How to Make Friends

When I first graduated from college, I was still learning how to be an adult. Paychecks felt like small fortunes. Cooking all my produce before it all rotted was a reason to celebrate. Happy hours were an exciting opportunity to present my new “over 21” horizontal ID. I was grown.

But I didn’t expect the crippling loneliness that accompanied my new adult life. In college, my best friends were also my dorm mates. After classes, meals and snacks were shared with classmates. In the evenings, my friends and I completed weekly problem sets in team rooms together. Friendships were easily cultivated in that environment.

Adulthood was different. At the end of the workday, I would return home to my empty apartment. Instead of a dorm full of people my age, my company was Hulu and Netflix. A cone of Pinkberry yogurt on my solitary walk home replaced snack times with classmates. Without the activity of the college campus, I struggled with loneliness.

On a whim, I submitted an application to Horizons for Homeless Children. An ad calling for volunteers to run a playspace for homeless children had caught my eye. After a brief interview and a Saturday training, I was scheduled to run a playspace at a domestic violence shelter every Wednesday. For some of the longest two hours of my 22 year-old life, I and three other women, entertained children aged one to ten.

These playspaces were often mind-numbingly boring with repetitive playacting with three year-old. Occasionally, I would have the privilege of holding the one year-old baby for the whole two hours. Even more rarely, a child played too roughly and I along with the other volunteers strategized on how to enforce playspace rules.

But after a year of running those weekly playspaces, I became friends with the women who volunteered with me. We started with minor pleasantries about things like the weather. But eventually, we talked about our lives. I knew of new relationships, medical school applications, and the general tempo of their lives as they knew of mine. And these women became my friends.

By running the playspace, I learned how to make friends as an adult. By doing the same thing at the same time every week, I had built friendships. Building new relationships required that kind of consistency. Over the decade since I volunteered at the playspace, I’ve been surprised at how reliably this kind of regularity works. When I moved to Oakland 10 years later, I took a community college ceramics class that met on Mondays and Wednesday evenings. And once again, I made friends.

“Grief has never been private; it has always been communal. Subconsciously, we are awaiting the presence of others, before we can feel safe enough to drop to our knees on the holy ground of sorrow.”

Francis Weller

But in my grief, these friendship building routines have new meaning. They anchor me to the world of living. They keep me from falling into despair. After my Dad died, my ceramics classmates welcomed me back to the classroom. Some people expressed joy at my presence, while others inquired where I’d been.

My dear ceramist friend, Diana, hugged me as I struggled. She shared her experience of grieving her husband. She held space for my complicated feelings after my Dad died. She offered presence and wise words.

When Diana decided to run a marathon, I joined her at mile 10 to cheer her on. When I saw she was running alone, it felt natural to run a couple miles to keep her company. Eventually those 2 miles turned into 16 miles. And I ran with her as she ran the 26.2 miles. I offered her my presence as she had shortly after my Dad’s death.

This is what it means to be in community. It starts with consistent activity like a weekly ceramics class. Mundane but regular interactions evolve into sustaining friendship. Eventually those relationships spill outside the confines of sculpting clay together. And our well-being becomes inextricable connected to the people in our community. And we begin showing up for weddings, funerals and the all the big and small life events.

Acknowledgements

Thanks for my friend Rye who reminds me everyday to write. And to my friend Diana who teaches me everyday how to be in deep community.