I’ve just returned from Iceland, having travelled there solo but with a group of women who were complete strangers to me a week ago. The premise of the company I travelled with, is to create adventures for solo travellers in a group setting. Before I was due to travel, I was filled with a slow dread. What if I didn’t get on with people in the group? What if they didn’t like me? What if everyone else made friends but I was the outlier?
These are worries coded to you when you are a child, thrown off balance by the shifting tectonic plates of friendships. The aftershock of doubt and fear from events decades-old, still sometimes trembles through my body. All of us have a book in our personal history around friendships that contain some defining moments: the time a friend said something cruel to you, the moment you realised you were ousted from a group, the sensation of a trapdoor opening beneath your feet because something you unknowingly said or did meant that you forfeited your friendship.
Some of these things define us. Such as the time a friend told me when I was 18: “I wouldn’t really describe you as a funny person. No, not funny.” Or the time I met the neighbourhood friends of my best friend at school, and she told me afterwards they found me a bit too loud and obnoxious.
These ghosts are hard to exorcise and haunt the edges of every new interaction. However, what I found among these women, was laughter, connection, vulnerability, the sense of community and realising you are not alone in how you feel, and looking out for each other, all of it coalescing to create a power-cell of warmth and connection.
Now, as I sit here writing this, all of us now in our different corners of the world, I feel as if a part of me is missing.
It seems strange to feel this way about a group of people I’ve only just met but it also feels like a reassurance, a reminder that making friends has no age limit, and that the intensity or strength of connection is not just the preserve of our oldest friendships. I should already know this, given that I have made some incredible new friends in the last few years, and that being asked about making new friends is something I get asked about a lot. Particularly by other women.
I didn’t always feel this way, though. In my thirties, I went through an acute feeling of loneliness around my friendships. As more of them were having children, and I was in an increasingly difficult and isolating marriage, I felt as if we were moving further and further apart. Not only were our lives moving in different directions, but my friends with small children simply didn’t have time for themselves, let alone time to pour into a friendship.
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