On friendship, loneliness and feeling on the 'outside'

I’m not always good at making friends. 

I think it used to be easier. When I was five years old I made friends with Victoria Dentist, who lived next door on McHardy St in Havelock North. The extra drawcard was that the Dentist household had a Commodore 64 computer with Pacman and her Mum made really good pumpkin soup. The only time I ever stamped my foot in rebellion against my mother was on our concrete driveway when she wouldn’t let me go to Victoria’s house for the afternoon.

When we moved to Hastings I became best friends with a boy called David. He was in my class at school and lived around the corner, so we used to hang out a lot. For a while, we both liked the same girl – Susan McArtney - and although one year Susan and I gave each other Christmas cards (which made my heart race) I think she always preferred David. We’ll never really know, because she moved to Australia when we were 9, so that was that.

When we moved to the small country town of Morrinsville, I was 13 years old and entering an awkward phase of my life. I like to think it was just a phase. But maybe it wasn’t. 

My high-school years were filled with complicated and fluctuating levels of self-rejection. When I was 14 I went through a phase of writing “life-sux” in small letters on the school blackboard before class started; I was having a bit of a time. It was also my job to put out the Morrinsville Elim church sign on the main street of town when we were setting up on Sunday morning. I’d peer out the door, make sure no one I knew was coming, and then quickly scurry out to place it there on the footpath before dashing back inside to safety. Then I’d go upstairs and sing about how I wasn’t ashamed of the gospel.

By the time I left home and moved to Auckland as an 18 year old, I was a strange mixture of confidence and insecurity. I moved into a Christian hostel and made some amazing friends that would last me for many years. I never really made meaningful connections at University though – somehow it was safer to make Christian friends because at least we had a shared language I could understand. I could be a somebody in the Christian world that I couldn’t be beyond it. And so in the end, having a brief science career – during which I also managed to make zero work friends – I gave it all up to work for the church. Maybe it was the call of God; I liked to think so. But perhaps it was also easier for me to go to work somewhere that I mattered, where I knew how the system worked and how to make friends. And I made a lot of friends during this time. By the time I got married in 2008 we had 23 in the bridal party and 350 people at the wedding. There were friends everywhere. 

But as time has passed, and my journey of life, change and transition has continued, some of those friendships have faded, most for understandable reasons. Some friendships changed because I got married, and suddenly the dynamic shifted and we didn’t know how to negotiate it well. Others changed because our married friends started having kids and we couldn’t, and so they moved on with each other while we were stuck at a previous intersection, frustrated by a red light that wouldn’t change no matter how long we sat there.

And now I’m 40, and trying to figure out how you make friends again. I have some very good friends, a few close friends, but I also know loneliness. And isolation. 

It’s possible to feel alone in a crowd. I’ve felt it many times. Occasionally the feeling has been so strong that it seemed like I was in a different dimension from those around me. Like I was an outsider in an alternative reality; close enough to see everyone, but stuck in a dislocated trance, watching others glide by laughing at each other’s jokes. I think about this sometimes, this feeling of being on the outside. Because although I don’t sense it this viscerally all of the time, it feels like a metaphor for the way many of us are engaging in the world.

For some reason, for all of our technological development, scientific, philosophical and theological knowledge, and with the multitude of experts, doctorates, think-tanks and research projects, we’re still getting further apart. We are feeling more lonely.

We’re not only outsiders to those around us, but outsiders to ourselves. Our contemporary life has stripped us of meaning and depth, so our interior lives have disintegrated, washed away in a flood of memes, notifications and 60-hour work weeks. 

We have become unavailable to ourselves, and unavailable to each other.

Of course this makes it sound like no-one has any friends. And that’s not true. I have friends, and I love them and they love me. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t warning signs. Some blinking lights telling us that if we’re going to have a meaningful life, we need some ways to come to know ourselves, and to open up to those around us. When I think about the times in my life when I’ve struggled with friendship, it’s when I’ve struggled with myself too. When I meet someone I want to be friends with, my typical instinct is to think “I don’t want to be a bother”, or, “I’m sure they’ve got enough friends without me adding to their burden”. Fortunately, I’ve had some good friends who have compensated for my negative assumptions with their inexplicably irrepressible enthusiasm for my presence in their life.

But what that tells me is that I’m in need of my own renovation. Maybe I can’t cure my tendency toward awkwardness or my introverted way of being in the world, but perhaps I can embrace practices that will enrich and strengthen my inner life, and that will help me open up to the idea that there is great love to be found in the world; love that doesn’t depend on “right” beliefs or behaviours, but on an openness and availability to each other that transcends all of our unnecessary limitations.

I think this is why I’m still interested in God too I guess. Perhaps I’m less certain in what I mean by that term than I used to be, but there is something deeply personal about life that I can’t get seem to get away from. And if life is deeply and profoundly personal, then there is something personal about existence itself. I don’t think God is a person, hanging out somewhere on his shiny throne, but I like the idea that God is person-ness. Being-ness. The source of this sense of meaning. And that tells me that even when I find it awkward, even when I feel like I’m on the outside, there is something rumbling beneath the surface that invites me to see something else too. To sense an invitation into something more beautiful, that doesn’t rely on me “changing”, but meets me in the moment and helps me find my feet.