You're listening to life kit from NPR.
Whenever you move to a new place, you're confronted with a familiar how to make friends.
But unlike when you were young, meeting other kids in the playground, you're an adult now.
I often feel like I'm that person on the outside trying to get in to a clique of people.
It's like you're trying to psych yourself up to approach someone and, like, scanning your brain for something to say.
I don't always know how much my personality I can show people right away, but I'm working on it and getting better.
It's an emotional journey I've gone through every few years as I've moved across the country and around the world growing up and even since I moved into my current home in Brooklyn, I still struggle with making new, meaningful connections.
Making Friends is the ultimate challenge for adults.
That's author Melody Warnick.
She's written two books on our sense of belonging and how having community could help us feel at home in new places.
Give yourself two weeks to go through that process of mourning the place that you left and saying goodbye mentally, and then dive into the new location.
But after two weeks where even my.
Two years in New York City, none.
Of this feels easier.
So I asked our expert friendship coach, Danielle Bayer Jackson, why is it so hard to make friends as adults?
I think that we think it's challenging to do it as an adult.
And I think we sometimes maybe really romanticize what it was like to make friends when we were younger.
And it's not something you're maybe necessarily technically taught.
And so because of that, I think some of us are startled to learn that we might have to make a lot of these connections happen for ourselves.
Right.