Finding Home in Friendship

When people ask me where I’m from, I have a choice to make. Do I tell them the whole story, from the beginning? Do I engage in the same conversation that happens every time I elaborate — wow, how exotic? Or do I give a simple answer that doesn’t turn me into a curiosity?

Answer: It’s complicated.

My parents had a sense of adventure. By the time I was three years old, I had already lived on three continents. My first words were in Hausa, a tribal language of northern Nigeria and my next words were in Dutch, my fatherland tongue. I have my mother’s Indonesian dark hair and features, and I stand at a whopping 5’2”, all oddities in the Netherlands, where I was born. When I was three, I carried this incongruity to the Midwest, where Nigeria, the Netherlands, and Indonesia were like places you read about in fairytales. So yeah, I get a lot of questions.

I caught the nomad bug and spent my young adult years flitting from country to country, collecting stamps in my passport, investing in adventure over relationships — living in the Netherlands, Denmark and Indonesia, and traveling through India, Asia and the Middle East.

I’m a textbook Third-Culture Kid — I grew up in a different country than either of my parents and I feel more at home exploring a new culture than I do staying in one place. Throughout my 20s, I lived and breathed the idea that without human ties, life could be rich and free. I was so committed to this tether-less way of life that I once told a handsome Dane that I dated in Laos, “no commitment, no pain”.

Shows like Friends and Sex and the City bothered me because they focused on friendships fraught with little dramas, petty fights, and funny make-ups. But underneath it all, I envied the characters on TV because they had friends who were there no matter what shenanigans each week had to offer. I longed for connection and deep friendships that felt impossible when I was always on the road.

It took a disease and two deaths in my family for me to recognize what was missing.

Eventually, I settled in New York City. Sure, I had plenty of friends. People whom I met on one continent and blipped into my life on another. People I would see at parties, who accepted that regular Sunday brunches and Thursday game nights were not part of my lifestyle. I prided myself on the global sprawl of my network — but if I had a break-up, or a broken bone, or a bad day at work, I dealt with it on my own.

It took a disease and two deaths in my family for me to recognize what was missing.

I was diagnosed with endometriosis, a painful disorder that affects women around their periods. The pain was often so great that I spent days in bed and disappeared from my social circle. My world got very small. When I reached out to ask for help, or cheering up, responses were scarce. It grounded me for several years, and I became very close to my Netflix queue.

Then one summer, my aunt and my uncle passed away in quick succession. In many ways, they were my connection to my Dutch-Indonesian roots when I went to visit the Netherlands as a kid. While my older cousins were too cool to hang with their little American cousin, my aunt and uncle would tell me family histories and share our culinary traditions. Their deaths shook me to the core. The infrastructure of family as I knew it crumbled, and the mortality of my own parents began to haunt my thoughts. How on earth would I — an only child so far from any sense of home — be able to deal with death? Who would I turn to?

That was my Bummer Summer, when I wallowed in pain — not just the pain of losing family and love — but the pain of realizing that I didn’t have many close friends to confide in. Invites to nights out and group drinks, late dinners and crowded bars felt thin and unsympathetic to deaths and diseases I thought incessantly about what I would do if my parents passed; I would have no one, I told myself. After a life priding myself on independence and self-sufficiency, I had never felt so alone.

It made me take a hard look at my relationships. I felt a gaping emptiness. I knew I had to do something.

Some people think friendships just happen, but they take work. It was a conscious decision for me to reach out more, break open my veneer.

As if flipping a switch, I woke up one day and decided to invest in friendship. Some people think friendships just happen, but they take work. It was a conscious decision for me to reach out more, break open my veneer, share bits of myself, appreciate those who were there for me, cull down those who were fair weather, spend my precious time on the relationships that counted. I invited people in, even when I was ill, to be part of the ups and downs of my life. It took checking in with people and accepting their pain so that they could accept mine. It took being honest about rough patches instead of running away.

I started cultivating the kinds of friends whom I would miss when I left, and who would miss me. Cherishing the people I was with in the moment, rather than always seeking what’s next. For the first time, I put my heart into staying rather than leaving. A year later, when I had the surgery that freed me from endometriosis, a parade of friends came by to bring me food, jokes and flowers. I was finally at home.

This essay is part of a series about relationships, dating, and friendship, sponsored by Chorus, the matchmaking app where friends swipe for friends.