Everything Happened | vol. 151
The last time I felt I had to make friends was in college. My boyfriend and I split up and I acted in a way that was very unpopular with him, and with our shared friend group, and probably with anyone off the street who might be called upon to assess the situation. (What had happened is that we split and I immediately started sleeping with a mutual friend, don’t do this if you can avoid it!) It’s not that my friends dumped me, more that they were not going out of their way to make sure I felt socially supported, for which I don’t blame them. I liked my new boyfriend’s friends just fine but I was already picturing myself two years down the road, when we broke up, and I was in the same single, friendless predicament. (This is called “catastrophizing”, which I would later learn from a therapy professional is not something everyone does, that indeed this habit of mine may be the sliced figs or prosciutto ribbons in the sumptuous cheese platter of the anxiety disorder I did not at that point realize I had.)
So me and my sumptuous cheese platter personality set out to make some friends of my own. I reconnected with people I’d studied abroad with, I went for drinks after work with coworkers, I made overtures toward people in my major who seemed cool but who I had always been content to appreciate from a distance. It required a lot of drinking and drugs (here in 2018 it feels retro to call marijuana “drugs” which is mostly what I’m talking about.) No sweat, I really liked drinking and drugs! By the end of the summer, I basically had pitting edema of the face from the amount of PBR I had inflated myself with. I also had people, separate people, and I liked them, and they liked me. I never broke up with the dude; I swatted him on his high, round ass this very morn! It was a worthy endeavor, though, to untangle a social identity of my own from the gnarled mass of my early 20s peer group.
“No new friends” is an easy enough lifestyle to adopt, AUBREY, if your horniness doesn’t cause you to make massive social blunders or if you don’t move around a lot. I haven’t moved much, not since I was an Air Force brat. The thing about being moved around as a kid is that no matter where you end up, you get dropped daily into a vat of every child who lives within a few square miles of your house, a.k.a. public education. It’s not...fun...but with that level of immersion, you eventually come out with some buddies sticking to you. Plus I was an outgoing, hammy, youngest child! I had social capital, baby! I had an exotic backstory to be uncovered! I had a weird name! I was very fast at Mad Minutes!
Sometimes I remember that I need to make friends here and I will feel a little stumped. I’m not desperate to make friends, nor do I feel particularly lonely. My two tightest bros moved here with me and so within a different set of walls, my home life has continued on in much the same way it was before. There are daredevil dives from the sofa that are either stopped or ignored depending on how tired Nick or I are feeling, there is the struggle to get dressed and out the door on time in the mornings, there is the daily question of how dinner is going to solve itself, there are bedtime standoffs. A great deal of crying over literal spilled milk. There is exuberant karaoke (me and Nick) and aggrieved protest of karaoke (Desi.) There is sex-and-violence television enjoyed with ice cream after Desi is asleep, if Nick and I can keep our eyes open for it. And then on the weekends, I still want to hang out with them because I’m greedy for all the time I missed with Nick over the past year while he was under water writing his dissertation!! It’s gross but I really like him!!! And Desi is fine, too.
In a previous life, I was a classroom assistant for adults learning English as a second language. In the training, we were taught that it takes, on average, seven years for a refugee to be invited into an English-speaking home. That seemed outrageous to me at the time. Seven years! Now, in my nascent middle age, in my life as a ~Working Mom~, in this hellish Trumpian fuckscape, it sounds optimistic, even Pollyannaish. Twelve years, maybe. Fifteen years. Never.
I know that a basic white lady wanting to find...a book club? Is that what people my age do socially? Anyway, I know that this is a different predicament from the cultural and linguistic isolation of immigration. But I’m remembering that tidbit from the training and thinking I can see sending my youngest off to kindergarten, having spent the last eight years wiping buttholes sending Outlook meeting requests checking in with my day one….buddies….for whom mutual devotion is a given checking in with my internet friends who are real friends because the internet is real life watching prestige dramas at night going for gnat-peppered runs along the river reading books complaining on Twitter then deleting my tweets the next morning going to visit my parents going to visit more exotic locales than my parents’ house abusing coffee gaining and losing the same 20 lbs a few times, living my life!!!!!—I can see myself eight years from now and it doesn’t seem so far-fetched that I could unjack myself from the Matrix of raising young children, smell the crisp autumn air as the school bus wheels away and realize I have acquaintances but no numbers in my phone and no local bud I could call in an emergency to watch my kid just a lot of nice people I know and bump into but no one who gets me who sends me memes with the note “you” and they are right, the meme is me, I am the meme. No one like that. Is this catastrophizing? You bet. I’m, like, really good at it.
Book club is a bad example because I am a serial book club dropout but you know what I mean!! I like books just not clubs. And not most books. Ha ha ha ha ha ha I’m fun, an asset to any social group.
I’m not the first person who has noted the challenge of making friends in one’s 30s, or as a parent, or at any time of life when you aren’t just floating on a lazy river of unscheduled time and budding substance abuse issues. It feels impossible but I am sure it will happen in ways I can’t predict. The best things in my life are not things I personally engineered, in fact, all attempts to engineer my ideal circumstances have flopped. This is me interrogating my cognitive distortions for evidence, a tactic you can scoop up for yourself should you ever have the privilege of surviving your 20s, getting deliciously old and boring, and paying for therapy.
yr mate,
Evie
P.S. I have been reading The Golden State and it empowered me to dispose of some commas, which I have to use a lot of because of how tediously wordy I am (have u noticed) so thanks for the permission, The Golden State! Read it, that’s a rec from me to you! My other recommendations are alternating child bedtime duties with your coparent if you’re lucky enough to have one, hanging art even if you are planning to move locally within a year, having someone who is benignly judgmental visit you a month after you move so you are forced to really unpack rather than just get very comfers living among Hoarders-esque walkways between stacks of boxes because you’re just going to move again next year anyway, aren’t you? (My parents are coming today!)
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