Making friends as an adult is weird. It’s like dating, but with less kissing and more “so what are you into?” awkwardness. You don’t get homeroom anymore. You get grocery stores, hardware aisles, and the one person at the thrift shop also inspecting the weird shelf of wooden ducks.

I’ve hit the stage of life where I’m not trying to collect people. I’m trying to find my people. The makers. The foragers. The art goblins. The “I brought snacks and half a project” crowd. The ones who get excited about a box of old fabric or a stack of rusty coffee cans because they see potential instead of trash.

When I get where I’m going in the Pacific Northwest, I want to go hunting—not just for mushrooms and berries, but for community. I want to find the art groups, maker meetups, fiber circles, sketch groups, garden nerds, and the random folks who also show up at the community center on Tuesday nights with glue on their hands and too many ideas in their heads.

I don’t need everyone. I just need the right weird few. The people who can handle dark humor without flinching. The ones who like dogs and don’t expect spotless floors. The kind of friends who show up with a bag of buttons, or a cutting from their favorite plant, or a strange piece of driftwood and say, “This feels like you.”

Adult friendship is a little complicated and challenging, but the part they don’t talk about enough is that it’s worth it. The older you get, the more you know what you will and won’t tolerate. You can skip the “pretend to be normal so they like me” phase and go straight to “here’s my actual brain and here are my actual projects, take it or leave it.”

When I picture my future people, I don’t see a perfect curated friend group. I see a loose flock:

• One person who knows plants and drags me out to look at moss.
• One person who loves textiles and shows up with yarn and gossip.
• One person who welds or builds and says, “I can help you make that real.”
• Several people who are just here to laugh, eat, and wander around poking at things.

I want friends I can sit with at a table piled with paper scraps, seed packets, half-finished sketches, and cups of coffee, while we all work on different things and occasionally look up to say, “Okay, look at this ridiculous idea I just had.” No small talk. No performance. Just shared space and shared weirdness.

I know it might be awkward at first. I’ll have to go to new places, show up to events where I don’t know a soul, maybe join a class or two and sit there feeling like the new kid. But I’d rather do that than sit alone in a house full of ideas with no one to cackle about them with.

So when I land in my new latitude, that’s one of my missions: find the makers, the oddballs, the gentle weirdos, the people who light up when you say, “I’m thinking about building a thing, but I don’t know what I’m doing yet.” People who answer, “Same. Let’s figure it out.”

If you’re one of those people—wherever you live—you’re my kind of people. You don’t have to have it all together. You just have to be curious, a little strange, and willing to show up. The rest, we’ll make up as we go.