When I left South Florida for film school in Tallahassee, my life changed dramatically in millions of ways.  A true turning point from which I didn't turn back, but only moved forward.  Many things were gained in my journey to Los Angeles, but my friendship base back home was left behind in Florida, and I've only been back for two weekends in five years.

My friends have always been my family.  I suspect, at least, that what I have historically gotten from friendship is what most people experience with family.  The catch for me being, of course, that my friends are not family, and my friends have families of their own.

Still, before I moved away and my life changed, it was easy to be a part of their lives, and I value my friendships highly.  I have a difficult time letting people in, letting people do things for me, but the friends I grew up with slipped easily in and live in my heart to stay.

Taking it one step further, the relationship pattern from my teens and 20s that I most needed to break, was that I too quickly made my boyfriends and my boyfriends' families my family, and I stayed in bad relationships too long because of it.  When I called off my wedding at 26, I knew it was the right decision, but the - immediate - loss of his family and the sense of family I had built with him just about killed me.

Ultimately, ideally, you do build family with your life partner and their family - but I was jumping into that too quickly and needing it too desperately, making it more difficult to pull away from bad relationships.  So I became even more self-sufficient.  Once I recognized what I was doing, I found a way to stop doing it.

Moving to Los Angeles pretty much sealed the deal on moving on from that life lesson.

When I got to L.A., someone said to me that you go through entire groups of people here before you find your place, your friends.  I thought that sounded cold, but it's been true for me.  You meet so many people, and you hold on to the gems.  Even then, you meet plenty of good people who you just don't see regularly.  I have a lot of those friends, and I value those friendships.

But you also meet people - sometimes entire groups you see regularly for months - who you then realize that you need to move on from.  Not a good fit.  Not your people.

And that happens with individuals, too.  Hey, I'm as crazy as the next Angelino, but I'm a good person.  Not everyone here is.  That is to say, perhaps, not the way I expect friends to be.  With people here from all over, everyone's milling about, looking for matches.

I am so jealous of the natives here.  People like to joke that in the entertainment industry you never meet anyone from L.A. in L.A., but it's not really true.  It's just that they don't live in apartment complexes in the valley (sometimes I think).  They grew up in houses, and they went to school with people that also live here - many of whom will continue to live here for years and years.  Established from day one.  Well-off.  They know the other people who aren't from somewhere else and who aren't leaving.

And they don't understand what it's like for us, the transplanted.

Most of my good friends are from somewhere else.  They regularly go away, and their families aren't here.  So they come and they go.  People move to L.A. with dreams.  Not everyone who leaves has given up on them, but people leave.  People move in, and people move out.  One of my best friends, someone I consider family, just moved to Knoxville.

And I just keep living and hoping to build family and home here.  To find that in L.A.  To find the good people who aren't leaving.

This post has gotten a bit heavier than I'd intended.  It's not all about the drama.  (Though clearly about the meandering.)

Another thing about friends is what they tell you about your significant other, and how, hopefully, they are one of the things that begin to interconnect your lives.  Plus, when you're crazy about someone, you want to meet their people.  Of course, Hunky Actor Boyfriend isn't from here.  Shocker, I know.  It's one more thing we have in common.

But that and our conflicting work schedules mean that I haven't met any of his friends.  I've not seen him around them, learned about him from them, laughed with them.  It's frustrating.

He has some good friends coming into town this week - friends he's only going to see for a few hours because of his work.  I want to meet them; he wants them all to himself.  It frustrates him that his job and his life mean they're here for a week, and he'll only see them for a few late hours.  Friendship, in our Los Angeles, is a struggle for time and resources.  Like everything here.

Thankfully, my journey that began seven years ago in Tallahassee has taught me something about time.  It taught me to see it as more horizontal.  It's not what you can fit or what happens in a day or a week or even a month.  With so much to do and so much to learn and so many people, things fall more lengthily across time.  Almost the way a six-mile drive takes an hour if it involves the 101 at 8am.  Things here don't happen as regularly as they do in other worlds.  Routine?  We hardly even need that word.

Perhaps we need a hundred different ways to say crazy.

At four-ish months, my old clock worries that I haven't met his friends.  But at the end of the day, my Angelino clock knows that time and life is different here for us.  We do what we can, when we can.  We try to protect our hearts.  We count our blessings, and friends from home are a big one. 

We share them when we can, perhaps, but visits from the life before are few and far between.

~

Related reading:

Friendship and dessert.  (I just did this yesterday... Only it was mimosas.)

Friendship forever (A free-thought poem-y piece - Love It.)

The web changes how we define friendship.  (Three links to article about social networking.)

Heights of Friendship (The photographer refers to them as a couple, but calls his picture "Heights of Friendship" - There's something powerful there.)

Contributing editor Liz Rizzo also blogs at Everyday Goddess.