Episode 26: Wanna Be My Friend?

TRANSCRIPT OF “WANNA BE MY FRIEND?”

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MALE VO [00:03]

This is Bad Attitudes.

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LAURA [00:20]
Hello friends and strangers! Welcome to another episode of Bad Attitudes: An Uninspiring Podcast About Disability. I’m your host, Laura.

Making new friends as an adult is fucking hard. Full stop.

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As always, I’d like to remind you that disability is not a monolith. My experience as a disabled person is going to be different from the experiences of other disabled people. I am one voice for the disabled community, but I am not the only voice.

I recently signed up for a service called Nudge, which texts you journaling prompts three times a week. I used to be a huge journaler, and I had been looking for a way to get back into it for a while. Prompts seemed to be the way to go, but when I searched for prompts, they didn’t give me what I was looking for, or I got a lot of ads for guided journals. So when an ad for Nudge showed up on my Instagram, I thought I’d give it a shot.

Nudge is a paid service, although I’m currently in a one-month free trial, and I’ve gotta say, I really like what I’ve seen so far. I will likely keep it going once my free trial is over. If you’d like to check out Nudge, I’ll leave a link for you in the episode description.

Now, this is not sponsored (unfortunately), so you’re probably like, “Okay, Laura, that sounds cool, but why are you telling me this?” Well, my third-ever prompt was about friendship, specifically: “As you grow older, how important are new friendships? Why? If important, how will you keep making new friends? If not, how do you ensure you remain close with current friends?” As I started thinking about what I might write in my journal, I realized it was too much, the whole thing was just too much. I had too much to say about making friends as a disabled adult to limit it to my journal.

Because making friends as an adult is fucking hard.

Especially if you don’t have kids.

Especially if you don’t work a traditional job.

Especially if you’re disabled.

Think back to how the majority of your friendships were formed over the course of your life. School, right? That’s probably the first thing that comes to mind. From elementary school through college, we made most of our friends by being thrown into a communal setting with complete strangers and somehow gravitating towards people like ourselves.

Then, after you graduate college, you make new friends in your workplace. Again, being thrown into a communal setting with strangers and finding people with whom you have something in common. Once you have kids, your kids sort of dictate who you make friends with, generally the parents of your kids’ friends.

My peak friendship period was college. Specifically sophomore year. That year, I met three girls who would change my concept of what friendship meant. I had friends in high school. In fact, I had the same group of friends from seventh grade until I transferred high schools in eleventh grade. And I desperately tried to cling to those friendships then. But the reality is, for the most part, they weren’t good friends to me. They didn’t treat me particularly well. I was consistently on the outside, even when I was included.

But when I met these three girls, suddenly, I felt truly valued. Like what I thought and wanted and said actually mattered to them. I felt like people wanted me to be around, not that they were just tolerating my presence. This was a huge revelation for me, because I had grown up thinking high school was where you made your lifelong friends. And for some people that is true. A particular pair of guys I went to school with have been best friends since at least seventh grade, bonding over a love of soccer and Pearl Jam. I’m friends with both of them on Facebook and I see their occasional bromance posts and it is beautiful. That’s what I expected my high school friendships to be.

But that isn’t how things worked out. In some cases, it was a natural growing apart, but in others, it was a conscious decision on my part to pull back. And, you know, they don’t seem to miss me. Which, admittedly, hurts a little.

But then I met my college friends. Not just those three girls who made up what I think of as my core friend group, but my other friends, who were just as important. People who cared about me. Who cared if I wasn’t around. Who wanted me to BE around. That wasn’t something I had experienced before.

And that’s probably why it hurts that much more to admit that, today, those friendships don’t burn nearly as bright. 

Part of it was life. One girl transferred to a different school. Another, who is still my closest friend today, ended up having to drop out. I was a year ahead of them all, so I graduated first and was gone from campus and out of college life.

Our paths diverged a lot. They got married, had kids, or became stepmoms. Paths I’ve barely looked down, let alone thought about setting foot on. In one case, she seemed to outgrow me. I lost touch with her even though I tried to stay connected, and, in fact, just discovered she’s now married! And I had no idea. And that makes me really sad.

I worked with some amazing women in my job after college and I am friendly with several of them. But, I was in my early twenties at the time and they were all in different life stages than I was. So they were my coworkers and we were friendly, but we weren’t peers. They all had much more experience than I did in a variety of arenas. So as much as I liked them, I didn’t feel especially comfortable hanging out with them.

That was my last real opportunity to make friends by being in the same place at the same time. After leaving that job, I went back to school online and eventually decided to work for myself. I also had some years where I was more depressed than I had been, which wasn’t conducive to going out and making friends.

Don’t imagine I was locked in my house during this time. During this period, my sister and I were out almost every weekend at concerts, either at our local bar or the nearby amphitheater. We saw a lot of the same people over and over again and became friendly with many of them. Would I call them friends? Not really.

This went on for like seven years. Eventually, the artists we wanted to see weren’t coming around as much or tickets were out of our price range. My sister moved out of state for a while, so my concert buddy wasn’t around. I would have happily gone with other people, but, honestly, it wasn’t worth the effort. See, my sister and I have a shorthand. She already knows how to deal with any issues that arise related to my disability. She knows how to handle ableism and isn’t afraid to put people in their place. I would have had to teach anyone else all of this. And while I’m willing to put in the effort of educating people on my disability and ableism, I’m not especially eager to do it with people I don’t anticipate developing a real relationship with.

