Aug 6, 2023·edited Aug 6, 2023Liked by Kelton Wright
Kelton, what the hell. This hits so hard I had to stop reading after every other paragraph to feel my feelings. One thing I find really challenging is balancing my natural introversion with the socializing required to make friends - especially knowing the extra energy that goes into the beginning stages. I feel exhausted just thinking about it. But you’ve reminded me that I need (want) to reach out to someone who I met on a walk months ago - we just ran into each other and started talking about my dog and clicked and exchanged numbers. I’m not in a small town, that never happens! But we haven’t met up since. Making new friends is the worst (and also the best obvi, eventually).
ETA: I will never ever ever forget the one person who, when I first moved to DC, did actually invite and encourage this shy new girl to go to events together. It was totally unexpected and I was so grateful. May we all find time to be that person.
Thank you for expressing this angsty feeling. I am in a completely different life space, a 68 y/o retired cis female doctor who is recently (18 months) solo in a town I have lived in for 23 years. My old married friends haven’t exactly abandoned me but I find less and less fulfilling to engage with them so I am actively trying to find new friends who can connect on a different deeper level. Having worked many years in spaces where no one really became friends (due to a hierarchical structure in medicine that pits women with different jobs against each other) I am hungering for true connection and bonding in this chapter of my life. I am happy in solitude but want the closeness of true friendship to enrich my days. Your piece has inspired me to keep trying to connect.
Every complaint about the Barbie movie not going deep enough/not being subversive enough/&c. - I mean, these are all valid points and certainly opinions people shpuld have on topics we should do something about, BUT...I'm every time just like, you do realize this is a big budget fun commercial movie with mainstream stars and mainstream machinery literally produced by Mattel -- what were you expecting? Frankly, it said a lot more than I would have expected it be allowed to given those constraints, and really there is a huuuuuuge chunk of this society that _needs_ some Feminism 101 and a mainstream entry point to discover it?
Making friends after a certain age is so hard. I moved to the Midwest in my late 20s and it took me a good five years to even make one good friend. Honestly, even now, I’m not as close as I would like to be to some of them. As a male in our culture, it’s so hard to be vulnerable and say to another guy, “hey, I’m lonely.” It’s embarrassing and it’s hard. But we must try. I’ve certainly written about this in my newsletter and will continue to do so because it’s important.
Your willingness and ability to bare your soul is poignant and opens doors that some of us have chosen to keep closed. Yes, I am lonely. No, I have not done all that I could to reach out and make friends. My insecurities are much the same as yours. Sometimes I get depressed and weep. So, at your urging, I will reach out again and try to connect with several people. How many hours do I have?
Coming up on year 3 in a new place, this is so real – especially considering we moved here in May 2020 :-| If any Shangriloggers are in the Tacoma/Seattle area, I'd love to meet up! Otherwise, I will be out here texting 3 folks (gulp).
The embarrassing part of making friends is spot on. When I first moved to ABQ, I was very intentional about making friends since i had zero, which meant embracing the embarrassment of asking people to do stuff and not knowing if “I’m busy this week” meant “I’m busy this week” or “leave me alone, desperate weird new girl!” Add to that I seem to always attract other introverts, so I truly didn’t know whether people were avoiding me or just avoiding everyone. But I kept texting thru my reddening cheeks...and those people are still my friends! I don’t see them as often as maybe I’d like, but then again, we’re at the point where sometimes I’m the busy one and I have to decline! So now I’m popular!!! That’s the takeaway!!!!! (Jk making friends both sucks and is beautiful, etc. etc.)
Maybe my favorite post yet? I think I've said that before, but yeah, this one. Definitely this one.
The part where Ben and your neighbor are trading stories about their summer plans felt like something out of a Portlandia skit. I always feel like I'm being asked about my plans, and my answer is something akin to maybe watering the garden later, you know, if it's not too hot, while the other person is packing their zero gravity gear for a trip to the moon that evening. Then I look down and realize I'm wearing Crocs and feel like I may as well just start digging my grave right then and there.
Sidenote: the word dweeb does not get enough play in the 2020s.
