I wish I could say that realizing such a grand lesson was immediately life changing. It wasn’t. Shortly thereafter I moved to Toronto, where I didn’t know a soul, and was presented with a whole host of opportunities to make friends. And I did make a few friends, but mostly I made acquaintances, a whole shwackload of them.
I lived and worked on Queen Street, so I walked up and down that street every single day. And I loved it. To me it was the heart of the city, a beautiful daily adventure, and everything I could possibly want. And because I spent so much time on Queen Street, it didn’t take long for myself and the other regular fixtures to start noticing each other. There was a guy at the Laundromat who told me which machines were the best, and who invited me to his friend’s place for Thanksgiving dinner one year (the most beautiful Thanksgiving I’d ever seen). There was the door man at the Bovine who would tell me all sorts of crazy stories when I stopped to chat with him on my way home. There were plenty of other faces that grew familiar, and who I’d swap a hello or a smile with.
There were my coworkers at HMV. There were all the same faces on the film sets I worked on, and who would often invite me into their Euchre games. There were the girls I did promotional work with. There was a rotating door of roommates, a handful of people my age at church (while I was attending), and the same 20-something, girl-next-doors who I’d share audition waiting rooms with. Just to be clear, I met a LOT of people in Toronto.
But knowing a lot of people and having a lot, or any, friends, are two entirely different things. Sure, I’d chat with my coworkers while on shift, then smile and wave at a bunch of Queen Streeters on my walk home, but once I was home I rarely went out again, I rarely received any phone calls, and I spent more time alone and lonely than even my Introverted self was comfortable with.
So why didn’t I take the friend-making lesson to heart? Why didn’t I reach out? I don’t know. I DID spend time with people that I enjoyed, but I also felt like most of the people I knew were exactly what they were: acquaintances. It was nice work with them, chat with them, and occasionally go to parties with them, but I didn’t feel like there was any connection, I didn’t think any of them would want to just come over and hang out with me, or meet up for coffee and a philosophical discussion about life.
How wrong I was.
To be fair, my time in Toronto wasn’t entirely devoid of close friends. When I first moved to the city I met this spunky blonde. She was in my circle of church acquaintances so we crossed paths here and there, but that was about it until one day she invited me to go see Blur with her at one of Toronto’s awesome little live music venues. I was baffled by her invitation because we didn’t seem to have a connection, but maybe all her friends were busy, or maybe she felt sorry for me? I dunno, but I went with her, we had a great time, and I’m sooooo glad she went out on a limb and took that first step towards making friends.
We clicked that night, we found common ground and made an incredible connection. It turned out that we were both new to the city, both actors working our way through the audition grind, and both living off savings and avoiding getting “real” jobs while we pursued our dream. Which meant that we spent an entire summer going to amazing live music gigs, seeing a lot of live comedy, dating the musicians we watched on stage, taking naps together, going on fast food dates (we’d share one combo, but each get our own dessert), occasionally working promotion jobs together and generally stomping up and down Queen West during long, warm, gorgeous, Toronto summer nights. That was a glorious time.
Maybe that’s why I forgot about my light-bulb moment, because I’d been lucky enough to be invited out instead of having to do the inviting, and then I had a friend – and one friend was clearly all I needed.
I was absolutely devastated when she moved away.
And by then, my acquaintances were so firmly in place as secondary players in my life that I had no idea how to invite them in and ask them to step up as friends. And so I was lonely, despite knowing the names and faces of dozens – possibly even hundreds – of Torontonians.
Four years later I decided that it was time for me to leave the city. As word got out that I was moving, suddenly I was inundated with a flood of people who were desperate to spend time together. I was blown away.
There were two reasons for this: The first is that Toronto can be true to its reputation of being business-like, cold and a little snobby. People are busy. And as such, you need to make plans, often weeks or months in advance. Want to grab a coffee with someone? Great! How does Thursday after next sound? Yikes. What I was reading as indifference was really just a bit of a cultural gap.
The second and much more compelling reason, was that somehow, unbeknownst to me, I’d made connections with way more people than I’d realized. Sure, it was just a spark in many cases, but there was enough between us that suddenly these acquaintances were desperate to see that spark fanned into a cozy fire before I traipsed off to the prairies.
I was so grateful for the attention as people flooded me with invitations to go out or meet for conversations or simply came by my house to spend time with me. But I was also sad, because had I known that people liked me and thought about me and genuinely wanted to get to know me better, maybe it would have changed how I interacted with them. Maybe I would have been more confident in calling them up and initiating the ability to further our connection, to check out whether that spark would lead to a lasting friendship. And I was sad that all these people were so “busy” that they didn’t take the time to seek out connections until the opportunity was almost lost to them.
And so, Lesson Number Two in How To Make Friends wasn’t too far flung from Lesson Number One, but obviously I’d failed to really learn that lesson the first time. Now I knew that not only did friend-making not magically happen by itself, but that I had to be willing to try and ignite even the smallest of sparks.
Leave a Reply