Looks Like My Mental Health Professional Was Right—Again

I saw a post on Craigslist lately from a person who was trying to make friends but finding that participating in group activities wasn’t helping. I replied thusly:

“I think it is rather challenging to make friends in an urban area, where people do so many things and are moving so fast. I think you were totally on the right track with going to activities and advise keeping on doing that, but with a tiny shift of attitude. I, too, thought, ‘I’ll go do such-and-such and I’ll make friends!’ I also found it didn’t quite work like that, at least not right away, but what I have discovered is that if I go participate in a group activity regularly—and there are tons to choose from, the blessing of being in the Bay Area—then, if nothing else, for that period of time, I’m with people, enjoying myself doing something of interest to me.

“I’ve been making a point of doing this for the past three or four months and now I find that I look forward to going to those activities and seeing the folks who are there, whereas when I started, they seemed like rooms full of strangers.

“Maybe some one-on-one friendships will come out of this in time, maybe not. I’ve kind of let go of that as a goal and now have the goal to participate in groups that are of genuine interest to me, and to enjoy my time there, which I do!

“Best of luck putting together a life full of satisfying activities.”

The next day, I had gotten three answers, one from the original poster thanking me and saying she would keep at it, then, but also two from other people saying they thought my advice was good; one said she didn’t know me but was proud of me for persisting in this effort, which, now that I think about it, was what Deborah told me to do the last time I saw her.

The other person who wrote to say she liked my advice was someone I have corresponded with twice before via Craigslist, though she had no way of knowing she was writing to me yet again, since email addresses are anonymized. She just happened to answer two questions I posted over a period of months. The second time, I joked that from now on, I was just going to email her directly instead of posting on Craigslist. This week we had a virtual chuckle over having bumped into each other for a third time. Maybe it’s time to invite her to tea.

Three Sundays ago found me at Eugene Cash’s sitting group again on Sunday night. My friend was there with his father, who is 97 years old and very charming. He looked like he felt better than I do, though he allowed, wiggling a bit and smiling, that an ache or two was starting to set in.

It turned out that another person was riding her bicycle home to a neighborhood near mine, so we rode together. Her routes both to and from Eugene’s are different from mine, so I learned something. I think she’s a little more intrepid than I am; her route home was down Gough St., which she likes because there are plenty of lanes, so she feels free to take one, which makes sense.

However, that kind of street, several lanes going in one direction, seems to me like a freeway, with cars going so fast, and I don’t really like to ride there at all. I have taken Polk St. home the other times I’ve ridden my bike to Eugene’s. There’s hardly any traffic on it at 9 p.m. or so on Sunday, and there is also a bike lane.

The following week, I went to Eugene’s again, but my cycling buddy wasn’t there, so I rode home by myself and decided to try Gough St. again, which saves having to go two blocks out of my way to Polk St. and then come back those same two blocks once I get down to Market St.

It was perfectly fine. I took the lane and, because several blocks in a row go downhill, I was often moving just as fast as the cars were. This time I could see a lot more of what was around me. Fright has the interesting effect of narrowing the vision, literally. The first night I rode on Gough St., all I could see was the pavement immediately in front of me plus what I glimpsed in my rearview mirror, which I checked often to make sure I wasn’t about to be killed.

(I have finally received John Forester’s book Effective Cycling, in which he says worrying about getting hit from behind is really useless, since there’s hardly a thing you can do about it, but that’s still the thing I fret most about.)

Sailing down Gough the second time, I could see the whole street unrolling before me and take in the general surroundings and it was more fun than the first time, as well as a much quicker route home.