When my husband and I first moved to our current town almost three years ago, I had grand ideas of making fast friends of my neighbors and being immediately indoctrinated into my brother's friend group. I'm slowly making neighborhood friends, but I have not once hung out with my brother alongside his friends. Whatever social-circle-by-association I thought we'd have because of him hasn't materialized. I used to feel envious of my brother and his wife for having so many friends here, but I recently realized all of their friends are here because...they have never lived anywhere else. They know more people here, but we know more people elsewhere. We can go to Boston, NYC, or London and see friends, and they can't do that. So. One is not necessarily better than the other, but everyone's realities are different. That doesn't mean I don't wish that I had more friends where we live now, but when I find myself thinking about how I don't, I try to remind myself of that fact.
I loved these two sentences from your post:
"While I feel like I belong here, in this place, I do not feel like I belong. Instead, I feel like every joke I make falls flat, every conversation I’m in is one people wrap up as soon as they can, and everyone is always doing something unbearably cool while I am at a computer."
"It’s that I can feel the connectivity of years-long friendships all around me, the ease of which they stop by and hang out with one another, the impenetrable force of inside jokes while they huddle together at parties and I stand in the kitchen with the dogs, and I am simply jealous, impatient, lonely, and insecure."
I have felt all of those things and been in those situations more times than I can count. I think it gets a little easier with each chance encounter and with each accepted invitation to hang out, although I do think it's just about impossible to replicate the sense of intimacy in the span of a few years that comes with decades of familiarity. I want to be part of the group, too, but if it's all about clocking those hours, it seems like it's going to take some time!
FWIW, everyone’s I’ve known who has done Bob Marshall Wilderness horseback tour is absolutely not a tourist, most of them were very adventurous, active folks from Montana. I was seriously impressed that you did it and loved your writing on it.
This sentence is a masterpiece and hits on why I have an online presence - “our work is to be known, and it’s in the knowing that we delight.” Gosh, this nails it.
i told my therapist that i wanted more community and she told me to always keep the ingredients on hand to make a pizza. she told me to google 6 ingredient pizza dough, and to have sauce and cheese. her point is, you don’t have to worry about spending money or going somewhere to eat or what to do. she also told me to unabashedly reach out to acquaintances. for some reason i have no embarrassment about this, but i think this is because i know that we are deeply craving connection and friendship, especially in our 30-somethings.
a new friend and i have bonded over losing parents, and she even came with me to go pick up a peloton i bought on facebook marketplace, but strangely enough our friendship began at improv shows. i felt weird asking for a favor of “can you come with me so i don’t get robbed or murdered” but she was down! never hurts to ask.
Thank you for your vulnerability. I wish I could say it gets easier, but I am 60 and I think it gets harder. People, naturally, hone their friend groups as they get more established, and there are decades of bonding that I’ll never catch up to. I think about moving as well, but don’t want to walk away from the hard won friendships I have in my current sphere (after a move 8 years ago). They were not trivial to build. Starting over to build a community feels too big. So I’ll keep building those for now. Thank you for the nudge. I’d be your friend.
I have been in a space for a few years now where I have downsized my friend group to a bare minimum, and it's been good and exactly what I needed and had the capacity for. But now that I have been at home for 8 months with my little baby (thank you, German parental leave system), it's the first time that I feel lonely sometimes. It doesn't help that my days are dictated by when my boobs are needed or when it's time for baby naps, because that leaves little time for socializing; it's also just being annoyed by other parents?!? Which does NOT help to make new mom-friends, let me tell ya! It's a weird in-between space where I crave more connection, but also am worried it will stress me out and/or send me into a comparison spiral. There wasn't anything in the Barbie movie about that, perchance? :D
Felt this one hard. It’s been tough in my own small-ish mountain town, as still recent-ish transplants (5 years). Thank you for the reminder to summon the energy and risk the embarrassment.
I just went through the process of moving, building relationships for three years, and then...moving again! It's a process for sure and I took all those hours logged in college for granted 😲😰😥
It's a throw-away line, obviously, but there something to the asymmetry point you've walked into at the end. We readers have either achieved or or well on the way to our 96 hours of thinking about Kelton. You're way over that, I'm sure, thinking about your readership as a collective, but don't have even an hour in of thinking about Charley. It's the nature of the enterprise.
The same thing applies to your time with prospective friends in your communities. You don't have to be physically together all the time, but you have to count their time thinking about you, not your time thinking about them. Don't be shy about using your time with them not just doing fun things with people, but you can also tell them interesting stories from your life that they'll enjoy telling other people in their lives.
I recently joined Kiwanis, and learned after I did so that the program committee had been talking for 2 years about having me as a guest speaker. Big down payment on the hours right there.
