Tag Archives: socializing

dance party weekend accomplished

Posted on January 22, 2023 | Leave a comment

I have slightly trashed knees. Turns out I’ve been hyperextending them for years! So now I have a slight cartilage issue in that they hurt when I use them too much. I’m forty four and have a long time to live in this body so this is of slight concern. Enter the collagen and the joint supplements and lot of care when I walk.

But right now I’m really feeling my knees because I actually went out two nights this weekend! I went to Vortex with Paul on Friday and then went to an 80s dance night at the local music hall with a mom’s group I joined on Facebook and aside from my stupid knees grinding when I was trying to do squats this morning in BodyPump class, I actually feel like myself more than I have since we left NYC six months ago.

Not only did I go out, but I spent time with new friends! I went for a long hike and pho yesterday and then a shorter walk and a chat over coffee with another friend today and I am starting to actually settle in here and make connections, which feels okay. Like I did it! I moved somewhere and didn’t need a chance encounter at a grocery store to plug into a friend group right when it was forming!

I admit, I did need a lot of Internet. I have met a lot of friends through a Facebook moms’ friend making group. I mean, the loneliness epidemic is real when you have two thousand women signed up for a Facebook group as a solution to dealing with their sense of isolation. And I’ve become more deeply entrenched in two sub-groups of that Facebook group: my speculative fiction book club, and a Moms of Teens spinoff. And through those sub-groups, I feel like I’m making actual small connections every time I meet up with them. Which is how these things are supposed to work, right?

It was that latter group, the Moms of Teens, that I coordinated to go out to the Ardmore Music Hall for 80s night last night, although I had a couple members of the book club show up too. I am a relentless promoter of parties when I’m socializing, and I sold that New Wave night through hard. And even though the DJ was MUCH too young and also did not manage to curate the waves of requests being thrown at him by drunk middle age people (Tiffany is not New Wave), everyone still seemed to have a fantastic time. We all left our houses at least, and went out with other people, and genuinely enjoyed ourselves dancing as a group, knees be damned.

So I have a lot of gratitude and a small amount of pride in how I’ve handled this challenge. I didn’t have my original Los Angeles crew to lean on. I didn’t have Brooklyn Scouts to help me find like-minded parents to connect with. And I still managed to go out and make new friends and coordinate a night out to an 80s dance party less than six months after landing on the Main Line. I still managed to make solid enough connections with people to spend hours in their presence on a regular basis.

And most importantly, I went out dancing two nights in a row this weekend, and I have stamps from two different clubs on my hand still, and I am proud of myself for that. Yes, I am feeling going out today. Yes, going out two nights in a row at 44 is very different than it was at 26. But I did go out two nights in a row to dance parties, and I’m so happy I’m at this point in a whole new city. This transition wasn’t ever going to be easy, but I can at least try to make it more fun.

sixteen years later

Posted on January 16, 2023 | Leave a comment

I am far too fond of visualizing a cut-over and a “[x] years later” overlay as a visual of my life. I’ve had to move and reboot so many times that I lack continuity. It’s hard sometimes even for me to piece together my own narrative. And lately, the cut-over I’ve been visualizing is a hot take from January of 2007 to January of 2023. This is because the common thread from my twenties is that I have to make new friends based on my own merits, as opposed to just having a kid born in 2008.

This is the weird thing about making friends as an adult who chooses to reproduce. You have a period of time where you make your own friends in your 20s, based on your college circles, or based on the people you meet randomly in your life if you move away from your college circle. Then you reproduce and suddenly, all your friends are people who had a baby around the same time you did. Then your kid becomes a teen, and suddently is an independent person, and you’re making new friends based on your own merits for the first time in decades because your identity is less about your status as a parent. Your life phase governs your identity, and your identity governs where and how you bond with other adult humans.

