, I can pay a shrink to listen to my worries, sure I’ll share some of my emotional baggage with you, but I will not share the dark and heavy stuff with you, I will leave that to those who are paid to do that for a living.

Don’t be my friend because times are good and I can bring some value to your current situation, then toss me to one side without a second thought, do not confuse that with me drifting away because our bond is no longer there, we never had a bond on the first place, you saw what you could get out of me as a friend and now that you have drained me of that useful energy you no longer want to know me.

I do admit that I seek friendships with people because I can see that they can help me further my life, but if I don’t like you in the first place, then I’m not going to hold my nose and befriend you, I’m just going to walk away and find someone else that can help me and at the same time I like them.

So If I offer you my hand in friendship it is because not only you can enrich my life it is because I like you as well. I have in the past made first impressions and walked away from people and discovered at a later date that the first impression I had of that person was completely wrong and I had just caught them on an off day.

The Others

Well what can I say, this the banks, the leechers, the bottom feeders that pretend to be your best “friend” there for you when the times are good and we are all living the high life, as soon as things take a nose dive they run for the hills never to be seen again.

There are some friends that have dropped into this category over the years, these are the friends that have shafted me in the past to get where they are going and I always meet them later on and see a remarkable change in them, not necessarily for the better I might add. Very rarely do their lives turn around for the better. As the saying goes “what goes around comes around.”

So now you know a lot more about how my mind ticks, do you want to be my friend?