90 Days: More Quality Friend Time...and other thoughts

Inner monologue: You've got just a few things that you can focus on for these first 90 day challenges. What are the most relevant or important to you right now? What areas of your life are clearly needing some more focus?

Then I saw this post last week and it really resonated with me:

Ladies, what do we want?

Meaningful friendships!

More girl nights out!

REAL HUMAN CONNECTION!

When do we want it?

...well, this week isn't good...

I can't do anything after 8pm on a work night...

...Let me check my calendar and get back to you...

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Being an unmarried 34 year-old woman without children has to put me in some rare statistical category. Actually, being an intentionally unmarried 34 year-old woman very intentionally forever being without children has to put me in an even rarer statistical category. While there's not many of us in society, I'm not quite sure if this is why it's been harder to make and maintain friendships these days, or if it's simply that I'm a totally shitty plan maker. Over the next 90 days, I'm going to put some effort into the latter and see where it gets me.

I made more friends while living in Austin, TX for 1.5 years than I have as an adult living off and on in Wisconsin. There's a different lifestyle and mindset being lived out in Austin. It's unlike anything I've experienced in any of the cities I've lived in - unfortunately coming with an increasingly steep price tag these days.

Austin is a unique city composed of mostly sociable transplants looking to immediately build their network and communities. The growing majority seems like a mix of people who were raging to get out of their home states to find something new and different in the elusive Austin, TX. When you've got hundreds of people moving to the city each day with hopes for a different kind of life, something special begins to materialize amongst the population (and unfortunately with it a lot of the not-so-great gentrification effect).

There's also always some kind of outdoor fest, show, rally, concert, fundraiser, or run happening in town, which gives everyone a great excuse to regularly get together. Want to wake up and run a charity 10 miler, swing by taco fest on the way home, go to a UT game, and then two-step at Broken Spoke to close out the night? SURE!

Since my new job was in nonprofit fundraising for a well-known kids' running organization, it was a goal of mine to quickly get the lay of the running land in town. I scheduled dozens of coffee dates in those first months with run club leaders, running store owners, fitness studio managers, triathlon club members, non-profit leaders, and fellow fundraisers. These folks connected me to other folks, who all became a part of my new growing network. Between my fundraising gig and part-time jobs with Athleta and Nuun, I was beginning to recognize faces all over town, and it was absolutely lovely!

The running scene in Austin is something fierce, with daily runs throughout the city, organized by different neighborhood groups, and a seemingly constant offering of free training + social events with legit goodie bags. I also joined the local Oiselle Volée running group and looked forward to meeting the other members on the track and trails. From joining the Texas chapter on a weekend trail running/camping getaway at Camp Eagle after Nick and I broke up, to starting a monthly book club that always left my soul overflowing with goodness (and that was continued on by my friend Laura after I moved back to Wisconsin!), this group of women ended up being such a positive presence during my time in Austin.

Speaking of Laura, she was a leadership team member for one of the triathlon groups in town, a badass trail runner, and active with the Austin Volée, so I asked her if we could get together to chat. We met at Rogue Running after one of her analysis appointments with RunLab and ended up talking about life's deepest topics for over three hours. She soon hosted book club at her place, invited me to an evening with Brené Brown, and consistently showed up to volunteer at my work fundraising events. Without notice, she jumped into leading a weekend morning kids' trail race so they wouldn't get lost on the course.

Over and over, I was lucking out by meeting some of the most wonderful women in the city. Soon I was regularly hanging out with new friends over coffee, runs, indoor cycling, doggy dates, patio beers and migas, and volunteering. Everything was falling into place.

Then, I moved away.

Admittedly, I have a love/hate relationship with my home state of Wisconsin. I love it because it's home, no matter where I've lived or where I ultimately settle. I hate it because very few things about the culture fit my personality or lifestyle. But most importantly, I fucking hate winter because I'm always cold, even when it's 84 degrees outside. I feel like I'm being physically tormented for eight months of the year and I'm forced to endure it by sitting inside all day, eating a ton of crappy bar food, and wearing a lot of green and gold on Sundays.

I think I'm allowed to be this judgmental if I grew up here, and keep returning with hopes to find a different version of the place than I remembered (still patiently waiting, but also fully recognizing that the place doesn't need to change, I just need to get out).

I'm sure there is actual data somewhere to back up this gut feeling, but it seems like most Wisconsinites stick around their home state. They are lifers around these parts. They might check out Illinois or Indiana for a bit, but the pull of home usually drags them back (I fall into this category). It's not the perfect fact to pull this together, but 84% of students at UW-Milwaukee are from Wisconsin. Valuable in-state tuition benefits aside, it's more common for Wisconsin students to drive down the block from their family's house to go to college than to get out of dodge.