This is where I, and a lot of people my age, happen to be at this point in our social journeys. We’ve got teens who are their own persons. And we may have our fellow parent friends, but after a decade and a half, we may also have lost those friends to moves or personal differences or other changes that happen with time. We may have our pre-parent era friends, but similarly, they may have been lost as we went through our own life changes. So here we are, having to meet people who have to associate with us based on more factors than just their kid’s birth year. It’s terrifying.

The last time I had to make friends based on my own merits as a person and as a human was in the mid-aughts. I was in my mid to late twenties in Los Angeles, far from my friend circle in Vancouver and my family in Victoria. I had gone to seek my fame and fortune in digital media buying. And after maybe ten days in the Westside, I ran into a girl in the grocery store who kindly passed forward her own good fortune in meeting people, and invited me to meet her friends…and the rest is history. I met new friends, introduced them to other friends, helped to make connections, and always, always had something going on. My blog from that time is a never-ending whirl of work, socializing, and anarchist bike rides…which it continued to be right up until I left the Westside in January of 2007 to move in with that guy I met at Bar Sinister out east of Vermont.

And here we are sixteen years later. If my time in NYC was all about being a parent (in probably one of the least practical cities to be a parent in), then my time in Pennsylvania is going to be about the transition back out of being a parent. Ben is large! He is as tall as I am and is becoming more independent every day. He’s going to be driving in less than two years. I’m no longer making friends with other parents I meet through his school or through Scouts. I’m making friends with other humans based on being my own person. I have not had to do that for the better part of two decades and it is a very terrifying thought.

If I have a point of consolation, it is that I was still learning how to be a human in my twenties (late learner, okay?) and had yet to develop the empathy and social skills I worked on more consistently in my thirties. I have more faith in myself to be a less self-centered and insecure person now. In my twenties, I worked on blind ego (“of course people like me!”) combined with then crushing despair when I wasn’t to everyone’s taste (“there’s something wrong with me”). In my forties, I am trying to work based on self-confidence (“I am a great person to be friends with because I am kind and considerate and try my best to truly hear the people around me”) and rational consolation (“not everyone has to be my BFF and that’s okay!”) This doesn’t always mean I’m going to function without insecurity as years of exclusion and bullying are always going to be embedded in my foundations. But it does mean I’m able to identify my own insecurities and try to move past them as much as possible.

The other motivation I have to make friends is that I need to set an example for my kiddo. Just because I’m not socializing entirely based on being a parent does not mean that being a parent is no longer a factor at all. I have to demonstrate to Ben that friendships are built a block at a time. This does require the core friendship skillset I learned in my twenties in L.A., which is:

establish contact and common ground
ask if that person would like to hang out sometime
get that person’s contact info
follow-up with hang out details
if hangout goes well, send follow-up note expressing how you enjoyed getting to know them
repeat steps 4 and 5
(optional) include that person in other aspects of your life, like double dating or bigger get togethers
~~build friend circle and throw monster house party~~ (okay maybe replace this with “quiet adult cocktails and appetizers party”)

So here we go, with a cut to 2023. I have to reach back through time and lived experience and remember what it was like to connect with people in an authentic and genuine manner. Thankfully, I am good at the Internet so I’ve been able to use that as a springboard to make new friends so far. But it’s still a major shift and change in my life and one I have to commit to. As does Ben. Sixteen years later, I’m in a different place both in my mental health as well as my physical location and life phase. Lets see how many of these old social skills tactics still work.

making work friends

Posted on June 7, 2018 | Leave a comment

This morning, I was skimming Facebook and saw that a group of women from my office had gone out for drinks last night to celebrate a former colleague’s. My absence from this group is not particularly telling or indicative of anything to do with me or my value as a person, colleague or friend. It is just a group of current co-workers who have been going out as a group for years, while I sit anti-socially at my desk.

