Friendship First, page 9
When I was still living in my hometown, it wasn’t hard to figure out where my friends were. I’d walk past their work and either see them behind the register or waiting tables—or I wouldn’t. When I drove home, I might see their car parked outside their house, or the house of whoever they were dating at the time. Without much conscious effort, I’d see almost everyone I knew most Saturday nights when we went to the one nightclub in town. Staying in touch was easy because running into each other regularly was a given, as we had fewer places to be. But as times have changed, so have our friendships.
When Kristen S. He realized she was transgender, she was living alone in Melbourne. While quarantining through the COVID pandemic, she developed a strong sense that something was missing in her life. “Despite being in touch with really great friends and trying to keep busy, I just felt a void,” she tells me over the phone, thirteen months after starting hormone replacement therapy (HRT). “I spent a lot of 2021 searching for what that void was.”
One evening, eating dinner alone, Kristen realized she’d been a trans girl her entire life. And while it felt like everything was crashing down around her, it also felt like everything was falling into place. She finally felt she had an explanation for her personality quirks, her attitude, her relationships—all the things that people around her may have never noticed but which were now so obvious to her. Since that moment, things have been good. “It takes a lot less energy to be myself than to put up walls and pretend to be something I’m not,” she says. Coming out was, in Kristen’s own words, an unburdening.
As we chat, Kristen mentions her friend Hannah, a fellow trans music journalist who lives in New York, but it’s not until midway through our conversation that she realizes Hannah was the first person she came out to, despite their not being particularly close at the time. They’d been in touch for over a year on Twitter/X, bonding over music and artists they both loved, but had never really gotten deep. Still, the moment she realized she was trans, she decided to message Hannah.
When I speak to Hannah, it’s getting late in New York and she’s on Zoom from her apartment in the Upper East Side. “Kristen and I had DM’d a couple of times because we have a lot in common, but then one day she writes to me and says, ‘Oh, guess whose egg just cracked?’” Hannah tells me. “I’m still not entirely sure how we became as close as we have, which is very amusing to me.”
Hannah and Kristen are both attracted to women and tell me that a lot of their friendship revolves around sending photos of celebrity crushes back and forth, then responding either with gender envy or their go-to hypnotized eyes emoji. These expressions of desire are wholesome, according to Kristen—a practice that was denied to them both in their past lives. Now that they’ve both reconciled themselves hormonally and socially, they’re happy to be making up for lost time on Twitter/X. “People say no art exists in a vacuum. In a similar way, friendships are what makes all these moments of joy feel so much more real and reflective,” says Kristen.
In our separate conversations, Kristen and Hannah both mention a feature Kristen wrote for Junkee7 profiling the indie pop band MUNA. In her interview with the band, Kristen writes about the way queer people often find themselves mirrored in one another. It’s not lost on me that both Hannah and Kristen—queer friends and music journalists—feel the same way about one another. “Kristen and I are very similar, but we’re not the same person. We don’t want to be each other and we don’t need anything from each other,” says Hannah. “A misconception is that trans friends don’t have anything in common other than being trans, but Kristen and I have a lot of other things in common. We’re really fascinated by each other.”
Kristen and Hannah’s friendship is one of many trans friendships both women now have. For them, online friendships have been a source of fun, connection, and in some cases, life-changing information.
Years ago, Hannah tweeted a map of informed-consent clinics in America for people starting HRT. She promptly forgot about the tweet until she started DMing with a new friend, Darcy, only to find out that the reason Darcy was able to start hormones was because of the map that Hannah tweeted. In safe pockets of sites like Twitter/X and Reddit, on private accounts and in well-moderated forums, you never know which of your online friends you could be helping.
Social media can amplify feelings of loneliness but can also make us feel less lonely. It can connect us in times we would otherwise have been completely separated. It makes meeting people and making plans easier, because it has changed the very definition of what it means to be somebody’s “friend” and to spend time with them. An awareness of the difficulties technology is capable of creating, along with a knowledge of the joy that’s to be found within it, are the only things that can really guide us on our way to using the internet to build brighter friendships—whether they ever exist in 3D or not.
Hanging out in a virtual reality
The internet lifts our inhibitions in ways that can make connection feel seamless and smooth as silk, but it simultaneously allows people to act with vitriol and cruelty. The downside of finding connection in an unexpected place can be opening a Pandora’s box of things to hate about yourself and everyone else. Technology can make people feel close, then distant. It can make us feel loved, then hated. Such is the dichotomy of social media, of the internet, and, at times, of friendship.
Between long working hours, family commitments, and household chores, our energy for in-person activities can dwindle. If you’re someone who once relied on your netball club for your weekly socializing but then stopped playing, online spaces that replicate that club environment can be a very welcome solution.
