Friends in Nomad’s Land – 2 of 30

So in my self-imposed 30 in 30 rules, I basically promised to do something social in Denver and blog about it. That certainly makes me sound so much more pitiful than I actual am (which bothers me surprisingly little, actually) – but it got me thinking about what my nomadic lifestyle has done to my social life over time. This may be one of my more pointless posts, but… I was thinking, see.

I am a nomad. I didn’t particularly want to be one, but I am. I lived in my birthplace for less than a year. I’ve lived in nearly as many houses and apartments as I have years. I went to five different elementary schools (six if you count kindergarten), and have lived in 10 different cities just since I left high school (and many more before that). Aside from being cursed with wanderlust everytime the going gets rough, the major impact of this is that it makes it so much harder to make friends and find a social group each time I pack up and go somewhere new. Some of that’s age, but most of it is having lived through the mourning of old friends and the uncertainty of acquiring new ones over and over and over again. The idea of just waiting your time out in solitude in each new place becomes seductive, if not particularly happy or healthy.

Every time I move to a new city, I have to start over. It’s easier when you’re younger – you have a built-in peer group at school or in college, even if you do have to find a way to fit in with them, but it’s still starting over from scratch. Sure, you keep some of your distant old friends – for example, my dearest friend is a South African living in Bahrain who I met in Holland, and I still keep in touch with my best friend from high school – but it does become something of a burden to have to find like-minded individuals (since you can hardly depend on the bonds of shared past experience) to go grab a beer with.

Finding new people to hang out with, to be comfortable with, has its share of dangers too. At best, when it goes wrong, you just can’t find anyone you click with. At worst, you end up running into someone who shares a common interest, and who seems nice enough, but three weeks later is clearly desperate and wants a copy of your entire minute-by-minute schedule for the next month and starts getting pissed off if, you know, you want to spend time with your boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse. Neither situation is much fun, and I’m finding that the older I get, the less I’m inclined to risk either.

It gets really hard, and it seems like too much effort.

Now, I know that for me personally, it’s really a matter of just giving in to the permanence of my current situation and biting my lip, ignoring my (covertly) introverted nature, and getting off my butt to do social things. Nothing pitiful about it, it’s just a matter of being less lazy about it. It’s just that the inertia is a bitch. It’s something I always remedy over time, but it does kind of suck. It’s hard not to envy some of those people I know who’ve stayed relatively close to home for most of their lives, who have the benefit of old friends who know all of the old stories, and who are comfortable parts of the new ones. Us nomads get a little sick of trading our life stories with virtual strangers each time we’re transplanted, I guess.

So, anyway, the upside of being a nomad is that you get to see new places; the downside is that you end up with a massively dispersed social group, and finding a new one every couple of years is a pain in the ass. I am really glad we’re staying put for the foreseeable future – maybe that will help this time. But I do really miss my old friends I used to go grab beers with, whether in Indiana or Amsterdam or New Orleans. E-mailed beer just doesn’t cut it.

Listening to: Marillion – Kayleigh