I Have No Friends.

And I’m not alone…

That’s my face. Boldly having no friends apparently.

Today’s post is going to be a little different.

It might not be as funny, but it’s personal and heartfelt, and a little meta, but that’s just how I felt today. It was a rough day with my chronic illness, and the days that bring the worst pain, also seem to make me less funny and more sentimentally goopy.

So please bear with me for this little rant/writing therapy session — and I promise the next post will be back to your regularly scheduled comedic programming.

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I attended a Substack Live recently, because — well, I get bored at work and have the attention span of a drunk gnat on Mardi Gras. It was a digital fireside-style chat between Dre Beltrami and Kristi Keller 🇨🇦. I thought I’d just kill some time while my brain marinated (ok, festered) on an article I was writing.

But instead of doing a reset on my writing brain, their chat really affected me.

These two kick-arse ladies had this brutally honest virtual chitchat. The kind of convo that you have on quiet girl’s nights. I only know Kristi a little and know Dre even less. But I felt like I was having a daytime pyjama party with them. Although maybe that’s because I was still in my pj’s (oh the life of a writer).

Their talk was lovely. Well, until it wasn’t. It made me realize how much I missed ‘girl talk’ in my life.

It hit me like a fuckton of bricks.

…I have no friends.

My best friend is my Mom. She’s the friend I talk to the most. And as much as she’d be over the dang moon to hear that, I think that even she might be a little sad to hear that come out of my mouth.

I used to have friends. Real ones, not characters in a book, I pinky promise. Then I moved from Mexico back to Canada. I got into a relationship, then out of it. I rented an apartment in my sister’s basement after that, and I had her and her family. They were my friends, so this lazy patootie didn’t bother making more.

Then they moved further north, and I moved back to the city I grew up in.

Most of the people I once knew there had left, and the few who remained— well, they weren’t as fun as I remember in my teens and early 20s. Maybe they changed, but I know that I became an entirely different person in the twenty years I was gone.

I chrysalid-ed out of my young self and morphed into my middle-aged-but-somehow-also-old-AF-now self.

Readjusting to my new self in my old city was weird. But I never really put down roots because I was planning to move back to Mexico, because holy fucksicles do Canadian winters blow. Winter can suck my ascended left testicle.

So I didn’t make friends.

Well, I made one friend, Diane. She was giggly, and bubbly, and we more or less clicked. It was a pretty good friendship considering I found her just 6 houses down from me. We were friends for about a year and a half, then she moved up north to look after her aging parents.

Well, crap on a cracker, there I was — again, friendless.

One thing I learned over the years was that if I was experiencing something, I probably wasn’t the only one. I couldn’t be the only one who is friendless, so I chatted with my work bestie, Google. I did some research to find other nerds who did research on not having friends. You know…science.

‘Science’ or whatever, says that the average person has one to five or more friends. In this scenario, ‘science’ is the overly-friendly fuckers over at Pew Research (yes that was written as bitterly as it sounded), who report:

“A narrow majority of adults (53%) say they have between one and four close friends, while a significant share (38%) say they have five or more. Some 8% say they have no close friends.”

Who? Who are these people with multiple friends? They must be all those people I see on Instagram who I normally assume are flesh-covered bots. Are these friends rented? Are they part of a cult?

Friendship levels vary with age apparently, says Pew:

“There’s an age divide in the number of close friends people have. About half of adults 65 and older (49%) say they have five or more close friends, compared with 40% of those 50 to 64, 34% of those 30 to 49 and 32% of those younger than 30. In turn, adults under 50 are more likely than their older counterparts to say they have between one and four close friends.”

I’m in the 30–49 age range, so things are looking up a little bit for me here, as only 34% of people in my age bracket have five or more friends. But I’m still supposed to, mathematically, have one to four friends. Here I am though, planted firmly in the 8% of friendless fuckers.

At least that makes me rare, ergo — special. Right?

Come on, lemme have this one.

