Hello. I just joined here so I'm not completely familiar with the forum code. Well, I'm going to be baptized in less than a month and I was wondering if I can find any friends among my peers or anyone around my age. You see, my congregation was split up almost three years ago. Half of the congregation was gone and the half that was went took my friends along with them. I was sad, seeing that I had no one around my age to converse with. My friends that went...well, we grew apart. I see that we all changed a bit and it made the situation even more uncomfortable. In my congregation, the only teenaged girls are 4+ years older than me. I felt that I couldn't get along with them because they were older and I thought that I was naive and small compared to them. So I stayed at a distance from them. The teenaged boys are definitely not people I would hang out with. They talk about manly things and I sure can't relate to that at all. Then there are the little children. There's one that I talk to a lot in the congregation and he's 10(?). Even though there's a 3 year age difference, we get along a lot. However, because he is smaller and wants more attention from the older teens, he sometimes frequent them. I felt as if I had no friends in the congregation so to find some, I would join forums, frequenting those who were not JWs. It was different talking to nonJWs and also I knew that my spirituality was going to fall apart if I continued frequenting them. So, the majority of the people I frequented I broke friendships with. I still don't speak to them and never will. I started feeling insecure because I was wondering in my head how bad the older teens talked about me and how they felt about me. I knew in reality it was Satan tugging at my mind. I spoke with my uncle, who is an elder and he showed me what was right. Right now, I'm trying to converse with the older teens and get to know them better little by little. Sometimes, I want to give up because I feel that I get nowhere with them and I just want to go somewhere else or break down and cry.
That's my story. Any nice comments are appreciated.