We Met in Virtual Reality,8 an HBO documentary released in 2022, was filmed entirely in virtual reality. The film introduces people who are hanging out in the online platform VRChat as avatars of their own choosing. Though the documentary was filmed in 2020, some of the people interviewed have been hanging out in VRChat since 2018, participating in such varied activities as teaching sign language classes, belly dancing, enjoying Friday night drinks, and falling in love. As one avatar named Jenny explains in the film, “Making friends here is sometimes what saves people’s lives or what gets them up out of bed in the morning.”
Friends who exist primarily online, whether on social media or in a virtual reality, are often judged by people who don’t have firsthand experience of this type of connection. But friendships that exist only or primarily online can be just as valid, attentive, caring, and life-affirming as those that exist offline.
In her novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,9 Gabrielle Zevin writes of the vulnerability of gaming with someone online, which I believe can be applied to many online friendships. “To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk,” she writes. “It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt. It is the human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back—I know you won’t hurt me, even though you can. It is the dog putting its mouth around your hand and never biting down. To play requires trust and love.” As our friendships take new shapes, the trust that a friend will take care with your online self just as tenderly as they would the real you is vital. As friendships evolve, it’s imperative that kindness and connection remain key pillars of our most important relationships, whether they seek to complement in-person interactions or replace them entirely.
7
Working It Out
The canteen was quieter than usual the day before I lost my job. People were whispering in person and quietly typing on Slack about mergers and restructures and rumors they’d apparently heard from someone in the elevator. Something just felt off. That evening, I insisted that my partner and I have beans on toast for dinner.
I’d found the recipe—if you can call it that—on the very website from which I was about to be laid off. “Rice and beans is a joke of cheap eating, but it’s also the gospel,” Jaime Green wrote. “And the way I learned to love the humble legume, in my own carefully budgeted cooking, was through bodega beans.”1 The concept behind “bodega beans,” originally written about in a 2007 post on the food blog The Amateur Gourmet,2 was that you could buy every ingredient for this cheap and allegedly delicious meal at your local bodega (corner shop). Following the vague recipe felt like all I could do to keep my mind off the storm I could feel rolling in. I sautéed a little garlic and some onion in a pan with olive oil, added a can of white beans, then seasoned everything with salt and pepper. Once they were warmed, I served my beans on two slices of buttered toast.
Before I’d even taken a bite, I saw the email notification flash on my phone screen: a round of major layoffs was coming, and my team would likely be affected. I looked down at the beans, hoping to feel grateful for the fact that I hadn’t received this news minutes after ordering expensive takeout or while sitting in a restaurant waiting to be served a twenty-eight-dollar pasta I could easily have made at home. Instead, I felt depressed. To top it all off, the beans tasted like shit.
That first time I was laid off I didn’t just lose my job, I also lost my visa. During the three months it took me to find a new job—and an accompanying permission slip to stay in the country—I spent every day applying for every role that I was remotely qualified for, along with a few I definitely wasn’t. I spent afternoons watching teen dramas on Netflix and miserably texting my group chat I had with my former team, who were also living out the same lather-rinse-repeat cycle of unemployment. Each day without a tether to the country I was living in was hard, but not seeing my work friends every day was excruciating. When I’d first arrived in the US, I’d taken for granted how lucky I was to have clicked with my coworkers so instantly—they weren’t just new friends in a new country, they were new friends with whom I was able to spend forty hours a week typing, laughing, and gossiping.
The media company we’d all worked for promoted friendship in the office; so much so that we were encouraged to think of our colleagues as family. The canteen was expansive, with large tables made for groups of rowdy twentysomethings; holiday parties went late into the night; and team outings and happy hours weren’t only tolerated but encouraged (and often expensed on corporate credit cards). When the company dissolved our team—cutting us off from the family it had forced us to create—it felt like they were trying to dissolve our friendships too.
We also happened to be in the middle of a demonic New York winter. On one of my worst days, I walked four blocks in 8°F weather to buy myself a houseplant as a reward for hitting a new milestone of job applications. Within hours of getting home, the plant’s leaves had turned black, its frozen cells defrosting and killing it from the inside out. That wilted peace lily sat on my coffee table for days, a reminder of the fragility of hope. Thankfully, weeks before my visa timed out, I found another job. I worked there, and loved it, until deciding to leave the US of my own accord in late 2020 for obvious global pandemic–related reasons. I was excited to be back in Australia, where my stability wouldn’t be so wholly tied to my employment, though I soon learned that there was a lot more I should have wished for.
My new job was as the editor in chief at a different media company. But after almost two years, I was laid off again. After I got the news, my partner and I went out for dinner. I ordered us rounds of margaritas and didn’t once consider whether we had tins of beans or a lone brown onion waiting for us at home. I wasn’t worried about my visa or money or security; I felt free. To lose a job that felt like just that—a job—rather than one that felt like a family was easier to stomach.
Two days later, on the afternoon of my final day of employment, I logged off early and went to the pub. Three former members of my team—all women in their late twenties and early thirties, all still employed by the company I was hours away from officially leaving—came to join me. Over three bottles of wine, I thought of what I’d learned about these women while working alongside them, and how different our conversations were from the wistful ones I’d shared with coworkers three years earlier.
