Zig Zag # 9

“How do you make new friends?”

That’s a pretty consistent question I get after people hear about my Zig Zag life. I get it especially from people who have only ever lived in one place.

It’s a great question. I’m not going to sugar-coat my answer. Making friends as an adult is challenging. We are no longer bound by geographic proximity (think childhood/adolescent friends) or institutions like school that provided an insta friend pool (think college or grad school). Even if you had solid groups of friends during those times, you change, and it gets harder to keep in touch.

It’s worth repeating: Making friends as an adult is hard AF. Yet, we need other people. As humans, we are made for connection (see my post from last week).

Regardless if you’ve lived a zig zag life or if you’ve never left your hometown, we can all agree that making and keeping friends takes effort, hard work, and commitment. The difficulty of friend-making is also something I don’t think we talk about enough.

We can quite often be fooled by the perception of someone’s digital life. Just by scrolling, we could deduce that someone might be living their best life with a ton of friends. That might not be the case, but we go down the friend comparison rabbit hole anyway. Then comes the shame. We start thinking to ourselves, “I might not be living my best life because I don’t have that many friends.” Woof. No one wants to admit they might be having a hard time in the friend area. Yet, ironically, adulthood is when you need good friends the most. Adulting is hard.

So in an effort to shed some light on friend-making (hard no matter what age you are, tbh), I’m going to share some of the wild and wacky ways I’ve made friends over the years. At the very least, I hope you feel less alone in all of this. It’s cool. I feel ya. Just keep swimming. Don’t give up. The people who are supposed to be in your life will show up.

Sushi Club - Yes. That was a thing I did. This was before MeetUp.com was invented. We were ahead of our time. ;) It wasn’t as formal as you might think. Once a month, one person was in charge of picking a different sushi restaurant in the area. They would send out the Evite and make a reservation. If I had my druthers, we would have been called The Wasabi Warriors, and our motto would have been, “We slay sushi one piece at a time.”

Every month it was a different crowd. But every month, we’d get good and nerdy about sushi. We’d talk about the quality of the food, service, hell, we even commented on the bathrooms. We would sometimes do sushi family- style. There is definitely something special about breaking bread or sticky rice, in this case, with other people. Sushi Club turned into wine tours and eventually quiche brunches. Am I still friends with any of those people? Nope, but it was perfect for that time in my life.

Training to hike the Grand Canyon - There’s nothing like a brutal hike in the wilds of Virginia, West Virginia, or Maryland to bond people together. A hiking group was a wonderful way to make friends and get to know people. One hike, I almost stepped on a rattlesnake. My hiking buddies saved me from rattlesnake annihilation, for sure. At the end of the day, we were all working toward the same goal: Survive our hike in the Grand Canyon and raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. Friends made. Mission accomplished.

Book Clubs, Meetups, and organizing Happy Hours - Let’s be honest, do people actually read the books for book clubs? Okay, I did. But mostly, people show up to eat, drink and gossip. The same goes for the meetups and any happy hours I organized. Alcohol can be a pretty good social lubricant, but not always the best way to make deep lasting friendships. Sometimes. But not always.

Haven Writing Retreat - Duh. Of course, there would be something in this post about finding fellow writing buddies. I went on this retreat years ago, and I still keep in touch with them. In fact, they have been some of my biggest supporters of this writing project. They get me. This was one of those experiences where I learned that when it comes to friends, age doesn’t matter. At all. Ever.

Weird lectures and workshops - I won’t go into details because this workshop I attended was just effin weird. But I made a quick friend who happened to sit next to me. We were both in agreement about the weirdness. We had paid for this workshop so we felt locked in. We spent the day making snarky comments back and forth. We couldn’t have been more different. Will she and I be besties ever? Probably not, but we keep in touch via social media, and I have mad respect for her. She up and left the U.S. and her corporate job to move to Bali to be a yoga teacher. Good on you, friend, good on you.

Mastermind Group - I have such a strong affection for the friends I made in my mastermind group. We actually started calling ourselves a mutual admiration society. We would meet once a week (virtually) and discuss our entrepreneurial pursuits and other personal development topics. We went deep. We got vulnerable. We got real. These are the folks I’d call if I needed help in a pinch.

Sometimes interesting work situations bring about the most unlikely mates…

Concessions at an outdoor concert venue - Serving food and going to concerts for free? Yes, please. I loved this job. Drunk concert-goers are the best tippers. My fellow concession co-worker taught me the secret of a good craft cocktail: Fresh juice.

Interning at a national security think tank - I was pretty lucky to work with two great intern cohorts while I was in grad school. We bonded over the fact that intern life can kind of suck. We were the coffee getters, the paper copy makers, and the event set up aficionados. These incredibly smart friends introduced me to the world of trivia and the best life lesson and #1 trivia rule never to be broken: Don’t Be A Dick.

Crew member at Trader Joe’s - Another job I loved. A prerequisite for working at Trader Joe’s? You have to be nice and friendly. So most of my co-workers were an absolute delight. In fact, two of my very best friends came from my time there. #crewmembers4life

Sometimes friendship is thrust upon you. Toward the end of my interning, I was asked to be a part of a group of young professionals that were highlighted in a news feature story on CNN. There was a video component and a web print component. I was in both. There was a lot of waiting around so naturally, we all got to talking. One person and I bonded quickly after only a few hours. He and I are still friends to this day.

A few years after this piece was aired/published, I was at the airport in Chicago and I saw my face pop up on the screen! I almost lost my shit. There the CNN piece was being played once again. I slouched down in my seat at my gate and texted my friend that I had just seen our featured piece. See? Bonded forever.

A lot of these examples seem like one-offs. Some of them were. But it has never failed to surprise me who shows up after the fact. The people I least expect have checked in on me when I needed them the most. The ones I thought would be friends for life, I haven’t heard from in years. But I appreciate both, nonetheless.

Friendship is most definitely a two-way street. When I haven’t heard from friends in a while, I know it’s on me to reach out. Just a few months ago, I was feeling a bit of a post-pandemic slump, and someone encouraged me to reach out to people I hadn’t talked to in a bit.

In some cases, I hadn’t talked to these friends in over a decade. But it was so good to catch up, and every single one of them was absolutely tickled to hear from me. No hard feelings about losing touch. Just gratitude for the call. To be thought of. To reconnect.

As I’ve gotten older, deep authentic friendship is now my goal. I want quality over quantity. I would rather have four quarters than 100 pennies.

I don’t think any of us has the answer to the ‘how to make and keep friends’ question. I think it’s part openness, part conscious hard work, and part commitment. I also think it’s a little bit of learning when it’s time to let go. I’ve learned that not everyone who started with me in the pilot episode of my life belongs in the series finale.

And that’s okay.

I’m always grateful for whoever shows up because I know it is the right time, the right place, and the right lesson. I am looking forward to seeing who’s coming up next.

Have a zig zag kind of week. Until we meet again.