i’m in an international book club. if you know me well, you know that this eclectic little book club – that started five years ago with me forcing my friends to read with me to celebrate my birthday – has become a very important part of my life. there are seven of us, and we rotate book picks loosely tied to our birthdays. we used to meet in person in bangkok; however, now that we live all over the world we meet in an online hangout. while not the same, it totally works and i feel like i’ve got my friends all around me in the living room. when i picture my life twenty years from now, i imagine birthday book club will still be a part of it in some way. we have read everything from atrociously heavy and depressing picks such as voices from chernobyl to epic universally adored books such as pachinko to pallet cleansers such as crazy rich asians. we make slides with questions. we still show up even if we haven’t done the reading. we give life updates. we disagree about whether listening to audiobooks is really reading. books have become the reason we stay in touch, but at some point along the way we became family.
birthday book club is just the beginning of my beautiful network of friends. living internationally, friends become the family we choose. i have close friends from nearly every phase of my life: my cottage bestie, my high school friends, my pool friends, my university crew, my mexico girls, and my professional learning network. i’ve also got lovely friends that i’ve met at the gym, on vacations, at work, and randoms i’ve met on the plane. it helps to be a bit chatty! when i got diagnosed with cancer, people warned me that i might lose some friends – people who feel out of their depth or who just simply don’t know what to say. for the most part, that wasn’t my experience. my friends found ways to be present and to support me even when they were totally uncomfortable and even when they knew they couldn’t fix anything. they showed up on day one, and they showed up on day one hundred and one.