Shy? Awkward? Feeling out of place? There is hope! - A true story

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All my life I wanted a best friend, I was the kind of kid who would watch other girls who would sit on the steps at school and giggle while whispering something under their breath, just low enough that you couldn't hear. I remember the sharp pain of jealousy that used to soar through me. I was chubby and awkward and felt completely alone. Maybe it's just as well. When I turned eleven, my parents moved our family from the "big city" to a small rural town in Eastern Cananda. The change was welcome for me at the time. I realize now it's because I had nothing to leave behind. As I started to grow into a teenager, I started to look around me and try to figure out if anything had changed...not much. Although, I was starting to express myself better than I ever had been able to. I had always been painfully shy and then one day I said to myself: "Why do you care so much what other people think of you?" That was when my attitude turned full circle. I started to be who I was and stopped caring whether or not people liked me. I realized that sometimes friendship is first about loving yourself for who you are; and when I realized that I was a person that I wanted to be friends with, my life changed. Today, I have more friends than I could probably count, people I would die for and who I know would die for me. Even though sometimes I wish I could have had that friend, the one whose birthday was like two days after mine, I now realize I don't need it to be happy. The people worth having as friends are the people who want to be around the real you. I have tried being fake and acting like someone I'm really not and it didn't work. The friends I have now, I have because I decided to show them the kind of likeable person I am. This post is for anyone who has trouble making friends or who has experienced such severe shyness that they felt they could never face making friends. This post is also for those of you (mainly teens) who think that being one of the "In" crowd is what makes the world go round. Let me tell you something from experience: IT DOESN'T. I could have been "popular" if I had let myself go down that path, but I now know how empty that life is and I want to feel "full". How about you? Let's hear your stories, how you made friends, or maybe someone having problems making friends, let's hear your problems, maybe we can help.