These were friendships I was sure I could carry into the next chapter of my life, but before I’d even been locked out of my email account, I knew there would be no longing for the days when we’d all sat side by side. Rather than the joyous icing on top of a job I loved, as has been the case at previous workplaces, these friendships had functioned as a protective blanket that helped us all get through each arduous day of confusion and pivoting directions. Instead of being encouraged to consider our company a family, as I had felt in my previous role, we’d created a workplace family on our own terms.
That afternoon, we spoke a little about the company I was leaving, what it would look like without me, and of the work we’d all done together. But mostly we spoke of care. Who would need the most comfort in my absence? How would the remaining staff link together to build a safety net to protect themselves for what could possibly come next?
Walking home from the pub that night, I thought of everything I knew about the people on my team: breakups, unwell parents, and endometriosis diagnoses that meant necessary days in bed and hard-to-get appointments. After two years, I left my job with pockets full of emotional breadcrumbs that I’d collected, one by one, after countless meetings, Zoom calls, and “I won’t be in today, I’m so sorry” texts. In 2019, I’d packed up my desk wondering: What’s next for me? But this time, I left thinking only: What about them? In the workplace I’d just farewell’d, friendship wasn’t a social perk, a way to occupy long days and make lunch breaks fun—it was a means of survival.
Leaning on each other
Back in 2013, two years after I got my first job working in magazines, Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead3 promised to help women thrive at work. But not by implementing any changes in the workplace itself. According to the former Facebook COO, it was women who had to start doing things differently if they ever wanted to get ahead. Sandberg’s approach to work, brimming with what would eventually be known as “girlboss” behavior, overlooked the broader systemic issues that exist in the workplace. It generally ignored the experiences of women of color, nonbinary people, and trans women, along with economic inequality and the kind of deeply entrenched sexism that can’t be solved by adopting a “power pose.”
For a long time, my own identity and self-worth were so closely bound with my career success that from a distance, all three might as well have been measuring the same thing. It makes sense that, through these years, I didn’t feel like anyone could understand me as well as my work friends. They knew what it meant to get “senior” added to my job title, even if that so-called promotion didn’t come with a pay raise. They got why I so firmly believed the work I was doing wasn’t just meaningful but necessary.
My work friends understood it all, because they felt the same way. I didn’t need to justify long hours or bad pay to them or explain why I stayed at a publishing company that was so clearly crumbling, because they were there with me on deadline nights, their bank accounts were equally empty, and they were hanging on just as tightly to the promise we’d all been sold about how lucky we were to have the jobs we did. My work has always meant a lot to me, and so have the friends I’ve worked with. But while my relationship to the workplace has since changed, the importance I place on work friends is as strong as ever.
In recent years, there’s been a culture-wide shift in how many people view work. I know I’m not alone in feeling less motivated by promotions and meaningless perks and more inspired by companies that offer flexible working arrangements and competitive leave policies. The so-called “great resignation”—a term coined by Anthony Klotz,4 a professor of management at University College London’s School of Management—saw record numbers of people in the US quit their jobs in 2021 and 2022. According to the Harvard Business Review,5 five key factors drove up these resignation statistics: retirement, which saw older workers leave the workforce at a younger age than they might have before the pandemic; relocation, as people left their role because they wanted to move elsewhere; reconsideration, in which people felt their approach to work change due to burnout or increased caretaking responsibilities; reshuffling, which accounted for people who quit their current role to find a new one; and reluctance, which saw people quit out of fear of contracting COVID or returning to a workplace that didn’t offer remote or hybrid options.
Despite these resignations happening for a wide-ranging number of reasons, the figures spurred countless TikToks, essays, and somewhat oblivious LinkedIn posts from executives and recruitment specialists that suggested a more pointed motivation. When Kim Kardashian infamously said, “It seems like nobody wants to work these days,” many people replied with a confused, “Well, why would we?”
According to the American Psychological Association’s “2023 Work in America Survey,” 77 percent of workers reported having experienced work-related stress in the past month, with 57 percent of those experiencing feelings associated with burnout, like emotional exhaustion, a desire to quit, a lack of motivation, and anger toward coworkers and customers. Only two-fifths of workers surveyed believed their employers offered a culture in which time off is respected. Factor in a lack of health insurance with mental health coverage, limited access to employee assistance programs, and workplaces that are becoming less flexible than they were in the past, and it’s no wonder many people consider putting in their resignation.
There are plenty of reasons for employees to feel disheartened about the current state of work. Salaries aren’t increasing at the same rate as inflation, workforces are being downsized as tasks are automated by machines or AI, and a lack of government support and funding is leaving many industries—from the arts to education—feeling as though they’re an inch from total collapse. But for a lot of other people, it’s as simple as this: people who feel lonely at work are more likely to want to leave their jobs. And a whole lot of people are feeling alone in the workplace right now.
