How to Find Friends on Medium

A most special stew of extraordinary people

There’s an old adage, an English proverb, about catching more flies with honey than with vinegar. Meaning, in effect, if you’re a right asshole to people it’s going to be very hard to have a circle of friends.

Except perhaps, other assholes. I just described our current Administration, the white supremacy movement and the Confederacy of dunces that makes up the world’s dictators, but I digress.

Over the last two years that I’ve been writing on Medium, I’ve slowly but surely built a cadre of female friends along the way. These women are far more than simply folks who comment and I comment back, tag and link and support.

These are women in whom I’ve invested personal time and energy. We have gone from comments, to emails to phone calls in most cases. I have yet to meet any of these people in person. While that’s on hold for now, it’s going to happen. Some of us have shared mutual interests, or there is a potent thread of commonality.

There is one thing that connects us all: as has forever been the case with people whose company I prefer, each one of these women is simply amazing, talented, capable, a badass in every way. They are wildly different. They represent extraordinary diversity not only in color but culture and background and age. That very diversity is part of why I love them.

Some I’ve interviewed for Medium stories. Others have gotten into the habit of checking on me, and I on them. Others have set up regular calls to exchange ideas and collaborate.

None of this happens by mistake. When Rosennab, or Dr. Rosenna Bakari commented on a recent post of mine, I took the time to look her up online. Her website, her writings, her work. I was immediately both impressed and delighted she was right down the highway from me here in Colorado. We’ve been talking ever since. Every conversation is another revelation.

A while back, Margaret Kruger commented on an article of mine, and I looked her up. She’s a fellow adventure traveler, writer, pilot and scuba diver. Within a week we were on the phone and have been in touch ever since. We also check in on each other and I am always delighted when we can carve out the time from her busy schedule.

A few months ago I was talking to Margaret about some simply terrible events. I had pulled off the street and was sitting in the parking lot of my local Sprouts. I had to, otherwise I’d likely have hit another car. We were both of us nearly breathless from laughter. The tears were smeared on my cheeks and my stomach hurt. We were discussing the kinds of things that ruin most lives, that drive people to suicide, that cause others to simply give up. Stuff that had happened to us, some of it recently. We were in hysterics.

You cannot put a price on that kind of friend. Someone who sees the absurdity and humor in the horrible, and who can laugh just as hard, poke even more fun at what frightens us. That’s one hell of a super power.

What’s a true friend? I’ve got one definition for you:

Someone who is willing to listen to us with love and call out the lies you and I spout without knowing it. So much of that is societal conditioning. We’re subject to it, and those who love us best tease that shit out of our language so that we can kick it to the curb where it belongs.

Those are goddesses. I am surrounded by them.

(Kindly, I have my share of gods too, this is about my women friends)

Such diamonds, and there are many, lurk all over Medium. Ann Litts called me out privately one time while I was in Ethiopia, noting with loving concern that I didn’t sound the same in my stories. What was up? I called Ann yesterday because of a tone I heard in a recent post of hers. I heard pain, stress and loss. She just wrote me back. We were both right. We are finely tuned to one another. We have never met. But we know. Goddesses do that.

Gillian Sisley and I have exchanged both comments and email, as have my badass fellow African traveler and skydiver buddy Kris Gage. I’ve asked a number of these folks to give me feedback on my brand new logo. With their help, a very talented branding expert came up with a logo that perfectly reflected the spirit of what I was hoping to convey:

You can’t put a value on that kind of interaction, that kind of support or feedback.

However, you have to give it first.

Every friend that I have made on Medium is either someone who gave me the gift of their time and attention, or someone whose writing appealed enough for me to write a particularly thoughtful comment.

Those act like fertilizer, if you will.

Every new shoot that has risen in the rich garden of my later-in-life friendships has been more extraordinary than all that had come before. In the last two years, as I have emptied my house of so many things, so many memories, and ended long-standing but toxic relationships, every single pruning has made room for something new to appear.

Which is what happens when we take out of our lives what doesn’t work, and make room for what can. Sometimes that’s been painful, jerk-it-out-by-the-goddamned-roots exorcism. Others have just faded away.

I’ve had to let go of some long-standing female connections (about which I’ve written), one of forty years and another of twenty, because they were one-sided, unfair and often unkind. The last ex, a decade of one-sided and abusive behavior.

In precisely the same way I’ve been throwing out, giving away and selling off what no longer works, that’s made room in my home. My house, emptied last February of all its contents, is an echo chamber, only a few things here to lie on, sit on, work on. I have space to think and dream, as the spring breezes sing in my massive spruce just outside the windows.

Those spring winds blew hard into my wide-open house last night, leaving me with a 57-degree house this morning, smelling fresh and clean and cold. Full of anticipation. There’s a reason I move fast in the mornings (I’m freezing my ass off, for one thing), the crisp of the pre-dawn is an invitation to celebrate being alive.

The longer I live, the more I realize that if I am to do my work I cannot be enmeshed with those who cannot see their way forward. I want to surround myself with courageous, out-loud, remarkable people who choose not to operate out of fear and life-sucking need.

Rather, these women, young, older, mid-life, from all walks, and from all over the world, are part of a growing circle of women of immense power. What’s intriguing is that most of them not only know it, but they require that I acknowledge my own. My closest goddess friends are fearless about calling out my bullshit and my best self. I do the same for them.

That’s what love looks like.

Finding connections on Medium, as Gillian has done through Fearless She Wrote and others have done through my primary publication Illumination, as happens all over this forum, happens when we are kind, respectful, interested, curious, and most of all, funny. I’ve made connections solely by writing some of my finest comedy lines on unsuspecting writers’ posts, who return the favor by reading my stuff. When you and I show interest, we have opened a door.

The best way I know to do that is invest the time not just to read, but also to research. Many of us have websites, we have other presences online. Many of us have published books. We’re not that hard to find.

Some of those doors can lead to magic.

For me, they already have. They can for you, too.

If you see work online by a fellow Medium writer, and you take the time to scan it, read it and then offer comments on it, it’s a rare person who won’t appreciate that effort. Terrific door-opener. It shows initiative and interest. I now have a relationship with a much-awarded, high profile author because I did that very thing.

The older I get, the more precious my time becomes. As a result, not only do I not wish to waste that time with people full of hate, blame and self-induced woes, but I also want to make myself useful to others who are similarly motivated. Taking the High Road takes hard work.

While it is indeed a solo and sometimes lonely journey, a community of goddesses taking their own High Roads is one hell of a lot more fun to laugh with when we take the inevitable face-plant into the concrete.

Which I did yesterday while hoisting big bags of garbage to my neighbors’ house. I stepped on the edge of the curb and went sprawling, face down. Well, SHIT. And bounced right back up, laughing. Bleeding, but laughing.

Goddesses can do that. It takes a lifetime of practicing face plants to learn how to get the hell back up with a smile on your face, guffawing at your clumsiness.

I am surrounded by superb women who can do the same thing. Many of them I have found on Medium.

If you’re lonely, I might suggest investing a bit more time in our fellow writers. Investigate them. When someone pens a piece that really gets your attention, say so. Do a little sleuth work. Reach out with all sincerity. A bit of honey goes a long way towards building a community of friends.

In my case, a dazzle of goddesses.