And that was what it came down to. The people I COULD have gone to concerts with weren’t people I saw myself developing friendships with.

I tried other avenues as well. I used the website Meetup to connect with book lovers. I tried out a couple of book clubs. One was made up of people I found sort of uppity, for lack of a better word, so I only went to a couple of those meetings. The second one was more successful, but, unfortunately, after a few months, the leader moved out of state and no one picked up the baton.

Understand that going to these meetings was a big deal for me. I’ve mentioned before that I’m an introvert, and putting myself in unfamiliar situations is HARD. I find small talk painful. I don’t know how to do it, even to fake it. If we don’t have an actual topic to discuss, I’m going to sit there in awkward silence because I don’t know what else to do, so you better be able to pick up the conversational slack.

But I didn’t just have to put myself into uncomfortable situations. I had to put myself in potentially inaccessible situations. In order to avoid showing up only to find myself denied complete access, I had to go out and investigate ahead of time. I had to, on multiple occasions, drive out to potential meeting spaces and scope out the accessibility. It wouldn’t do to show up only to find an access ramp that belongs in a skate park. I had to investigate the parking, the access into the venue, and the venue itself. I had to put in a whole lot of extra work before I could even begin to consider how to go against my introverted nature.

This is par for the course if you’re disabled and accessibility is something you’re concerned about. Whenever I’m considering going somewhere new, I have to check it out beforehand to make sure I can manage on my own or if I’ll need someone to come along with me. I literally have to go to a place before I can GO to that place. Sure, I could just call ahead, but that’s rarely reliable. “Hi, what’s your accessibility like?” “It’s accessible. We have a ramp.” Trust me, having a ramp and being accessible are not the same thing.

When I got my tattoo last summer, I would have been SOL if I hadn’t had someone going with me. The building itself is accessible, but because the location is near a station for my city’s light rail, the parking lot is filled with cars who park in the lot all day. Including illegally in the accessible spaces and the access aisles, making it impossible for me to have a safe space to get in and out of my car.

My point here is that the lack of accessibility makes it nearly impossible for me to venture out to new places without someone else in tow. And if I have someone to go along with me, then I wouldn’t need to venture out to meet new people in the first place. If you’re disabled, you basically need friends to make friends.

Now that we’re in year 3 of a viral pandemic, I’m not interested in venturing out to meet new people anytime soon. Although I’ve always been a homebody, the past three years have made me slightly agoraphobic. I’m not afraid of leaving my house, but I will avoid it if I can because people are gross and nasty and can’t be trusted, and the way disabled people have been treated during the pandemic is enough to make me never want to leave my house again.

To circle back to the prompt that, well, prompted this episode, yes. YES, I want to make new friends but, no, I have no idea how to do it. I don’t have a ready-made situation for friend-making like a communal workplace or kids in a class with 30 other kids, some of whose parents I should like, based solely on statistics. Being disabled, of course, adds another layer of difficulty. It’s bad enough trying to find places that are accessible that also correspond with my interests and the types of people I want to meet. But, oftentimes, my disability feels like a barrier between me and new people. Unless and until I explain it, it’s an elephant in the room. Because people always have questions, whether they ask them or not.

Over the years, I’ve made my fair share of online friends, but none of those friendships are exactly what I’m looking for. I don’t feel like I could meet up with those friends and feel like no time has passed or there would be no awkwardness. And it feels a lot harder to make internet friends today than it did when I was teenager. I mean, that’s probably on me. I put up with a lot less now than I did then. And, unfortunately, social media has made it pretty easy to gauge people’s true colors without much effort.

I can’t believe I almost got to the end of this episode without mentioning how hard it can be to make new friends if you don’t drink. A lot of disabled people can’t drink because it might interact with medication or because of how it might affect their condition. I don’t drink both because of potential interactions and simply because I choose not to. I’ve never felt a very strong compulsion to drink. I don’t have anything against drinking or against people who imbibe, but I do have some questions about drinking culture.

Like, why do so many people seem to think you can’t have fun if you don’t drink? People will refuse to go to an event where alcohol won’t be served. Why? And why do some people insist they can’t relax unless they’re drinking? And why would anyone want to get blackout drunk on purpose? Why would you want to put your body into such a condition that you know within a few hours will have you sick and vomiting and basically completely unable to function? I’ve seen hungover people and honestly, it looks like the worst flu I’ve ever had, and I can’t imagine wanting to feel like that on PURPOSE.

I understand we all have our coping mechanisms and that a lot of alcohol culture has to do with society and the alcohol lobby and all that. But still, so many questions.

When it comes to existing friendships, disabled people often lose out on theirs because they may have to decline invitations more than most or be unable to participate in certain activities. As a result, their non-disabled friends tend to leave them by the wayside and they end up sitting alone at home. The onus shouldn’t have to be on disabled people to keep their friendships intact. Friendships are meant to be partnerships. Yes, we might have to say “no” more often, but don’t stop inviting your disabled and chronically ill friends out. Make an effort to find activities your disabled friends can take part in, even if it’s just hanging out and talking. That’s some of the best time I’ve ever spent with my friends.

It is way too easy for disabled people to become lost and forgotten by their friends. I’ve felt lost and forgotten before, and I’m afraid that I might reach a point where it can’t be undone. It’s why I’m constantly trying to find ways to cultivate new friendships. Trying and failing for the most part, but trying at least.

How do you make new friends as an adult? Have you cracked the secret? I want to hear your tips.

Thanks for listening and I’ll talk to you in the next one.

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