Kelton, what the hell. This hits so hard I had to stop reading after every other paragraph to feel my feelings. One thing I find really challenging is balancing my natural introversion with the socializing required to make friends - especially knowing the extra energy that goes into the beginning stages. I feel exhausted just thinking about it. But you’ve reminded me that I need (want) to reach out to someone who I met on a walk months ago - we just ran into each other and started talking about my dog and clicked and exchanged numbers. I’m not in a small town, that never happens! But we haven’t met up since. Making new friends is the worst (and also the best obvi, eventually).
ETA: I will never ever ever forget the one person who, when I first moved to DC, did actually invite and encourage this shy new girl to go to events together. It was totally unexpected and I was so grateful. May we all find time to be that person.
Thank you for expressing this angsty feeling. I am in a completely different life space, a 68 y/o retired cis female doctor who is recently (18 months) solo in a town I have lived in for 23 years. My old married friends haven’t exactly abandoned me but I find less and less fulfilling to engage with them so I am actively trying to find new friends who can connect on a different deeper level. Having worked many years in spaces where no one really became friends (due to a hierarchical structure in medicine that pits women with different jobs against each other) I am hungering for true connection and bonding in this chapter of my life. I am happy in solitude but want the closeness of true friendship to enrich my days. Your piece has inspired me to keep trying to connect.
I do not yet have a single friend in my (not-so-new-anymore) hometown and I feel all of this IN MY FREAKIN SOUL.
Every complaint about the Barbie movie not going deep enough/not being subversive enough/&c. - I mean, these are all valid points and certainly opinions people shpuld have on topics we should do something about, BUT...I'm every time just like, you do realize this is a big budget fun commercial movie with mainstream stars and mainstream machinery literally produced by Mattel -- what were you expecting? Frankly, it said a lot more than I would have expected it be allowed to given those constraints, and really there is a huuuuuuge chunk of this society that _needs_ some Feminism 101 and a mainstream entry point to discover it?
Making friends after a certain age is so hard. I moved to the Midwest in my late 20s and it took me a good five years to even make one good friend. Honestly, even now, I’m not as close as I would like to be to some of them. As a male in our culture, it’s so hard to be vulnerable and say to another guy, “hey, I’m lonely.” It’s embarrassing and it’s hard. But we must try. I’ve certainly written about this in my newsletter and will continue to do so because it’s important.
Your willingness and ability to bare your soul is poignant and opens doors that some of us have chosen to keep closed. Yes, I am lonely. No, I have not done all that I could to reach out and make friends. My insecurities are much the same as yours. Sometimes I get depressed and weep. So, at your urging, I will reach out again and try to connect with several people. How many hours do I have?
Coming up on year 3 in a new place, this is so real – especially considering we moved here in May 2020 :-| If any Shangriloggers are in the Tacoma/Seattle area, I'd love to meet up! Otherwise, I will be out here texting 3 folks (gulp).
And Kelton, I've always wanted to be your friend!
The embarrassing part of making friends is spot on. When I first moved to ABQ, I was very intentional about making friends since i had zero, which meant embracing the embarrassment of asking people to do stuff and not knowing if “I’m busy this week” meant “I’m busy this week” or “leave me alone, desperate weird new girl!” Add to that I seem to always attract other introverts, so I truly didn’t know whether people were avoiding me or just avoiding everyone. But I kept texting thru my reddening cheeks...and those people are still my friends! I don’t see them as often as maybe I’d like, but then again, we’re at the point where sometimes I’m the busy one and I have to decline! So now I’m popular!!! That’s the takeaway!!!!! (Jk making friends both sucks and is beautiful, etc. etc.)
Maybe my favorite post yet? I think I've said that before, but yeah, this one. Definitely this one.
The part where Ben and your neighbor are trading stories about their summer plans felt like something out of a Portlandia skit. I always feel like I'm being asked about my plans, and my answer is something akin to maybe watering the garden later, you know, if it's not too hot, while the other person is packing their zero gravity gear for a trip to the moon that evening. Then I look down and realize I'm wearing Crocs and feel like I may as well just start digging my grave right then and there.
Sidenote: the word dweeb does not get enough play in the 2020s.
