Making Friends and Doing What You Care About in 2024
Image by @marvelous on Unsplash
When I first moved to Arizona in 2022, I was ready to unbox the things I’d gathered and learned about myself and life from my time in Michigan, and assemble something equally beautiful in the desert.
I flew from MI to AZ to meet the moving truck and spent a week taking things out of each tower of boxes and putting them where I thought they should live; the tall spoons and spatulas in the deep kitchen drawer to the right of the stove, the camp chairs and sleeping bags in the garage, and the guest sheets in the linen closet above the shelf that held the rows of Kirkland tissue boxes.
When I returned to Arizona a few weeks later after my job in Michigan had ended, everything was where I had left it, or was shifted just slightly from the everyday use of my partner who had been living there with the dog in the space between the move and my arrival.
Leaving Michigan was sudden and weird. Our old house didn’t completely work for us, with the closets only large enough to hang the everyday items and the bedroom only large enough to have one nightstand next to the bed, but not two. Our neighbor to the right had been a hoarder who left the house to a family of raccoons and our neighbor to the left was a sweet widow who laughed when our dogs met each other most days at the fence and raced alongside it.
We were alone in our stage of life and family makeup on that block, but I loved being covered in mulch and raking leaves and trying desperately to grow tomatoes that maybe we could eat instead of the squirrels carrying them off while laughing at me.
I was sad when we left, but happy when we arrived at our new home in the Southwest. In Arizona, we lived in a town just West of where my grandparents had spent several winters in retirement and the city felt like it had always been home, even if it wasn’t exclusively their home and was barely yet mine.
When I dropped into life in Arizona, I struggled to know where to start. All the to-dos of unpacking were done and my new job wouldn’t start for weeks. The 115 degree heat began creeping in around 9:00 AM, which left little time to enjoy the sun from anywhere other than peering out the living room window. My body took time to adjust to the dry heat and even though I sucked down several fills of my 40 oz water bottle every day, I was dehydrated and frankly exhausted.
I took the dog on walks around the neighborhood before the sun came up and made a list of places to check out on my own that had air conditioning: the library, a museum or two, the library in the next town over. I made brunch plans with the only friend I’d had so far, a girl from my high school who had gone to graduate school in the state and never left.
I read and I wrote and I prepared for my upcoming new job by reading more packets and new-hire emails than I cared to. I also made a list of stores and coffee shops that might be a good fit to carry the guided journal I published in 2021, and set out one day with a box of copies in the car in case my pitch went well. I shoved aside the fears that I might end up in a bad neighborhood because of my lack of knowledge about the area or that I might pop a tire and get stranded and die of heat stroke, and I got in the car and cranked the AC.
I stopped at three places on the first day: a local gift shop, a boutique, and a coffee shop. The gift shop said they didn’t source from local artists except for one display on the counter that held a spinning rack of cactus-shaped keychains. Weird.
The boutique owner said she would take 10 copies of the journal and I signed the consignment agreement right then and there as we talked about our “real jobs.” I, being a school psychologist, and the shop owner, a nurse hoping to retire sooner than later.
The coffee shop was the furthest from where I lived, but had seemed the most promising. It was on a main street of the downtown and had local art from floor to its high ceilings and locally made jewelry under glass cases that doubled as bar tops for customers. Not to mention, the blueberry coconut scone I ordered was so thickly plastered with icing that I needed a fork to eat it. When I introduced myself to the store owner, he asked if I was “part of that Saturday group.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, and I said so, hoping that it was a cool group and that they might accept me as a new member with no friends. He said it was called “Red Mountain something” and told me to look it up online. He also accepted ten copies of my journal and the over-the-top complement I paid to his blueberry scones.
I walked back to my car parked just out front and wrote down “Red Mountain group” in the notebook I always have with me, making a note to look it up later.
When I did look it up later, I found that nearly everything in my area was named Red Mountain something. Red Mountain High School, Red Mountain Ranch neighborhood, Red Mountain branch of the local library, the community college at Red Mountain.
I was discouraged, but persistent. I eventually found a Facebook page or website of a writing group in the area, called Red Sands Writers Circle, that had a repeating event on Saturday mornings held at the coffee shop I’d visited. Success!
While I could never get into the Saturday morning critique group at that shop, since it turned out to be the most popular meetup, I did join another group that met Tuesday nights via Zoom. The first meeting I joined, I took from my armchair in the living room with my laptop balanced on the plastic lap desk across my thighs. It was two hours long and it was magic.
I introduced myself, then listened to the other writers share their pieces, then listened to members offer their critiques before offering some myself. I added comments on the Google Docs of my new friends’ work and closed my laptop at the end of the two-hour session with a happy exhale.
The next time I joined, I got to share a piece of my own writing from the memoir I’ve been working on with my sister. I received feedback from group members that ranged from, “Wow, the details you offer are so clear and I love the pacing of the chapter,” to “I like it, but…I don’t get it.”
As this group grew, I was able to hear pieces from all kinds of authors who wrote all kinds of things, from Native American poetry to “speculative fiction,” which was a phrase I had not previously heard, but now completely love. I heard pieces from people in their 20s who were Zooming in from their closet floor on spotty wifi for some quiet away from roommates and pieces from people in their 60s and 70s who were writing about the arc of their lives or about fantastical worlds that came right out of their own heads.
It was amazing to open my laptop in the evening and see my video bubble blip onto the screen to other familiar bubbles who would unmute and say, “Hi, Emily! Good to see you!” I knew their names and the tone of their works and that the rustle of papers to their left was a cat in need of attention.
I eventually expanded from this group to another group that is focused exclusively on memoir writing and meets more often for a shorter amount of time. Only one member gets to share a piece each week to receive critique from the other members, then we all spend the second half of the hour muted with cameras turned off in a sort of free-write study hall. I’ve joined this group from three time zones over the last six months, and I couldn’t love it more.
I was unsure at first how my life would come together in another new place, in another climate, while I worked another brand new job with new responsibilities and managed fluctuating creativity and resolve. But I left the house with a mission one day, and ended up with friends across the country who have inspired me to keep following the direction of what I love, that it’s worth it, and that I’m worth it too.
Whatever you do this new year, resolution or not, go into it with curiosity and see what happens. As a friend of mine says about her dating journey, “I’ll either come out of a date with a new relationship or a good story.”
May 2024 bring you both.
Yours,
Emily Rose // Miss Magnolia
Want to work your creative brain and log some self care at the same time? Check out the downloadable Self Care Activity Pack and get your word search on, color in front of your favorite TV show, and write a letter to your past and future self.
