Saturated but Still Parched: PYL In-Flight: Feb 3, 2023

Welcome Back My Oversaturated Passengers:

It’s raining again in northern California. While we desperately need the rain to combat the drought, many places are still recovering from the nine atmospheric rivers we experienced starting on New Year’s Eve when it rained here for 13 hours straight. Roads closed and in some cases collapsed. Buildings flooded displacing businesses and people. Folks who’d traveled to Tahoe for the holidays were stranded and/or sat in hours of traffic attempting to return to the Bay Area.

I’ve never seen anything like this in California and I’ve lived here my entire life.

Even the coastline shifted. While we haven’t been to the Santa Cruz, Monterey, and Big Sur areas to see the damage, Pillar Point Beach where we take George weekly near Half Moon Bay, is almost unrecognizable. The beach is steep and what was once a sharp cliff has turned into easy beach access which is nice since the regular stairwell down to the beach is unusable.

We became completely saturated with no place for the extra water to go and yet we are still in a drought.

On a recent trip to Tahoe, I started to think about how social media bombards us with information about the people in our lives to the point of oversaturation and yet we may still be starving for connection. We are still lonely.

For many of us, our worlds shrunk with Covid. I know mine did.

I became hyperfocused on my family (typical overfunctioner) and the ways in which I would normally meet and connect with other people were no longer available.

I tried to stay connected with people through Zoom cocktail parties, twice monthly Silk + Sonder virtual get togethers to work on our planners, and even hosted small BYOB get togethers for friends around our firepit.

During the first month of Covid, when the world shut down, I turned 50 and I experienced what a lot of women do as we age: we have decreasing tolerance for bullshit including people who no longer bring us joy or don’t hold up their end of the relationships.

After a while, I stopped hosting the Zoom events because the friends I invited no longer showed up consistently. I stopped hosting or coordinating in-person events for the same reason. And then I waited for others to step up to host and add me to the guest list.

But the invitations didn’t come.

Because of social media (Instagram and Facebook), I’ve liked/hearted the pictures of my ‘friends’ out together wondering if my value was in the organizing/facilitating because I sure wasn’t getting any invites.

At the same time, I was getting a lot of requests for my time to help people with their endeavors like introductions, advice, or money.

I’ve spent the last two weeks thinking about how to write about this topic without coming across as pathetic or needy. I’ve also spent time wondering about my overall value with other people.

It’s demoralizing to feel like the only time people reach out to you is when they want or need something.

I’ve talked about this with Zeke and I’ve hinted around this with some of the gals I play tennis with to get their thoughts on what amounts to the challenges of adult friendships. As a verbal processor, I need to talk through my thoughts and ideas until I have clarity. I also wanted to gather more information to understand if I was alone in my experience.

Two weeks ago when I started to write this I was in a pretty bad place. It coincided with Finn heading back to Vermont which didn’t help.

I was heartened last week when I had a makeup singles match and was the only one on the team playing that day, and three of my tennis teammates came out to cheer me on (I baked apricot scones as an incentive!). I’ve started to get to know one of the gals off the court and we are in the early days of a budding new friendship.

Zeke is leaving for New Zealand in a few weeks for a 2+ week bike trip with his buddies and a friend I made at a client site a number of years ago is coming to stay for a week while he’s gone. She too has struggled with friendships lately and it seemed like an economical way to spend more time together. I’m no longer interested in the superficial nature of some relationships.

As an identical twin, I didn’t learn how to make friends like most people do since I always had a default ‘friend’ in my sister. When she stopped talking to me over 11 years ago, I was given the ‘gift’ of having to learn how to make and keep friends. One of the gals I play tennis with is an identical triplet and when she moved to the Bay Area about 10 years ago, leaving her sisters in Chicago, she had to learn the same skills.

Never wanting to be the victim, I’ve reached out to some people in my life to initiate some conversations and see if we can take the relationships a bit further without me doing most of the work.

Over the past few years, I realized that I had been holding up both sides of a lot of my relationships and I’ve been actively letting go to see what happens. It hasn’t been pretty.

I’ve also reflected on how I show up in my friendships and whether I leave room for others to show up as they are, and if I have realistic expectations.

I’m still working through all of this.

In sending out Valentines this year, Zeke and I went through our address list to make sure we were only sending them out to people we wanted to stay connected with. We are working together to be intentional about making ‘couple’ friends and in some cases, we are letting other people come to us, rather than trying to force relationships. We will put out an invite twice and if not accepted, mostly due to scheduling issues, we leave the ball in their court.

I read an article about how Southern California had the opportunity to create an emerald chain of green areas instead of cement canals to handle water. If the green spaces / parks were created, all of the excess water we’ve received this year could have absorbed into the ground refilling our aquifers. Instead, the water collects in the cement canals, spilling into neighboring areas or running off into the ocean.

How can we do the same with the people in our lives?

Or maybe a garden is a better analogy.

— We can create a healthy space for friendships to grow by doing the work on ourselves.

— We can plant seeds of new friendships, testing out new varieties, knowing that some are there temporarily (situational friendships) and others are more like perennials and trees.

— We can cultivate and care for the ones we want and weed out the unhealthy ones or those that don’t bring us happiness.

We can move from feeling saturated and parched to grounded and supported.

May you find peace, acceptance, and love today as you navigate being human.

With much love and gratitude,

Terri

This week’s song: Purple Rain by Prince
Why this song this week? Obviously, it’s a song about rain. At the same time, this song was popular my freshman year of high school when I was dating a senior, was a song girl (dancing cheerleader), played softball and soccer, was in orchestra, and gave all the appearances of a ‘popular’ girl with lots of friends but the reality was somewhat different. It seems appropriate now too.

Journal prompt / reflection: Who are your true friends? Is it time for a friend audit as described in the book Big Friendship? (Note: I wrote a blog post / reader guide for the book in September 2020).

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