Oh, the sweet joy of hanging out with other human beings! Do it with the right people and you would feel blessed, do it with the wrong people and you'd feel like punching yourself for wasting hours of your life. Everyone seems to have hanging out as one of their favorite past time. From snapchat to instagram, look at everyone having a good time with their closest friends! What a life!

I have a confession to make:

I do not know what hanging out is for.

I mean yes, it's supposed to deepen your relationship with another person and you do things like shopping, prank calling, playing sports/ video games, gossiping about other people, etc. but what if those are not your cup of tea? (Okay, aside from prank calling. Prank calling, I like)

When you are young and you're figuring out yourself, I get that you need others to help you along with that journey, but you also need some time to yourself to process all that, right? I think it's quite essential to spend time with ourselves to form an identity that doesn't totally depend on what others think. I don't understand how others' way of appeasing their boredomeness is to hang out with another.

Maybe it's my strict family that had caused me to think this way, or maybe it was my religion that had taught me from a very young age not to let the others around me influence my actions. It's hard at times when insecurity hits me and I see my friends getting closer to each other while I maintain a certain distance from them. It felt like something was wrong with me because the people around me wanted company from their friends and would gladly spend most of their days texting people about life or the silliest things, and I am here, silently feeling anxious whenever someone had sent me a message.

Would they talk to me for a long time? Would I be able to read this novel I was focusing on while texting them back? Should I keep texting or let them be?

It had always been a mystery to me how other people can text just about everyday. Whenever I have nothing to do, I would either distract myself from feeling empty by reading, or I would do something about it by training myself to do things for later, or I challenge myself to do things that I am scared of. I am addicted to growing as a person. Texting seems like a time-waster for me. Gossiping about other people? Talking about popular shows? I simply don't find the fun in them.

Sometimes, I think, maybe the people around me talk about those things because they truly didn't know what it is they truly liked. Maybe it was just their way of fitting in with the group. So instead of figuring out what they are truly passionate about, they stay in the safe zone, thinking they have found their people by talking about surface common grounds. They want to be different, but not too different.

I'm not satisfied with just that. I would rather first use my younger years to find out what I like doing, (writing, drawing, dancing) and then I want to train myself to gain skills on those areas and afterward meet people who are similar to me. I want to discuss life, I want to discuss how we're taking steps forward to grow more as people, I want to learn about how they see life and their experiences.

I don't want to know who was popular, I don't want to know who's hot or who was dating who, I want to know people's insecurities and their stories.

But more importantly, I want to be given the space to grow. I want to be friends and help each other during tough times but I also want us to go to our own journeys only to come back together afterward and tell each other of our adventure.

Am I too weird for thinking that?