On my birthday, I posted this note:
I expected it to get a couple of likes, then get buried under a pile of notes about how Substack feels like the internet’s library, “I only have two subscribers and they are my parents”, and pictures of trees with 10k likes.
But no.
Apparently, I struck a chord.
My notifications, flooded with comments like these:
and these:
People, as it turns out, are fucking lonely.
And that includes me.
I think that’s why this post spread so far and wide. People saw a portrait of a person, once stricken down by loneliness, who had clawed their way to the light. And everyone wants to know how.
In these comments lay a certain kind of hopeful desperation—so many people, especially young people, resonated with 26-year-old me: the one who used to break blood vessels in her face from crying so hard from loneliness. People saw themselves in younger-me, and equally hoped that they would someday identify with today-me.
Because of all of these comments, I wanted to make a guide—something to outline the realities of how I’ve managed to make friends.
But before we start, there are two things you need to know:
I didn’t make friends by accident, and
I still feel varying degrees of loneliness.
Our culture praises hyper-individualism, encourages independence, and starves us of opportunities for connection. Third spaces have disappeared, people often have to work multiple jobs just to be able to pay for the basics, and when we do have downtime, we’re too mentally exhausted to socialize, so we stay at home and watch what everyone else is doing on our screens as our consolation prize, giving us an artificial sense of connection.
Please know: you are not alone in your loneliness (as much of an oxymoron that that is). You are not weird, and you are not unlovable. It’s just that the way society is currently set up feeds loneliness.
But I’m here to tell you, it doesn’t have to be that way.
What I’m not saying is that it will be easy: you will have to put in some work and make adjustments. Gone are the days when we had friendships of proximity: you’re not seeing and connecting with your friends at school every day. Work friends are possible, but it’s certainly not a given, especially with remote work.
For most of our lives, we’re put into environments where we’re constantly around people. Friendships form and evolve naturally. But now, once you leave school, you’re tasked for the first time with actually needing to go out of your way to make connections. Of course, you’re lonely. You’ve never had to do this before. It’s uncharted territory. No one has ever taught you that you need to change your strategy—these are skills that you simply don’t have yet. My goal is to help bring some awareness to the skills—at least, the ones that helped me.
These are things I’ve learned from both my experience with trying to make friends and observing how my husband makes friends (who is, by all accounts, incredible at making friends).
Everything I’m sharing is based on my experience. This isn’t a regurgitation of what I’ve heard other people on the internet say, but a distillation of things that I’ve done that have moved the needle towards building a community. I’ve still got work to do—there are still gaps in my needs and areas where I still need to grow in order to fill those gaps—but I’ll count going from breaking blood vessels in my face from crying from loneliness, to a birthday party with 14 people in attendance as a major achievement.
Move
I’m starting with this one because it’s mildly a joke. But, at the same time, it’s actually an integral part of my friend-making journey. So, out of transparency, it’s worth mentioning.
To make a very long story extremely short: I was back living in my hometown and had lost all of my friends. I had built a small group since moving back, but lockdown and quitting drinking alcohol dealt the final blow (I just want to add, don’t let this dissuade you from quitting alcohol if that’s what you feel called to do. The friends you lose weren’t ever really your friends, and also, you might not even lose any friends). Since I worked remotely, there wasn’t really anything keeping me around anymore.
So, we moved someplace where we knew we would have at least some base commonalities with people. A place with a lot of other transplants, also looking for friendship. I’m not saying moving is a requirement, but I also want to mention that, if you don’t like where you are, if you’re having trouble finding your people, moving is an option. And if you want to move, but feel like you can’t, it’s worth taking a look at your limiting beliefs and narratives around why you don’t feel like it’s possible, because it’s often easier than we make it out to be in our heads.
Making friends was probably a top 3 motivator for why we moved, so when we arrived, our brains were primed to seek out friendship. You can absolutely do that without moving, but sometimes nothing compares to a change of environment to jolt yourself awake.
Identity check
As painful as it is to admit, so many of us stay stuck because we have a story that we’re benefiting from in some way. A lot of people take on the identity of a lonely or socially anxious person, and when we embed these things into our identity, they become the albatross around our necks. In theory, we hate it, we complain about it, we run into walls trying to change it, but deep down, we use it to give ourselves continuity. And continuity means predictability, which feels safe.
