I am. Deeply so. But I wasn’t always this way.
When I was younger, I warmed up easily. New faces didn’t stay strangers long.
There was an openness, an appetite for connection that came naturally. I didn’t think twice about it. Then, gradually, almost imperceptibly, that changed.
Not because I became colder or more guarded, but because I grew more deliberate. More aware of what real friendship costs — in time, in attention, in the kind of showing-up that actually counts. What I have instead is something I’m quietly proud of: an eclectic, wonderfully mismatched bunch of people I call friends.
They come from different worlds, hold different views, and are often so unlike each other that the only thing they have in common is me.
And yet each one of them is dear. Each one occupies a place that no one else could fill.
The Decision to Stop
Over a decade ago, I made a conscious and deliberate choice: I would stop making new friends.
It sounds stark. Maybe even a little cold. But the reasoning was sound, and I stand by it even now.
The friends I already had were people I cherished and valued, and yet I was struggling to give them the time they deserved.
We all lived busy lives. Meetings that were planned got postponed. Calls that should have lasted longer were cut short.
Not for lack of care, but because life — as it tends to — got firmly in the way.
So I asked myself a simple question: What's the point of adding more people to my circle when I can't do justice to the ones already in it? So I stopped. For nearly a decade, I held that line without a second thought.
The circle stayed closed.
How the Circle Opened Again
I didn’t go looking for new friends; life placed them in my path at a moment when I was, without quite realising it, ready.
A few years ago, two new faces entered my world, and slowly, without fanfare or formal declaration, they crossed from acquaintance to something far more significant.
The Man Who Never Pretends
The first was someone I had known of for a few years but never really known. When he became my immediate neighbour at work, proximity gave us the chance to actually talk. What struck me almost immediately was something rare, something you recognise instinctively because you see it so seldom: what you saw was what you got.
No performance, no shifting of positions depending on who was in the room, no careful calibration of personality to suit the moment or the audience.
Rakesh Bedi was and is simply, thoroughly himself. He had reached that stage of self-knowledge where the opinions of others had ceased to hold any real power over him. Not with arrogance, but with the quiet clarity of a man who knows exactly who he is and has long since made peace with it.
At work, he would do what the job required, but where he had a choice — in how he engaged, what he stood for, where he drew his lines — he didn’t flinch.
Take it or leave it. Most people took it. Gratefully.
There’s a particular kind of respect that has nothing to do with title or authority.
The kind that people extend freely, willingly, because of character alone. Rakesh has that. His colleagues seek him out not because of what he could do for them professionally, but because of who he is when he walks in the room.
Such is the man I now call a friend.
The Storyteller Who Feels Like Old Times
The second came into my life at a birthday celebration for a mutual friend — one of those gatherings where you’re surrounded by familiar strangers, people you’ve heard of but never quite met.
Mahesh Misra and I had existed in each other’s awareness for years. Same extended circle, overlapping worlds, and yet somehow our paths had never properly crossed. When they finally did that evening, something clicked almost immediately.
Not the careful, tentative warmth of two people deciding to be friendly, but something easier, more instinctive — a connection that felt, oddly, like recognition.
That evening turned into a friendship. And Mahesh, it turns out, is a particular kind of person: the sort who makes any room he enters more alive. He has a gift for stories — drawing from the rich, messy, hilarious material of real life and landing them with the precision of someone who understands exactly when to pause, when to lean in, and when to let the punchline breathe.
Within a year of our friendship taking root, he relocated to another city.
We meet now when he passes through town, and every time, there’s that rare ease. The kind that doesn’t require catching up so much as simply continuing.
Though we’ve known each other for only a few years, it feels like decades.
What This Taught Me
Looking back, I think my decade-long pause was right, and so was breaking it.
The pause taught me that friendship is not a number. It’s not about how wide your circle is, but how deep it goes. Thinning your attention across too many people is a disservice to all of them.
There is real wisdom in deciding that enough, tended well, is more than abundance left to wither.
But Rakesh and Mahesh reminded me of something equally true: that the right people add to the quality of your life in ways that are quiet, cumulative, and entirely worth making room for. Being selective doesn’t mean closing yourself off forever; it means keeping the door shut until someone worth opening it for comes along.
The Thought to Take With You
My friends’ club still has a strict door policy; that hasn’t changed. But I’ve learned to recognise the particular quality of someone who belongs inside it — someone who is entirely themselves, who enriches a room without trying to, who makes you feel, in their company, that time is being well spent.
If you haven't found those people yet, keep the door mostly closed, but don't bolt it shut. Because sometimes, life slips exactly the right person through the gap, and your world quietly becomes larger and warmer for it.
And if you already have even one or two like that — hold on; they are, in the truest sense, irreplaceable.
This post is part of an ongoing series sharing life lessons from lived experience — observations gathered along the way that might resonate, and with luck, be useful.
About Me
I am a thinker at all times. I see, I think. I hear, I think. I read, I think. Every weekend I write. I would love to know what you think.