DPAlecks

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doodlemancy
@doodlemancy

a thought that came out of me while i was chatting with some other people in a cohost lifeboat discord

some people are Bus Stop Friends. you see them at the bus stop. and you probably wouldn't hang out otherwise. you probably don't know much about them. but you're like, hey, it's my bus stop friend! and you have your little chat and then you're on your merry way.

and i think that is kind of how i end up interacting with a lot of people online. i don't have the capacity, as one human being, to keep up with every single cool person on the internet. it's been easier for me to admit that, while i will make close connections, others will fade, others will drift and come back together periodically, and some of us will be Bus Stop Friends. it was my natural inclination to write "only" Bus Stop Friends or "just" Bus Stop Friends but i don't want to devalue that kind of relationship, because i think it's worth something.

it's worth something to have friendly interactions with strangers. and it's okay if some of our connections are temporary and/or fleeting. i don't think that's shallow, or fake, or meaningless. i've discarded my "i hate small talk" mentality. i still think fondly of my Bus Stop Friends, and the co-workers i never got to know very well, the regular customers i saw all the time at my old job, all the random people i've chatted with in grocery store checkout lines and waiting rooms and at conventions. it feels a little sad sometimes to know i might never run across any of those people ever again. but it meant something that we met in the first place, and that we had a nice time together.


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in reply to @doodlemancy's post:

I tend to make a lot of like "friend-lites" a bit more than bus stop friends like maybe I WOULD take a chance to hang out if one popped up, but still with no sense of obligation.

I'll have a lot of younger friends I have like this get concerned like "Oh no I'm sorry I haven't reached out in months!" and it's like "Don't worry, child. If everyone I liked reached out to me all the time, I would die. :)"

There is something inherently nice about low-intensity relationships like that ๐Ÿ˜Œ

yes yes yes exactly. the now-departed podcast Friendshipping talked a lot about "cactus friends," relationships that don't need daily or even weekly interaction, people you can just pick up with now and then and It's Fine.

when people apologize to me for not getting back to me within like 10 minutes these days i'm like... hey, you're good. there's no need for everyone to be constantly available. nobody owes me their full attention the instant they see a notification from me. the only person i'm constantly available to is my cat. LOL

This is a thought I've found useful too - it shows up sometimes in urban sociology, talking about the sort of casual and incidental relationships that come out of being in the same place together. At the time I was complaining to my friend about how before I graduated college and left NYC, I never worked up the nerve to tell the guy behind the counter at the Chinatown cantina near my dorm that I was graduating and leaving, nor did I thank him for his work. And at the time she told me about this exact thing, how simply being a regular at a place was itself a kind of relationship and something that has weight. Something that in the 70s had people leaving their apartment keys with the bodega guy when they went traveling.

This many years later, I doubt the guy cares that I left (and frankly he may not be working there anymore, I haven't been back to Chinatown since pre-covid). But him and that cantina, I still think fondly of. The bus stop relationships I had with everyone who crossed my dashboard here, that's meaningful. Thank you for making this post, it's given me words for thinking about this ending.

i think there's really something to be said for relationships without strings, and i think that's one thing that like... not to get ranty about it but it's something capitalism steals from us. to be kind to each other without feeling like anything is owed other than the kindness itself is something you can do more honestly when you don't, say, live with each other and depend on each other to make sure the rent and bills are paid, or something. i think about this a lot, lol.

โค๏ธ glad i was able to Help With The Words

Yes! Also, a thing I'm realizing as I transition is it is so much easier for me to talk with random people now and I really need to unlearn the old habits of minimizing interaction with people from my days of struggling to pretend to be a boy.

yesssssssss. i have heard this from a lot of my trans pals. it turns out being a vastly happier person makes you better at talkin' to people. who knew? i am not trans but like. i can kinda imagine, i guess. when i finally got on the right meds and my mental health improved-- suddenly i was way more open to random chitchat and it felt good to have those interactions instead of nervewracking.

that's a great way to describe it. it's one of my favorite things about being a "face" in a neighborhood, where you know by sight many people and they know you and everyone's friendly but there's no great pressure to be besties.

I've got a corollary problem, it feels like the overwhelming majority of my interactions are Bus Stop Friends and I don't feel like I have any Actual Close Friends... But I know this is a depression thing and a lot of people care about me more than I realize, I just suck at identifying these relationships!

idk if this will be useful or just unsolicited advice from an internet rando so please do feel free to disregard

i'm not in quite the same place with my Depresso Brain but i definitely have issues with like... thinking people are only being nice to me, or saying nice things to me, or including me, or even calling me a friend out of pity. it's just a mean thing my brain says to me, sometimes, and like you, i'm aware it's a mean lie, but it still happens and it still clouds my vision. and i've also had people genuinely try to exploit me a few times, which has made me distrustful in some ways

and the cure for that (which i have to keep taking, like a prescription) is to trust more.

you gotta try to trust when people are nice. even if some people really are insincere sometimes. even if now and then you find out that you are a bus stop friend to someone you wanted to be closer to. that might sting. but acute pain is a lot easier to deal with in the long term than chronic pain.

(also if you are a podcast-liker i really recommend Friendshipping, a podcast that is sadly over now but which taught me a lot about Being Better At Relationships. you'll have to uhhhhhh kinda try to forgive it for a lot of Harry Potter references from before JK Rowling went off the rails but the hosts are not jerks, it was just, A Different Time,,,,)

god honestly i went to a little house show the other night and just being in proximity with a couple dozen people, the majority of whom iโ€™ve ambiently existed around dozens of times before, and then chatting with three or four of them, had me feeling better in myself than i had all month. s/o bus stop friends

I described people on this site as like I'm walking down a really interesting and colorful street with nice people I would occasionally see and wave at, but I think "bus stop friends" is a really good and perhaps more accurate analogy

this post threw me back to my long college commuter bus trips, and how we'd arrange actual holiday meals and pass food up and down the bus and stuff, and i had not at all thought of those people in the same context. but it is exactly right, this is perfect.
(also i'm going to use that soup recipe soon. it looked too good.)

very carefully! a lot of foods in trays. the hardest were the cheesecakes, because one of the stops was near a cheesecake factory, and somebody would always buy a cheesecake. cutting a cheesecake on a bus is exciting, even if it is a highway commuter bus without a bunch of stops. just kind of have to embrace it being a little messy and have a chill driver! the funniest part really were whoever the non-regular-commuters were that happened to end up on our bus those days. they were perplexed every time.

Oh yeah, that reminds me of something on my own commute. The early morning leg of the route stopped at a gas station for like, ten minutes or so, so a lot of times, we'd take a little "field trip" to get a snack/breakfast, and the bus driver would like, not only make sure we were all back in the bus before leaving, but sometimes go in and buy something himself.