In fact, my anti-social status at the office is so extreme that I am missing the company picnic today because I didn’t cross-reference my work and personal calendars before making plans for the school closure dates. Therefore, I am hosting Ben’s friends for a day of “please entertain each other” activities instead of re-bonding with my own co-workers. Part of this is because I’ve been offsite for the past year, and upon returning, instead of attempting to re-bond with colleagues, I decided to hide at my desk and pretend I don’t know anyone anymore.

My failure to prioritize this kind of in-office socializing is probably why I am rarely invited to events outside the office. On a daily basis, I make the choice not to get up from my desk and talk to people, which results in not being invited to events outside of the workday. And for the past few years, I have prioritized my son’s birthday over the company picnic – and then this year, the one year I could have gone, I invited three of his buddies over to hang out instead of sending Ben to chess camp for the day, so I am now committed to staying home with a houseful of ten year olds.

It therefore should not be a surprise that I’m not invited to office social gatherings, and yet, I’m still sad and disappointed when it happens and I see it posted about retroactively. It’s just so hard to get over my fear of socializing at the office. I worried for years that people didn’t like me, and only put up with me because they were obligated to engage with me, a fear everyone has but that I actually had reinforced in me twenty years ago by a co-worker who told me that was how she felt. Now I not only worry people don’t like me, but also worry that the obligation to engage positively with me is higher since I am management and sometimes, I am someone’s direct or indirect boss.

This is not a surprising phenomenon to many people, I’m sure. There’s mixed feelings on work friendships. TV teaches us that it’s the norm to have a workplace social circle, but I have never had that kind of extended work/social life. I am friendly with co-workers, and often remain good friends with people after leaving a job, but it isn’t a regular occurrence to have that kind of interaction. I do not believe this is abnormal, especially for people with children and/or other priorities outside the office, and the New York Times seems to emphasize that work friendships can be weird and inconsistent by running articles on a regular basis talking about issues that crops up in these strange hybrid relationships.

Is there a not-awkward, non-creepy way to make friends as a grown-up?

A post shared by Fowl Language Comics (@fowllanguagecomics) on Jan 6, 2016 at 8:04am PST

</script

It would be easy to be safe and just cocoon further into my loner, anti-social status, but that isn't what I want. I know that my co-workers are people I would like spending time with if I wasn’t so anxious about it. The problem is that added stress of thinking, “does this person like me or are they just putting up with me” kills most of the joy I would get from the encounter, and makes it difficult for me to reflect positively on the fact that this is a cool, smart, interesting person with their own perspective on the workplace we share and have in common. It’s difficult to engage in a positive, meaningful conversation during a workday as it is – I’m always worried I’m keeping someone from something more important – and then my fear of whether or not my presence is received the same way makes it even more difficult for me to engage in a verbal exchange that would add collateral to the friendship.

Therefore, I’ve been hiding at my desk, nodding at people when I see them, smiling and saying hello, and praying I don’t have to actually engage because THAT IS HARD AND CAUSES FEAR.

I empathize with this SO HARD. It’s how I know Daria is really covering for insecurity!

I’m asking myself now, what can I actually do about this? Do I have to come out and talk to people and put myself out there despite a crippling fear of rejection? Do I have to make going to company events and happy hours more of a priority? We’re moving to a new office soon, after all – can I make it a priority to talk to people there? Can I engage more through the “Women in Leadership” initiative, making sure I show up for those events? Would it help if i went into the office more days instead of working from home all the time? What if I reached out more to co-workers, current and former, attempting to get to know them on a 1:1 basis and setting aside time to do so?

The answer to all of these things is yes, and the answer to everything is that I have to just work a little harder at engaging in meaningful social interactions, both in creating the opportunity to do so and in finding conversation to make that isn’t awkward when those opportunities come up. That isn’t easy for me – I sometimes feel like I’m missing a critical part of the human personality, the part that puts people at ease and makes people feel comfortable with me, the part that makes me likeable. That, however, is an insecurity for an entire other day. For today, I need to go problem solve a way to get to that company picnic!

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