First Time Playing Out – Life Story

So obviously being how I am I never really “played out” with anyone. You know the thing you do with mates, where you go out into your local town or city and just hang out in places such as perhaps a park or the arcade or just some kind of entertainment place or just messing about outside and having fun.  

It’s something I never really did too much as it didn’t seem super interesting for a long while. There is a time at one of my previous residences where I did begin playing out and it was also fairly often as well and I will explain how it came about. It’s weird thinking about it as I had actually for some reason blanked it out of my mind and have only just remembered recently about the period.  

So, for years and years we lived in this one house, on just a normal street and the house had been with us for a long while, throughout a huge portion of my childhood but one day my mum told us we would be moving to a much larger house with a big garden and a driveway and so we became very excited.  

The day we moved there it was very exciting as the house was quite large and is one of those house’s that has a name instead of a number, it even had a little pond in the garden as well which was really cool and there were also frogs, which is a story for another time I guess, the house was down one of those streets that stops at a dead end, it was a rented house, we have never not lived in a house that was rented. For a while I had noticed there were some other kids on the street who would often play out, I remember for a time they would keep looking over at us, specifically one time when we were helping my mum weed and clean-up the front garden.  

But they didn’t really say too much and there was also a point where I was watching them play in their garden from my bedroom window and they noticed I was watching and proceeded to be rather rude towards me about it (yelling asking what I think I am looking at and also the middle finger gesture), so obviously after that point I didn’t think we’d ever be friends or anything.  

Strangely though I was actually quite wrong, I can’t 100% remember how it happened but it was something to do with my younger brother first hanging out with them after they asked us if we wanted to play out – me being me though I was at first too nervous to hang out and also remembered the negative encounter originally, so that made me not want to, but my brother did, which is strange thinking about it nowadays as he is a hermit and would never ever play out anymore.  

After a few days of my brother hanging out with them though, I started wanting to give it a go myself and the other kids also kept asking for me to come along as well so one day when my brother was already hanging out in their garden I decided to go over myself and turn up and it actually went well and they were friendly now, in contrast to the original encounter, and from then we regularly hung out, either at their house or in their garden on their trampoline or they would come over to our garden and play around with the pond or on our trampoline when we got one.  

Other times we would play about in the street on our bikes just riding up and down the street and messing about and there is even one time we went to some kind of birthday party at a social club with a bunch of their other friends. It was an interesting time as I had never experienced anything like that up until that point but for some reason it didn’t last for super long, after about perhaps a couple of years we slowly stopped playing out, not sure why and then eventually we had to move away to a new house for reasons. After that we had no way to really keep in contact so it ended there, pretty much.  

I think, thinking back it is kind of a shame we didn’t try and keep the friendship as close as it could have been, a missed opportunity I feel like, but I guess at some point you just drift apart due to what happens in life, but at the same time it makes it very hard as I have often found it almost impossible to make new friends elsewhere. It was clear in this instance that if it wasn’t for them reaching out first (ignoring the initial rudeness) then none of the sort would ever have happened as I certainly would not have had the nerve to do so myself.  

It wasn’t the last time I ever played out, but it was the last long period of the such and I am happy it happened as it was an experience, I think that is important for development and I can say “yeah I did that too.”  

There were two further times that I played out but that didn’t happen until many years later in the later part of secondary school when I was in the Special Needs education, again it was them initiating it first, as one day two students from the school randomly knocked at my door, to my massive surprise. They knew where I lived as the school would pick us up using taxis and one of them was always on my taxi.  

They were both the same Year as me but only one of them were actually in my classes (as the years were split up into two groups signified by putting a letter on the end of the year). What made it different was that I also had a crush on one of them for some time (who was a female), which is the only crush I ever had in school time, so that made it even cooler and although we only played out twice (almost three times but my mum didn’t want me out too late during 3^rd time) it was good times.  

I might talk about what we did more in a future post. Again, it’s just a shame it didn’t last, and I kind of blame myself for perhaps not really trying enough to initiate further times on my end as I was too shy, by the time I did attempt to it was too late as they had already long moved on to other friend groups.  

I think the moral of the story is that it’s important to try your best on your own side to initiate things and then try your best to hold them together as well, both sides need to put in the effort otherwise it will eventually break-up by itself through the general wear and tear of life. It’s just very hard though when you have a severe social anxiety disorder, low self-esteem and the difficulties of Autism on top that can make relation hard.  

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