I didn’t think Friendsgiving would happen this year. For whatever reason — maybe it was the lockdowns, the city, or just me — finding close friends in Bangkok hasn’t been easy.
Now, I had a really strong group of friends when I first moved here. A handful of us that met for weekly Friday night dinners, spent holidays and birthdays together, and whom I considered my Bangkok family. The kind of group where you were so in sync, you thought you were destined to meet and weren’t just friends by proximity.
But at the beginning of this year, that all went sideways. When it all came to a head one night, they revealed they’d been mad at me for various reasons for weeks; one admitted she’d actually been upset with me for ten months. I wasn’t welcome anymore, and hadn’t been for a while.
Shocked, I spent the better part of winter and spring grieving the friendships, mostly oscillating between anger and a deep sadness. I stumbled through the weeks and months following in a haze. I celebrated my birthday alone, for the first time in my life. Work became an emotional minefield, as some of the old friends were still current colleagues that I had to see regularly. It was brutal.
It’s been harder to trust new people since then. The fallout made me question a lot about myself, and how much I should allow others in.
In previous cities I’ve often found connection through vulnerability, and folks here generally haven’t responded as well to that. Who I am, however I come off, just doesn’t gel here. If I got report cards for all the cities I’d lived in, the Bangkok one would say: Does not vibe well with others.
Obviously Bangkok is massive, and I’m sure my people are out there, but it sure has been a lot harder to find than it was in Paris or Shanghai. Big pond, aloof fish.
So I’ve mostly been focusing on myself and keeping my head down at work. I have a loving partner who reminds me what’s really important in life. Borders have reopened, so I’ve been traveling a lot more and seeing old friends scattered across Southeast Asia. No New Friends, I told myself.
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Over the past few months, however, I’ve started hanging out with some women who work in entirely different industries from mine. They travel often, so I only see them once or twice a month, but it’s been interesting to take a new friendship slowly, instead of jumping in all at once. Things about me that used to bother the old friend group are no longer seen as a fault, but rather an asset. (Making friends in your 30s has many parallels to dating, I’ve found.)
They’ve also been in Bangkok the same amount of time — two-ish years — and it’s been comforting to hear them express the same difficulties in finding a (strong) community. “It’s been challenging to peel through Bangkok’s layers,” one said. Maybe some of us aren’t meant to.
In the end, we threw together a last-minute Friendsgiving that was positively delightful, and recently had one last dinner before we all went our separate ways for the holidays.
I’ve accepted that not every place I’ll live can be a Paris year or Shanghai year. Maybe for me, Bangkok will be more of a Wellington year (i.e. will learn a lot, but won’t leave with a ton of friends). But I’m grateful that for now, I’m starting to find my fish again in this big, big pond.
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