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But back to Kristi and Dre’s Substack Live (←-click here to watch it). About 7 minutes into their chat about reinventing yourself when you’re halfway dead (what they call ‘midlife’), they talked about how both of their midlife cocoonesque reinventions were done online.

Then Kristi said what so many of us are afraid to, “I have no life offline. Like zero. I walk my dog, that’s it.”

Ooph Kristi — me too. Right down to the dog walks.

Many days, the most conversation I have all day is at the dog park. Well, unless you count me talking to my dog. She’s a great listener, but that bitch is a shitty conversationalist.

I might be one of the most happy-go-lucky to be alone humans on the planet. But of course I am, when I’m alone — I get to hang out with me. And I’m hilarious. The thing is though, human beings aren’t meant to be alone. Even the most self-amusing of us.

Further into the chat with my two new digital-besties-for-the-day friends, Dre said something that resonated down to my tippy toes. She said in the last 6 months on Substack she’s met people who truly get her. She’s found more people in this digital playground than in the last years of her real life.

Dre said these digital friends are free to be feral (a good thing) and weird (an even gooder thing).

She’s right. People get to be truly themselves online, including about all their weird peccadillos. You can reinvent yourself, you can be exactly who you want to be, and you don’t have to hide your weirdness because real people like family and coworkers might not like it.

We’ve entered the world of the virtually-friended existence.

There are oodles of people like me who have no friends. I’m not alone in being alone. A quick YouTube search shows that online, I’m not alone. The famed Brene Brown even made a speech on it.

Millions of people like me have watched these videos, of creators like me telling the world that we have no friends. Each has their own reasons for it, but the common thread is letting things slip away, and getting comfortable in being alone.

If I had to make up some bullshit reasons why I have no friends, to avoid saying that I haven’t bothered making any, I’d say it’s multifold:

• I moved countries and left my friends;

• I quit drinking alcohol and suddenly wasn’t invited to many things anymore (not that my social calendar was brimming with dates before);

• I work at home so I can’t make coworker friends;

• I don’t fit into society. I’m not a mom like most women my age, I don’t drink, and I work home alone;

• I haven’t found anyone local who is 40% nice, 50% feral, and wants to spend 10% of our time together comedically roasting each other.

• And I didn’t bother making any friends.

We all have our reasons. It does feel good to know that I’m not alone in being alone. And neither are you, my fellow 8%ers.

But I’m not entirely alone either, like Dre, I have made incredible virtual friendships. Dre did it on Substack; I did it originally on Medium as I started there first. Many of those friendships have followed me over here.

These friendships might not be what Morpheus would consider “the real world”, but they’re not Matrix simulations either. They’re real people, who I’m more honest with than I’ve been with my ‘real’ friends. As Dre said, in the ‘real world’ you have a small bubble to choose friends from and you have to “chameleon it up” (Dre, I love you haha).

Online, you have a bigger pond. A digital ocean of souls to find the people you truly and authentically connect to. People like my brother-from-another-mother, The Mouthy Renegade writer; my former editor turned bestie-who-still-edits-my-ass, Karen; and the writers in a Discord writing group that I’ve been in for a couple of years now.

We talk every day.

Every. Single. Day.

Back when I had ‘real’ friends, I never talked to them every dang day. My virtual friends and I also talk with more passion than their unplugged counterparts, because of our shared love of writing. I can’t talk to real people about writing. Not one person in my offline life even reads my writing (other than Mike, the guy I met at the dog park).

So perhaps I do have friends.

They might not be ‘real’ in the sense we can go for dinner together, but in many ways, they feel more real than my out-of-the-Matrix friends.

Or maybe it’s just that we can be more real with ourselves and each other online.

All I know for sure is that Medium and now Substack, brought me back to life…even if it is only digitally. I adore these platforms and the people on them more than — even as a writer — can express.

So to the beautiful-souled humans on this platform, thanks for being here. This place might matter more than you know, to people you don’t even know exist yet.

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