Reading the Room

On friendship, Miami, New York, showing up for people, and learning that not every connection is meant to become permanent.

I listened to Andrew McCarthy’s interview with Anna Sale about friendship. His conversation focused on male friendship, but much of it still resonated with me.

I’m an introverted extrovert, and recently I got a phone call from my friend Lisa, who I probably hadn’t spoken to in over a year, maybe longer. Oh my gosh, I was genuinely thrilled to hear from her. We spoke for almost an hour, and I kept interrupting her just to tell her how happy I was that she called.

We talked about friendship, community, people, and life. She’s moved three times since we last spoke and is now back in New York, back with her people, her community. I’m still in Miami Beach, and when she asked how things were, I told her the truth: I have no desire to leave Miami. I never ever want to be cold again. I genuinely love living here.

But friendship has been the hardest part.

I have a lot of “friends,” but the depth of connection I had in New York and New Jersey has been harder to recreate here. Thankfully, I do have a few longtime friendships in Florida, including friends I’ve known for more than thirty years. One of my closest friends lives in Fort Lauderdale, and we’ve known each other since New York and New Jersey. She feels more like a sister than a friend. Thank you, Jenni, for always being there.

Still, friendship as an adult can feel complicated, and I think many of us experience it without speaking openly about it.

Especially as a single woman.

Especially as a woman without children.

Especially in cities where so much social life still revolves around couples, schools, family units, or histories you weren’t part of.

I’ve felt this both in cities and in the suburbs. In the suburbs, it felt especially pronounced. I remember once helping a woman decorate her home because she asked me for help, and told me I had great style and taste. Later, she didn’t invite me to the party she hosted there because, as she actually said out loud, “It would be an uneven number of people.”

I am still sitting here dumbfounded as I write this almost a decade later. Silent, my mouth agape and, as my father would say, “rubber teeth,” feeling as though I’d been catapulted backward into 1952.

Here in Miami, the dynamic is different. I didn’t grow up here. I don’t have children, so I don’t have friendships formed through schools or family circles. Many of the people I meet are much younger than I am, and naturally they have different social lives and rhythms. They go do young people things, and I am not a young woman anymore.

It creates an odd in-between space.

This is definitely not a poor me letter. It’s an observation.

During my conversation with Lisa, we started talking about support systems and community. Over the past five years, I’ve been in and out of hospitals regularly between chronic illness, testing, MRIs, and a long list of medical surprises that definitely were not on my bingo card.

At one point during our conversation, I compared my experience in Miami to what it would have been like had I still lived in New York or New Jersey. In the Northeast, people would have shown up. Someone would have organized a meal train. Friends would have come by. When I was living in Princeton, one friend showed up at my house after I got home from the hospital carrying her Apple TV loaded with movies and food. She looked at me and simply said, “You don’t ask. You just come prepared.”

That stayed with me.

Here, during one hospital admission, I spent three days mostly alone. One friend brought me clothing because another friend in my building had packed it. I remember being told, “It was convenient. It was on my way to work.”

Convenience should never be the reason we show up for people.

What struck me during my conversation with Lisa was that she told me she didn’t necessarily experience overwhelming support from her community either. But she said something important — something about the energy we put into the world and how people respond to it. I wish I could remember her exact words because she said it beautifully.

That conversation made me think about my own role in friendships and how long it has taken me to learn to read the room.

When I first moved here, I had a friend I spent enormous amounts of time with. We lived in the same building, on the same floor. We did things together constantly. I called him all the time. I would go over to his apartment. We’d make plans. We’d wander around the beach. This went on for years. Over time, though, I slowly realized something uncomfortable:

I was assigning a level of intimacy to the friendship that he wasn’t assigning to me.

There wasn’t real reciprocity. I simply hadn’t recognized it yet.

At one point, I brought him to a storytelling event I regularly attended on Miami Beach. I loved introducing people to things I enjoyed. I still do. People are always asking me how I find things — events, dinners, strange little happenings around the city — and the truth is I usually just go by myself.

Partly because I enjoy it.

Partly because if I waited for invitations, I’d miss much of life.

So I create life for myself instead.