When my husband and I first moved to our current town almost three years ago, I had grand ideas of making fast friends of my neighbors and being immediately indoctrinated into my brother's friend group. I'm slowly making neighborhood friends, but I have not once hung out with my brother alongside his friends. Whatever social-circle-by-association I thought we'd have because of him hasn't materialized. I used to feel envious of my brother and his wife for having so many friends here, but I recently realized all of their friends are here because...they have never lived anywhere else. They know more people here, but we know more people elsewhere. We can go to Boston, NYC, or London and see friends, and they can't do that. So. One is not necessarily better than the other, but everyone's realities are different. That doesn't mean I don't wish that I had more friends where we live now, but when I find myself thinking about how I don't, I try to remind myself of that fact.
I loved these two sentences from your post:
"While I feel like I belong here, in this place, I do not feel like I belong. Instead, I feel like every joke I make falls flat, every conversation I’m in is one people wrap up as soon as they can, and everyone is always doing something unbearably cool while I am at a computer."
"It’s that I can feel the connectivity of years-long friendships all around me, the ease of which they stop by and hang out with one another, the impenetrable force of inside jokes while they huddle together at parties and I stand in the kitchen with the dogs, and I am simply jealous, impatient, lonely, and insecure."
I have felt all of those things and been in those situations more times than I can count. I think it gets a little easier with each chance encounter and with each accepted invitation to hang out, although I do think it's just about impossible to replicate the sense of intimacy in the span of a few years that comes with decades of familiarity. I want to be part of the group, too, but if it's all about clocking those hours, it seems like it's going to take some time!
FWIW, everyone’s I’ve known who has done Bob Marshall Wilderness horseback tour is absolutely not a tourist, most of them were very adventurous, active folks from Montana. I was seriously impressed that you did it and loved your writing on it.
This sentence is a masterpiece and hits on why I have an online presence - “our work is to be known, and it’s in the knowing that we delight.” Gosh, this nails it.
i told my therapist that i wanted more community and she told me to always keep the ingredients on hand to make a pizza. she told me to google 6 ingredient pizza dough, and to have sauce and cheese. her point is, you don’t have to worry about spending money or going somewhere to eat or what to do. she also told me to unabashedly reach out to acquaintances. for some reason i have no embarrassment about this, but i think this is because i know that we are deeply craving connection and friendship, especially in our 30-somethings.
a new friend and i have bonded over losing parents, and she even came with me to go pick up a peloton i bought on facebook marketplace, but strangely enough our friendship began at improv shows. i felt weird asking for a favor of “can you come with me so i don’t get robbed or murdered” but she was down! never hurts to ask.
Thank you for your vulnerability. I wish I could say it gets easier, but I am 60 and I think it gets harder. People, naturally, hone their friend groups as they get more established, and there are decades of bonding that I’ll never catch up to. I think about moving as well, but don’t want to walk away from the hard won friendships I have in my current sphere (after a move 8 years ago). They were not trivial to build. Starting over to build a community feels too big. So I’ll keep building those for now. Thank you for the nudge. I’d be your friend.
I have been in a space for a few years now where I have downsized my friend group to a bare minimum, and it's been good and exactly what I needed and had the capacity for. But now that I have been at home for 8 months with my little baby (thank you, German parental leave system), it's the first time that I feel lonely sometimes. It doesn't help that my days are dictated by when my boobs are needed or when it's time for baby naps, because that leaves little time for socializing; it's also just being annoyed by other parents?!? Which does NOT help to make new mom-friends, let me tell ya! It's a weird in-between space where I crave more connection, but also am worried it will stress me out and/or send me into a comparison spiral. There wasn't anything in the Barbie movie about that, perchance? :D
Felt this one hard. It’s been tough in my own small-ish mountain town, as still recent-ish transplants (5 years). Thank you for the reminder to summon the energy and risk the embarrassment.
I just went through the process of moving, building relationships for three years, and then...moving again! It's a process for sure and I took all those hours logged in college for granted 😲😰😥
It's tough, and takes time.
It's a throw-away line, obviously, but there something to the asymmetry point you've walked into at the end. We readers have either achieved or or well on the way to our 96 hours of thinking about Kelton. You're way over that, I'm sure, thinking about your readership as a collective, but don't have even an hour in of thinking about Charley. It's the nature of the enterprise.
The same thing applies to your time with prospective friends in your communities. You don't have to be physically together all the time, but you have to count their time thinking about you, not your time thinking about them. Don't be shy about using your time with them not just doing fun things with people, but you can also tell them interesting stories from your life that they'll enjoy telling other people in their lives.
I recently joined Kiwanis, and learned after I did so that the program committee had been talking for 2 years about having me as a guest speaker. Big down payment on the hours right there.