The spiritual journey of making new friends...

When I moved close to 400 miles from my group of friends, I felt confident and equipped to handle the feeling of missing them. As it stood, I had a baby at the time and my social life was limited to a revolving door of nursing, arranging childcare, and making sure I didn’t turn into a pumpkin and was home for bedtime. I knew, no wait, I was an expert on how to have friendships during restrictions of time and space. The thing that I didn’t expect (and honestly didn’t want to expect) is how it’s been a spiritual endeavor to find my new friends.

I’ve had to find myself by digging deeper into what I know when nothing I know is familiar.

Our sense of belonging to a place or a culture is relational. Humans have evolved a nervous system that is directly affected by several things, most of all social interaction. Think cuddly blanket, warm gushing calm feeling – that’s what social interaction does for us. Simply put: we need each other to feel ok. Yet, when we willingly extract ourselves from most or all of our relations, we have to find that again. That leaves a shocking blank slate of figuring out a new sense of belonging.

When we moved, my husband began a career shift. At one point, he told me that it felt easier to embrace this change in a new geographical spot. I experienced this too, as I shifted from out of my graduate student phase last year. There certainly is a freedom found when you’re carving a new shape for yourself around new people.

I didn’t know this freedom was going to ask more of me than I expected. Would that sense of freedom be worth it, in the end?

What happens in this journey is you’ve got to be alone. Like, real f-ing alone. Not having a social mirror of oneself can activate the opposite of what I mentioned above, a sense of panic in the nervous system that shakes you to your core. Most of us use our status and social surroundings as a way of knowing ourselves. When this changes, instead of you seeing yourself as a reflection in your friends, you have a mirror shoved right back to you. Yikes, right?

Change is inevitable, and it’s terrifying in some ways. But, I’m starting to think that’s the whole point: to be terrified is the fuel you need for your next chapter. Change doesn’t happen from a place of comfort.

In the end, you don’t become someone new when losing what or who was once holding you up. You find out what you’re made of once they’re gone.

A note: there were two ways that I was going to take this essay that I want to add here. First, I wanted to give lots of information on how I’ve made a wonderful, vibrant, supportive group of new friends. Hint: it’s vulnerable and just as uncomfortable as it gets. Perhaps I’ll write more about how to do it, especially as a woman in midlife. Additionally, this journey parallels the process of losing my Mom, my first home and mirror, too. Grief layers into everything every change, every step forward. It’s the change the makes you, you.

Resource on the science behind needing one another:

Porges S. W. (2009). The polyvagal theory: new insights into adaptive reactions of the
autonomic nervous system. Cleveland Clinic journal of medicine, 76 Suppl 2(Suppl 2), S86–S90. https://doi.org/10.3949/ccjm.76.s2.1