And I invite people into it constantly.

Eventually, I noticed that I had stopped attending the storytelling nights because I stopped asking other people, and especially him, if they were attending too. Like, “Are you going this month?” And then I wouldn’t hear back. But I’d see that he continued going, bringing other people along. It had felt like my thing, and suddenly it felt like it had been taken away from me. Later, the organizer handed the event over to him entirely.

And I was jealous.

Deeply jealous.

Mean-girl jealous. Sixth-grade jealous. Territorial and hurt.

Embarrassed. I hated how much it affected me.

But eventually I had to confront something more honest: this friendship simply meant different things to each of us. I wasn’t abandoned. I had misunderstood the depth of the connection.

That realization mattered.

I hope this doesn’t sound like criticism of him because it isn’t. We had a meaningful season of friendship, and then it shifted. Friendships can fade the same way romantic relationships do. Not every connection is meant to become permanent.

Back in New York, I used to host birthday brunches and Christmas tree decorating parties. Those were my rituals. I cooked everything and invited everyone. Truly everyone.

If I met you on the bus and we had an interesting conversation, I’d invite you.

I still do that.

Recently, I was struggling to carry something heavy home for an event in Miami Beach, and a stranger stopped to help me. He asked how far I was going, and I said, “A few blocks,” which in New York terms was a few blocks but in Miami terms was apparently several miles. He carried it with me anyway.

We talked the entire walk. By the time we reached my building, I had invited him to the event.

That openness is simply part of who I am.

I think part of it comes from understanding what exclusion feels like. I never want other people to feel outside of things.

Another close friend from boarding school has family here in Florida. They do everything together, and for years I found myself quietly hurt that I was rarely included. Eventually, though, I realized something important:

Not everyone moves through the world the way I do.

I am unusually open with people. Open kimono. I mean, hello, I’m writing deeply personal truths on the internet for strangers to read.

That level of openness is not universal.

After my conversation with Lisa, I started thinking about another memory from New York — one I hadn’t thought about in years.

I once hosted a party where almost nobody came.

I had cooked, prepared, invited people, confirmed attendance, done everything properly. And then maybe four people showed up.

I can still picture the food sitting there untouched. The apartment too clean. The weird silence between songs. My parents may have even driven in from New Jersey, and I remember seeing pity on their faces and discomfort on the faces of the people who did show up.

The room itself felt awkward.

I later realized another event had happened the night before, and everyone was tired. That was it. But at the time, it felt absolutely humiliating. I felt embarrassed and rejected and deeply uncool.

Now I think it was simply another example of misunderstanding social realities, emotional positioning, timing, and expectations.

I hadn’t read the room.

Friendship changes throughout life. Some friendships are built through proximity. Some through shared seasons. Some through survival. Some through deep history.

My boarding school friendships became one ecosystem. We lived together, grew up together, and now decades later we still share a group text and histories that can never really disappear.

Then there are the friendships formed when I first got sober.

As I’m writing this, I realized my twenty-fifth sobriety anniversary is in a few days — May 29, 2001.

Twenty-five years.

That realization startled me a little. I had to stop for a second when I realized it while writing this.

Those friendships carry a different kind of permanence because they were built during an entirely different season of survival and rebuilding.

Lisa and I also talked about the possibility of creating new communities as adults. That has actually started happening for me here recently through women’s groups, business communities, and emotionally intelligent spaces where people are trying to connect more honestly.

I recently attended The Born Method™ event with Ipek Gray and ended up added into a group chat afterward. Suddenly I found myself connected to this entirely different world of women in Miami — thoughtful, accomplished, emotionally deep, interesting women I may never have encountered otherwise.

And that feels exciting.

It feels like the seedling stage of friendship.

The beginning of something.

And then there are the lifelong friends — the people you can call no matter how much time has passed. The people who simply pick up the phone.

Some are in Princeton.

Some are in Los Angeles.

Some are in New York.

Thankfully, a few are here too.

And now, maybe, there are some new seedlings here as well.

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Thank you for reading.

If you made it all the way to the end, thank you. Maybe you know someone else who would too. Send it to your people.

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