How are you different?

A friend told me recently, “I have decided that you’re not judgey; you just have a clear sense of how things should operate, and it’s based on what’s logical.”

I couldn’t agree more, and even though I don’t mind being labeled as judgey (I’m an equal-opportunity judger, after all), I won’t be continuing the “J is for Judgey” series.

If you know me at all, you know that doesn’t mean I’ll stop being judgey logical about how things should operate. And of course I will continue to document my journey of getting frustrated at people who lack common sense self-discovery and understanding how people are different from me.

It can be both fun and frustrating to discover what those differences are. Growing up, I naively assumed that everybody behaves the same way that I do. (Side note: everyone does this, right?) In my adult life I’ve wisened up quite a bit, but it’s a been a long process of discovering just how different people are from me. I should note, though, that there are two categories of “different”:

1. In a way that doesn’t fit within current social / cultural norms, or is illogical (e.g., RSVPing incorrectly, or playing games incorrectly, etc.), and
2. Everything else

Although I spend more time ranting about the first category of different on this blog, it’s the second category that I find much more interesting. I think of this second category as our individual idiosyncrasies / strengths / abilities — basically, what makes us all special snowflakes.

As you may have guessed, I’m a rule follower, which probably stems from my judgeyness strong sense of right and wrong, and it’s a part of what makes me unique. I had this epiphany after an epic battle between the Hunted (my team) and the Creature (Malik) in the co-op board game Not Alone. Team Hunted had made an incredible comeback to win against the Creature, but Malik pointed out that the web interface shouldn’t have let us win based on cards that were in play. It was a bit of a gray area, so I did some research and ended up contacting the game publisher for a final ruling on what should have happened. After they confirmed my hunch that Malik was right, I filed a bug report on BGA so they could address it for future gameplay.

It was funny to realize after jumping through all those hoops that I was the only one who seemed to care that a rule had been broken. Not that it mattered since it was just a game and we all had fun playing it, but I still felt compelled to at least try and correct this glitch in the matrix.

Another example is my ability to connect people and initiate / organize meetups. Because I thought everybody behaved liked me, I wondered why my friends weren’t doing the same with me for far longer than I care to admit. Eventually, I came to the realization that this ability was a gift that not everybody had. For the longest time, though, it felt more like having a rare disease where I had to constantly meet people and invite them to things, or my soul would wither up and die. 😂

Nowadays I love exercising this gift, and don’t expect the same from others. After all, if everybody was an organizer there’d be no one left to attend all the events. That’s not to say that I don’t appreciate it when friends do reach out and invite me to something — I actually cherish those invitations and keep careful records in my gratitude journal when that happens.

I met Steve like how I met so many of my friends: playing volleyball. It was at a meetup I had been going to for years, and he stood out to me (quite literally) because he was tall, new, and a very good player. I introduced myself to him and found out that he also worked at the fruit, so we exchanged contact info. Shortly after that he made it onto my regular list of people I would text whenever I organized volleyball at work, and it wasn’t long before I started inviting him to game nights as well. (It goes without saying that all of this was made possible by the fact that he knew the Rules of the RSVP before I even wrote it.)

This was the usual progression of how I become friends with people I play volleyball with, and if that’s as far as the friendship goes then so be it. A few months after I first invited him to game night, though, Steve invited me to his Friendsgiving. I remember being pleasantly surprised because I hadn’t really met his other friends, and was just glad he thought of me.

What I took away from the experience was…I didn’t have a monopoly on the gift of invitation. 🙃

But seriously — Steve, like me and everybody else, has his own set of unique gifts; some may be similar to mine, and some may be vastly different.

As a general rule, I love meeting different people because I enjoy learning from them. (Although for “category 1” different, it’s because I can blog about them.) However, in the end I wonder if it is actually our similarities that form the basis for lasting friendships.

So I’m curious…how are you different from and similar to your friends?