Making friends as an adult

I have no idea what I'm doing.

One thing I was not prepared for when I started my academic career in 2007 was just how much I had taken my grad school community - and my bookstore friends from my pre-library life - for granted. My first semester was miserable and isolating, but a switch flipped my second semester and all of a sudden I made new friends, including my platonic life partner. Post-graduation, we scattered because we went where the jobs were, which is how I ended up in the Deep South, sans a cohesive community of friends.

I don’t want to say I have no local friends. I have two friends with whom I have breakfast periodically, and it’s lovely, but that’s all our schedule can fit, especially since they have kids. I have another friend with whom I’ve formed a micro book club (i.e. we read the same book and then go for a walk and talk about it.) I have other acquaintances that I enjoy seeing in passing, and I’m trying to convert some to actual friends, but I miss being able to text someone to meet up on short notice for coffee, drinks, a meal, or a trip to Target. Maybe that’s only possible for the young.

But how do you even make friends as an adult? I’ve been working on cultivating loose ties, which means I have friendly conversations with a variety of people that I genuinely enjoy seeing in passing, and it is nice. It’s not a deep friendship, though. 

My natural introvert tendency is to be passive with social events and wait for an invitation, which worked for me in the past, but that isn't the case here. More recently, I’ve stepped outside my comfort zone and initiated some social events, like the aforementioned breakfasts and book club, but I’m at an impasse with ideas for others. To add to that, I sometimes see that people I used to have ties with are doing things like going to brunch together and posting pictures on Facebook, and I realize I’ve fallen out of their minds. Things change.

So how do you build friendship as an adult?

An appreciation

I helped out with a student event at the start of the semester. I don’t have much student interaction in my current role, and if I do, it’s usually because they are having problems, so it was fun to engage with excited new students. My office is in a low traffic area on the fourth floor of the library, and I was tired of telling students they had to go to the first floor to staple things or borrow a pen. I asked about getting supplies and was told they’d all be stolen since the floor is largely unsupervised, so I decided to experiment by buying the supplies myself. So far, aside from the expected attrition of pens and pencils, nothing has been stolen.

As I was setting up the supplies station, it occurred to me that I wanted to do something fun for students as well. I settled on a basket of stickers, and to my delight, they have been popular. I find myself peeking out of my office to see if I can catch students in the act of taking stickers, but so far I’ve only seen it once. The stickers deplete on a fairly regular basis, so I know they are taking them, though.

Our social media folks have offered to feature the stickers in their posts, but I don’t want them to. I prefer that it be a bit of an Easter egg for students who make it up to the fourth floor. It’s a small gesture towards community. Stickers, fuck yeah!

Readings

A modern scripture* I read every fall, because gourds

*Terminology courtesy of Sam Sanders: “I like to take certain readings and call them my modern scriptures. Things that I've read recently that I find myself constantly going back to because they speak to me in such a real way.” (Source)

Also gourds. It is time.

A quote

“Bunny thought her soup was bad, but there was something very compelling about the unlimited breadsticks and the salty, well-lubricated salad, and she ate them until she felt sick.”

- Mobility, Lydia Kiesling

Quantifying reading

Want a book tracking site that’s not owned by Amazon? You can find me on StoryGraph. I’ve been using it since May and I really like how clean it is. I don’t write reviews because I was a geophysics major and have no business pretending to be a critic - I read on ✨vibes ✨- so mostly I use it to compile a list of what I’ve read and look at pretty charts of my stats. I have dipped my toe in the world of reading challenges and that’s been fun so far.