If you love where you grew up and it feels like the right place for you to stay rooted for the next 75 years, you do you boo. I just never had that feeling, so I sprinted away from home as fast as I could. I wanted to see what was on the other side of those cow-filled pastures and Miller Lite displays...so I went to Minnesota and looked at their cow-filled pastures and Miller Lite displays instead.

Since graduating from small-town Wisconsin, I've lived in Minneapolis, MN; Sevilla, Spain; Milwaukee, WI; Dover, England; Corvallis, OR; Takahagi, Japan; Austin, TX; and Madison, WI. I'm still looking for the place where I want to root myself for the next 75 years, but I know deep down that it's not Wisconsin.

I often remind myself of the old adage, "wherever you go, there you are." I've journaled countless pages about how any physical place can become home if you actually try to make it be your home. Wherever I go in the world, I'm going to bring with me my personality, interests, political leanings, and cultural preferences. In theory, I should be able to be exactly me, wherever I'm placed, and thrive. Anywhere can become home, right? In practice, I haven't found this to be the case. For me, my external environment very much positively or negatively impacts my experience with a place. For good or bad, I’m an emotional, empathetic, easily affected spirit feeler and once an environment is no longer net positive in my mind, it’s hard to see it as a potential home.

Anyway, this post was supposed to be about how difficult it has been to make friends in Wisconsin compared to my easy breezy Austin experience and what I can do better moving forward. As usual, I’ve really meandered through the details.

Lately I’ve been volunteering at an animal sanctuary, attending all of the social work meet-ups, and checking out trail runner group trainings. This summer I tried out language classes at the local college, and as usual, worked #allofthejobs, but it really hasn’t brought me that same sense of place or community that I felt in Texas.

How do adults make friends? Since Wisconsinites tend to stay close to where they grew up, I was convinced that everyone here already has their friends from elementary school and they’re not open for business. However, I was chatting with a colleague a few weeks ago about this and she said that she’s lived in Madison her whole life and has struggled to make friends as an adult too.

Because I’ve moved around so much, I find that I have incredibly meaningful friendships for small bursts of time and then I move again, only to have another small burst of friendship before I pack up and go do it all over again.

Austin was a city of entirely new friendships. Madison is a city of decades old high school and college friendships, but even these have drastically changed form. I thought moving back would automatically mean that I’d be seeing my trusty Sconnie friends on a regular basis, but I see them less now than I did when I was only coming home for holidays. Oddly enough, you make a concerted effort to connect when you're only in town for three days, but think that you could see that person any time when they live a couple of towns away from you, and you end up never seeing them.

I know that relationships change over time and things ebb and flow along with life responsibilities like kids, houses, spouses, and the like, but what if you’ve chosen to be in a life-long phase that doesn’t entail a lot of these same things? Do I eventually get edged out over the pressing priorities that more closely align with their new lifestyle? Do I need to intentionally search out unmarried, childless 30-somethings who have ample weekday evening hours to spare for friendship, or do I just need to do a freaking better job of reaching out to my parent friends to put a date on the calendar already? Have my married-with-children friends been thinking the same thing?

I’m sitting here blogging at 6am about taking on a 90-day challenge to make more friends, while my friend Mal has probably been up for hours taking care of her 1 year-old baby. Most of my current priorities are selfishly focused on self-improvement, with obsessions to pay off my debt, run a marathon, and become fluent in Spanish. I’m not spending my weekends weatherproofing a house or building up the self-esteem of a growing toddler.

This is not to say that my parent friends don’t also have these same self-improvement priorities and major goals. They just happen to be doing it all on top of other weighty commitments and priorities that I simply don’t have (and yet I’m still under-performing).

We’re the same age, but we’re in such different places in life right now. Sometimes it feels like I might not share enough similarities anymore to be a valuable or useful friend.

I yearn for the days when I’d see my favorite people 2-3 times a week, dominating at trivia nights, hunkering down in dance club corners, and biking around town. Now I find myself waiting an entire year to see friends, like at our annual Ragnar Trail event meet-ups. Alas, many years have passed since those nostalgic days, but it’s not too late to start creating different types of memories together, with a few additional tiny bodies now in the mix.

This brings me back to the opening sentiment about trying to schedule friend dates, but it taking three cancelled plans and 47 text messages to finally get something on the calendar. This is why one of my 90 Day Challenge goals is to make an extraordinary effort to see my friends in person, at least twice a month. That doesn’t sound very extraordinary, but considering it takes 11 IG high fives and 162 texts spread across three months to schedule a 45-minute lunch, I’ll take it. If I call or text with an actual plan and an actual date and time, I think I'll start to see my friends again...although still not sure how to find new ones.

Tiny steps, right?

Even if I’m not mentally committed to staying in Madison forever, I can at least begin treating it like home by building up new and existing relationships. Maybe, just maybe, this city will surprise me and convince me I have a lot of things worth sticking around for after all.