Q: How do you make friends in a new city?

I celebrated two years in Austin on June 1. While my time here has mostly been calm and lovely, it’s a huge undertaking to start a new life from scratch, and I’ve had a lot of Big Feelings along the way. Like a hermit crab, I’m still in the process of leaving that familiar old shell behind and making this newer one really feel like home. Austin threw a lot of magic my way to help me craft a beautiful life here. But nothing has been more magical than the soft, easy breeze that brought new friends into my life and set them down at my feet, like that traveling feather in Forrest Gump. When I visited Austin for five weeks in February 2021—testing the waters to see if Austin should be my new home like I had a hunch it should be—I put out a call in this newsletter asking if anyone in Austin wanted to get together. One reader, Summer, responded. We met up in Zilker Park and took a walk. Then she added me to an Instagram group called ATX Leftists which held the key to the women who would becom

I celebrated two years in Austin on June 1. While my time here has mostly been calm and lovely, it’s a huge undertaking to start a new life from scratch, and I’ve had a lot of Big Feelings along the way. Like a hermit crab, I’m still in the process of leaving that familiar old shell behind and making this newer one really feel like home. Austin threw a lot of magic my way to help me craft a beautiful life here. But nothing has been more magical than the soft, easy breeze that brought new friends into my life and set them down at my feet, like that traveling feather in Forrest Gump. When I visi