Friendships are some of the most important things in life, especially when you have a chronic health condition. We all need someone there for us, but when you have unusual situations in your life, you tend to depend on a support system more than most.
I don’t know that I even need to acknowledge how particular I am about making friends. When I was a freshman in high school, I was friends with a boy, and I’d talk to him on the phone before bedtime several times a week. So when I found out he was moving at the end of the year, I was absolutely devastated. It was 2001—before cell phones with free long distance became commonplace—which meant that after he moved, I wouldn’t be able to talk to him as often, if at all.
Even today, there are two parts of this story that rattle my mind. The first is that I ever talked that much on the phone. I hate talking on the phone these days, and at times, phone calls cause me to have mild anxiety episodes, depending on who I’m calling. The second part that I can’t comprehend is what I did after I found out my friend was moving.
I clearly needed a replacement phone friend, and I took to calling other people in my class to “interview” them to see if they could take over. I realize now that this was bizarre. And I have no explanation, other than I was 12 or 13 years old at the time, and clearly my brain was not developed enough to make rational decisions.
I figured out that I needed to give up phone interviewing after another boy’s girlfriend confronted me because he and I had had a two-hour phone conversation. Apparently, the girlfriend had never even had a 10-minute phone conversation with him, and she didn’t understand what we talked about all that time. I asked her if she’d ever brought up hunting, fishing, or other things her boyfriend liked. She said she hadn’t. In any case, that ended my golden age of phone chatting.
I definitely think there is something to the Girl Scout song about friendship that says, “Make new friends, but keep the old.” (I was a Girl Scout, by the way—a Daisy and then a Brownie. I wore the outfit all of the time to school. I was terrible at selling cookies. I’d take my wagon full of cookies around and started eating them myself after a while. Also, when we “camped out,” it was at a hotel.)
It’s not easy to make friends after you’ve graduated college, and you are no longer surrounded by people in your peer group. And it’s more challenging when you live in the suburbs. Don’t get me wrong, I have amazing best friends. But I need friendships beyond them, and that can be challenging, especially with all of the time I’ve spent in hospitals and at doctors’ appointments.
Along the way, I developed a few toxic friendships. And if there’s anything I don’t need, it is people who are not very supportive. One thing I’ve noticed over the past few years is that there are people who will pop back into my life when really awful things are going on. Sometimes when I’m experiencing a health speed bump, I’ll receive an e-mail from someone I haven’t talked to in months or years. The message asks about what’s going on and how I’m doing.
I usually reply, ask questions about how his/her life is—and then comes radio silence. I would like to think that most of the time their intentions are good. I’d like to give them the benefit of the doubt. But sometimes it feels like people just want to know what’s going on without real interaction. At the end of the day, this is painful, and it feels like I’m being offered a single sip of water when I’ve been walking in the desert. It’s part of the overall category of toxic friendship that I’ve been trying to leave out of my life.
The Internet has been somewhat of a saving grace for me. Since I don’t always feel fantastic, it lets me connect with friends such as my fellow NYLI members, who don’t live close by. When I first moved to Milwaukee, I didn’t know anyone in the area. But this is not where I discuss how I developed friendships with people who lived close by. This is instead about how I’ve made friends online.
When I graduated college, I’d been working on a project to try to find ways to bring the arts to the chronically ill. (When I talk about this in person, the conversation can last a while. And while I am still incredibly passionate about this cause, it’s been more difficult recently to get things back on track.) It was a few weeks into getting my Web site established that an American woman in her 20s who was teaching in Hungary contacted me. She wanted to volunteer in any way she could. She eventually became a board member.
I’ve had the chance to read some of the novels she’s written, and we exchange tweets, chat on Facebook, and even Skype. She has lupus, and we easily empathize with each other. I consider her a good friend. But I’ve never spent a single moment with her in person. When I think about this fact, it’s kind of mind-blowing. That two people who live nowhere near each other can connect in such a way is pretty great.
If you didn’t know, I’m obsessed with Broadway and just generally all things musical theater. I used to eat ramen noodles as a child, pretending that they were gruel, and I was in the show Oliver. About three years ago, I started watching a Web series in which three actors in NYC discussed the happenings of Broadway. For a person living in Wisconsin, this was exciting. I watched it weekly, and I participated in the show’s online chat.
Over time, two hosts of the show, Marti and David, became familiar with me. Eventually, I asked them to be entertainment for an upcoming fundraiser for my nonprofit. They happily obliged. It was amazing. I talk to one of them, who has since become a model for the cover of a popular novel series, a few times a week via Twitter. We keep up with what is going on in each other’s lives. Again, I’ve spent maybe two days in person with them. Thanks to technology, distance really doesn’t matter.
I did make a friend while online dating (which I actually hate; I feel like it is a vortex of negativity). I think the key difference here is that we never dated. He had a link to his Twitter feed online, and I appreciated his wit. I sent him a message through the dating Web site, and then he deactivated his account.
Because I’d apparently decided to have a gutsy moment, I sent him a message via Twitter asking how he could possibly deactivate his account without responding to my well-thought-out and moderately witty message. We sent tweets back and forth, and we continue to tweet each other now. Since he lives in Chicago and I obviously don’t, we’ve only met up twice for coffee while I was visiting the city. He’s pretty great, and I definitely appreciate his friendship.
Sometimes I reflect on some of the unusual stories that accompany my electronically acquired friendships. I’ve even become friends with others who have health issues similar to mine through networking at conferences and on message boards. It’s kind of neat.
When you have an already complicated life, it’s important to make sure that all of the people in your life are sources of positivity. My friends continue to be a great source of that very encouragement and positivity. It’s important that when you go through life’s challenges, it isn’t something you do alone. Even in more isolating situations, it is always possible to connect with others. That’s part of the human experience—to connect. It’s unavoidable.