How do I make friends without feeling like I’m forcing it?

Welcome (back) to the Polite Fictions advice column!

 

Hey, hi, hello! As I like to start all of my newsletters, sorry for the delay.

I swear I had some momentum behind this thing, but then the holidays happened and then I was psyching myself up for the first anniversary of my dad’s death, and amid that LA quite literally caught fire. My mom and our two geriatric dogs had to evacuate to the wall-less loft my boyfriend and I call home. At 4 AM on the actual anniversary, one of those geriatric dogs managed to poo IN my shoe which I only figured out when I stepped in said poo shoe, so now the anniversary of my father’s death is also the anniversary of poo shoe. Sorry for being so lavatorial before noon.

Needless to say, you can understand how this got away from me!

Before we dive into this edition of my “advice” “column,” some housekeeping: 
#1 I’m joining everyone else you know on the internet and moving this establishment over to Substack for the next issue, because these Mailchimp prices are increasing at a level on par with eggs and I’m a freelancer. You’ll get a standard opt-in email from this address when that happens, so please, opt in! 

And #2 Since we last spoke in this particular medium of the newsletter, one Alison E. Roman debuted yet another media subsidiary with the name Unsolicited Advice and I cannot even dream of competing with that woman’s SEO, so we’re pivoting. We’re rebranding. We’re moving on! 

Welcome to Polite Fictions! Sob sister central, your on-call agony aunt: The in-between issues, if you will. If you’re unfamiliar with my previous forays into Dear Sugar territory, I offer what I like to call 'parenthetical advice' — small but sincere suggestions and accompanying books to solve the everyday problems we face in these modern times, The Age of Avoidance. 

Together, we’ll rewrite the little stories we tell ourselves to make things easier, only to end up feeling worse. If you're tired of saying 'no worries!' when you are, in fact, worried, you're in the right place. Polite fictions help us survive the day-to-day, but they also keep us from saying what we mean and getting what we need. And while my polite fictions keep me warm at night, I can dispense advice on evolving past them because you know what they say: those who can, do; those who can’t, write newsletters.

So, please send me your quandaries: dating dilemmas, etiquette errors, sibling rivalries, road rage, work worries, whatever! We’ll get through it together. You can also just ask for super-specific and very personal book recommendations. Just give me the details and I’ll give you the books!
 

Let's begin!