Insomnia induced self revelations

So yesterday morning I woke up with a bad cold. I started mega dosing with Vitamin C and hopefully it won't last long but it kept me from being able to sleep last night. I took myself to the couch at 11 hoping I could fall asleep there. At twelve I was still awake to hear Cason crying, he was cold so I added a sleeper to the two piece jammies he was wearing, laid him back down and again prayed to fall asleep. But instead my mind was working overtime and trumped my body's ability to fall asleep. I was thinking about friendship.

I'm in the process of making a new friend. I met her at Jonah's school, her son is in Jonah's class. I was the first to meet her when her son started a month after all the other kids and we sort of hit it off. When we have class events her and I tend to gravitate toward eachother. Well I've been thinking that it would be sad to get to the end of the school year without seeing if we could be friends, so I asked her if she wanted to get coffee sometime while our boys are at school. I've never been very proficient at friend making or friend keeping so this whole thing makes me anxious. And anyone else in their late twenties/early thirties with little kids at home knows how hard it is make friends.

So here's the thing that is smacking me in the face. This isn't pretty. When I was younger I was sort of the outcast. I wanted popularity so bad it made me an easy target. Eventually it made me weird, suspicious, and demanding of my friends. Though I still feel regret and some sadness over those situations, I can't really blame the ones who decided to move on. This has carried over into my adult life and has even affected my marriage at times. Last night I was laying awake thinking about all this when a horrible realization hit me. I've spent so many years believing that people won't accept me for who I am and that's why friendship is difficult for me. But as I've been thinking about this new friend, I realized that I have a pre-conceived idea of what my friends should look like. I don't just mean appearances though. So there it is, I'm the one who's not accepting people for who they are. I took what happened to me as a child and used it as a judgement on how everyone who came after would treat me. Then I took it even further and treated others the way I had been treated. I hope that realizing this can help me begin to change the pattern.