I have been troubled, lately, by the pervasive sense that I’m doing the lion’s share of the work in connecting with people–people I already count as friends. I’ve been feeling down that it seems always up to me to initiate the phone tag that leads to the scheduling that maybe, eventually, lets us get together face to face.

As a person who is not currently employed outside the home, I’m missing the opportunity for casual contact with folks in the workplace, and building co-worker relationships. As a person who lives a forty-five minute walk from the center of town and doesn’t usually have a car available, I’m missing the opportunity to build relationships with people I run into around town. As a person who no longer lives in a large collective housing situation (which has varied, in my past, from a college dorm with dozens of women to a household of 4-5 adults) I’m not thrown into close contact with the friends of my housemates and lovers who just happened to drop by at someone else’s social invitation

At a certain point, it has become clear to me that it is not through some fault of my friends that I feel like I’m working really hard to keep in contact all the time. It’s deeper and more pervasive than that. The whole architecture of my current life is stacked against connections being formed or maintained with ease.

And the thing I wanted to say, the key realization that thinking about all of this has brought me, is this. Just because I feel like I’m working really hard at this, doesn’t mean someone else is doing something wrong. There is no dynamic where one person is working hard to stay close, and everyone else is just lazily coasting, trusting to others to do the work for them. We are all working hard. It’s the nature of the system. And the work is worth doing.

I’m going to keep reminding myself of that. I’m going to keep reaching out to the people that I value. And I hope you’re out there, reaching back.