I'm just happy to be at the table
- Brydon Wang
- May 9
- 6 min read
Updated: May 10
On The White Lotus, adult friendship, and finding your people over time.
There’s a moment in The White Lotus Season 3 finale that has stayed with me. Carrie Coon’s character, Laurie, sits at a dinner table with her friends and delivers a monologue so unguarded, so quietly devastating, that it stops the show in its tracks. That singular line of profound observation, that so many of us feel this incredible need to 'justify our lives'. And it just builds and builds from there:
This monologue is 'courage'. It cuts through the performance that often settles into long friendships: that need to appear well, settled, unbothered. Instead, laid bare in technicolour detail is the quiet ache of being seen by people who remember who you were. It strips out the ra-ra of belief systems, to hone in on that singular moment that elongates into who we are and what we mean to each other: Time. Time spent. Valuable time spent. Here, with friends. The accumulation of history, of awkward dinners and emotional near-misses, of staying in each other’s lives even as everything else drifts and swirls around. And, as Michelle Ruiz put it in her sublime Vogue article, in breaking from the Bragging Table, in refusing to cling to this pretence that her life had arrived at some polished, enviable conclusion, Laurie said quiet part loud: our oldest friends reflect back not just who we are now, but the choices we’ve made… and the ones we regret.
I’ve been thinking about that scene a lot since Clement got on a plane to get here to me in Brisbane. Without qualification, Clement is my oldest friend. We met before we were teenagers. He’s now godfather to my boys and we’ve known each other long enough that the shape of our friendship isn’t soft around the edges anymore. We’ve had one of those big adult differences—the kind where you don’t just get angry, you feel betrayed. You retreat. You wonder if this is it—is this the line in the sand that just becomes that tectonic boundary where you shift at such a geological scale away from each other. It certainly wasn’t like the squabbles we had when we were younger, when friendships felt elastic, endlessly forgiving.
Adult disputes are different.
The funny thing about when the ‘Dispute’ happened was how for a long time I’d been thinking we were drifting apart, and in a way this shook things up. My main complaint was that Clement had become his occupation walking on legs. He’s had a phenomenal career—but my gripe was with this corporate-speak he wielded in all parts of his life, even with me. And despite my various journeys through corporate, small business, academic, government sectors… I did not quite gel with this. It felt like a veil or some kind of clinical distance that creeps in with the vocabulary of capitalism, like someone constantly trying to negotiate you into their viewpoint.
But what stayed with me—what changed my view—was how he met that moment of Dispute deploying his considerable corporate skills of managing. I walked away from there truly in awe of the American corporate skillset he’d imbibed. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t deflect or disappear. I found in him a masterful communicator that saw the problem so thoroughly and from all around, listened, didn’t try to dismantle the framework I was on—but reached across to build a bridge.
Now, I’ve met very, very few people who are able to do that... so coming at this both from the recipient of such bridge-building and almost in some narrator-view of the scene—I was so utterly impressed, and proud that he was my friend—even if I was the angriest I’d ever been with him. And so I did something that I’ve probably done for no one else in my life... I stayed in the debris of that fury, showing up in the middle of the mess. Not to fix it immediately, not with the ease of a paste-on apology, but to do the slower work of making meaning from the cracks.
And meaning, I’ve come to think, is what we’re always reaching for in our friendships – though it doesn’t always look the way we expect it to.
But as I said to Kat Feeney on the radio all that time ago... let’s not overly romanticise old friends because the truth is, old friendships are fragile... some even become toxic. We carry expectations into them that no longer fit, we misread closeness as permanence. And we fail to appreciate the brittleness that it acquires – hinted at, sometimes, in how small things become the hill you die on: one missed birthday, one too-late reply, a passive-aggressive comment that finally tips everything over. And just like that... you’re done.
Other times, the erosion is slow. You become the afterthought and you start to wonder if the rare moments of warmth outweigh the ways they’ve let you down, whether the inside jokes still matter when they never show up on time, or only message when they want something. And sometimes (the saddest of all) your lives simply diverge. You’re parenting, they’re not. They’re travelling, you’re building. The rhythm you once pranced through the kitchen and living room to, disjoints.
And then, there are people you meet later in life who see you with a kind of clarity that shocks you, who get your jokes, who ask these incredible questions that unlock these layers and layers of conversation to dig into... who feel like a missing piece. But the timing’s off. You’re both too busy. You have to text before you call. After a while, it’s clear: this glimmer of gold isn’t yours to hold. Not now… maybe not ever.
And the thing is: there's research to back all this up... studies that show that as we age, we often become more discerning (more protective, perhaps?) about who we let into our lives. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean we carry fewer, and often more brittle, friendships. The American Psychological Association reported last year that high-quality adult friendships predict long-term wellbeing, helping to buffer against depression, anxiety, and even physical illness. In fact, people with strong social ties are less likely to die from heart disease and chronic illness. And the effects are measurable: having no friends or poor-quality friendships is a greater risk factor than smoking 20 cigarettes a day!
You see, when we are low in social connection, be it from loneliness, isolation, or poor-quality relationships, we face increased risk of premature death. But the research also tells us that friendships can be made and maintained at any age. Even minimal or ‘weak’ ties—like the person who always remembers your coffee order—can lift us. Our brains literally light up in synchrony with people we connect with. We feel less alone on a hill. Our heart rate stays steadier when we’re tackling something difficult with a friend beside us. And I think it boils down to this pseudo shared decision-making… sometimes we just need someone to agree with us, don’t we. To take our side even if it’s a terrible, terrible decision. I call it the 'Don't save me. Just agree.'
In the face of life’s harder seasons, these connections become our anchor. A close friend, one who sees us as we are and chooses to stay, can steady our ship… not just emotionally, but physiologically. And yet, for something so vital, adult friendship is often left unsaid, unsupported, unstudied. We’re taught how to manage careers, to navigate romance... but who teaches us how to sit beside each other when things are hard? To not walk away when the performance cracks?
I’ve come to see that adult friendship is less about compatibility and more about will. It’s about being able to sit with someone who has changed—and who sees that you have, too. It’s about tolerating the uncomfortable silences, the misunderstandings, the disagreements, and deciding they’re still worth working through. It’s about breaking from the Bragging Table long enough to be honest.
And it’s about showing up. Not always perfectly. But again and again.
Laurie’s monologue felt so radical because it didn’t argue for perfect friendship—it simply asked us to stay. To witness each other across time. To admit our sadness, our vanity, our mess. To drop the performance. When she breaks down and says, “I’m just happy to be at the table,” it hit me hard. Because I know that feeling. I know what it means to still be at the table, even after everything.
Maybe that’s why Clement’s friendship matters. Not because it’s always been easy, not because of the decades. But because it’s endured the harder parts. Because we’ve done the work to rebuild. And maybe, that’s what long friendship is: not something seamless or fixed, but something shaped in the middle of things... in the missteps, the recoveries, the shifting expectations, the long-long memory, and the renewed promise to still be there.
And so, here you are, Clement—part of the family. Not the one inherited, the one we chose.
P.S. Enjoy this little photo essay from a long time ago when I was visiting Clement in San Francisco:
