I want someone that will help me wake up. I want someone that makes me more free. I want someone that makes me less identified with all of this. But so many people use relationships as a way to steam seal in the illusion.
Towards friendship
Thereās been a great deal of upheaval in my life over the last handful of years. Mostly revolving around relationships I considered closeā¦friends, lovers, inspirations, confidants, co-conspiratorsā¦Relationships with people that have played important roles in my life. The forms these relationship breakdowns took were common place. Lack of support and appreciation coming in. Feeling like an on-call resource going out. All couched in performative action, passive aggressiveness, and gaslighting. All happening through a multi-year cascade. One (or more) rolling over into another. Each complicating the prior and exposing true shapes.
I say ācommonplaceā easily now. That wasnāt always the case. The disconnect between my expectations of the responsibility people who care about each other have to each other and the reality of my continuing experience was immense. There was a point where I began to feel a bit crazy.
On the lighter days: How did my expectations get so wildly inaccurate? On the darker ones: If this requires so much work for little, if any, return - If the odds are high that difficult times are only exacerbated by my close relationships - Why bother at all?
I decided to get out of my own bubble and explore what other people had to say about friendship. What follows is a summary of some of the things I found. This overarching view is, to me, both informative (in a practical sense) and comforting (in a broader immaterial way).
None of what Iāve collected is a magically solves all problems. Iāve found I need to continually re-contextualized and re-considered it. Iām putting it here as both a statement of purpose and as a place to easily return toā¦
What is friendship?
āWe have perpetrated a corrosion of meaning by overusing the word and overextending its connotation, compressing into an imperceptible difference the vast existential expanse between mere acquaintanceship and friendship in the proper Aristotelian sense.ā
She goes on to create a taxonomy of friendship. A series of concentric circles of āhuman connection, intimacy, and emotional truthfulness, each larger circle a necessary but insufficient condition for the smaller circle it embraces.ā
- Acquaintances: These are the people we are, quite simply, aquatinted with. Our connection with them begins and ends there.
- Persons I Know and Like: āThese are people of whom we have limited impressions, based on shared interests, experiences, or circumstances, on the basis of which we have inferred the rough outlines of a personhood we regard positively.ā This is the group we most often conflate with friends. Both in the sense that we think of them as friends, also in the sense that we think of this when we self-define our responsibilities to friendship. This is a highly consumptive relationship. It thrives in the superficial world of social media. It is a photo, a sentence, or a Like.
- Kindred Spirits: These are the people with whom we have a significant overlap in core values. We are sympathetic towards them and inspired by them. Though this relationship is informed by both parties performed public selves, rather than āfrom intimate knowledge of one anotherās interior livesā.
- Friends: The smallest circle. ā[P]eople with whom we are willing to share, not without embarrassment but without fear of judgment, our gravest imperfections and the most anguishing instances of falling short of our own ideals and values. The concentrating and consecrating force that transmutes a kinship of spirit into a friendship is emotional and psychological intimacy. A friend is a person before whom we can strip our ideal self in order to reveal the real self, vulnerable and imperfect, and yet trust that it wouldnāt diminish the friendās admiration and sincere affection for the whole self, comprising both the ideal and the realā.
How does friendship work?
In the February 14th, 2018 edition of Hanna Brooks Olsenās newsletter, Hanna outlines some behaviors that make a friendship last:
- Thoughtfulness: remembering birthdays, thinking ahead about what another person might like
- Emotional openness and labor: actively admitting to what they're feeling, asking how the other person feels, comforting
- Supportive behavior: listening, calling back to check in on someone, following up, making plans to help a person feel connected
These fit nicely with Mariaās definition of friendship. They are the core of actions that build and maintain the foundation (trust) that enables the level of connection and vulnerability required for genuine friendship.
What about love?
bell hooks takes a radical approach to love. She makes a deeply convincing argument that the notion of love as a nebulous undefinable thing is profoundly incorrect. In the book āThe Will to Changeā she defines love as:
Love is action and not solely feeling.
It is the willingness to nurture oneās own and anotherās spiritual and emotional growth.
It is a combination of: care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust.
She goes on to say that when any of those things are missing, there is no love. There may be the potential for love, but in that moment when something is missing love does not exist.
That resonates with me. I like it because it eliminates the myriad of commonplace excuses we might make in an effort to avoid the responsibilities of love.
If we change the first line to āFriendship is action and not solely a feelingā, the remaining definition nicely encompasses Maria and Hannahās thoughts.
In practice
All of these ideas together creates a useful lens to look at advice and action around friendship.
For example: A reoccurring problem in my friendships has been people disappearing for extended periods of time (not the occasional ghosting - anywhere from six months to more than a year of no response). The advice Iāve routinely seen for handling these situations is: If those people return without any acknowledgement of their absence, you donāt owe them anything. Pretending it never happened is absolutely not an option. You can choose to have a conversation with them about it, but you do not owe them that.
That was hard to get my head around at first. It made me uneasy. After all a friendship is rare and important. Shouldnāt you make every effort to salvage it? Mix in a bit of the ridiculous but none-the-less real feelings of āWhat if this person that has disappeared thinks less of me for not re-engaging?ā and simply wanting a friendship back, and it becomes advice thatās hard to put into practice.
Applying bellās definition of love to these disappearances violates every required action: Care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust. It is a disengagement from the āintimate interior livesā Maria speaks on. It moves the relationship from āFriendā to one of the lesser circles.
Friendships are rare and important. These situations are no longer friendships. Friendship is action and not solely a feeling.
Is an acquaintance owed intense emotional labor?
When we look at relationships in this informed and heartfelt way we create an opportunity to release ourselves from the exhausting back-and-forth of masquerading friendships. Freeing up energy to discover and focus on folks who value the work required to grow together.
(At least that's how I see things at this moment - Further reading is always appreciated)
❱❱ The Nap Ministry
We believe rest is a form of resistance and name sleep deprivation as a racial and social justice issue.
People have found the solution of everything in ease and the easiest side of ease;
but it is clear that we must hold to the difficult; everything living holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself according to its own character and is an individual in its own right, strives to be so at any cost and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must hold to the difficult is a certainty that will not leave us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; the fact that a things is difficult must be one more reason for our doing it.
[ā¦]
[I]f we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it becomes clear that most people get to know only one corner of their room, a window seat, a strip of floor which they pace up and down. In that way they have a certain security. And yet how much more human is that insecurity, so fraught with danger, which compels the prisoners in Poe's Tales to grope for the shapes of their ghastly prisons and not to remain unaware of the unspeakable horrors of the dwelling. But we are not prisoners. No snares and springs are laid for us, and there is nothing that should alarm or torment us. We are set in life as in the element with which we are most in keeping, and we have moreover, through thousands of years of adaptation, become so similar to this life that when we stay still we are, by a happy mimicry, hardly to be distinguished from our surroundings. We have no cause to be mistrustful of our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors they are our terrors; if it has abysses those abysses belong to us, if dangers are there we must strive to love them. And if only regulate our life according the that principle which advises us always to hold to the difficult, what even now appears most alien to us will become most familiar and loyal. How could we forget those old myths which are to be found in the beginnings of every people; the myths of the dragons which are transformed, at the last moment, into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our life are princesses, who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrifying is at bottom the helplessness that seeks our help.
āRainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Chewy sticky rice chocolate waffle
Normalize waffle clotheslines.
The cinematography that changed cinema
This is a celebration of cinema. More specifically, this is a celebration on the many wonderful looks that cinema has. The many faces it wears to greet us and the many unique and poetic ways it shows us where beauty may reside.
Take to the streetsā¦
And fuck the police. No justice. No peace.
We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time
in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.
āAlan Watts
Freetown Christiana
In 1971 residents of Copenhagen took over a 84 acre section of the city, turning it into an independent intentional community. It remained legally independent until 2013.
The objective of Christiania is to create a self-governing society whereby each and every individual holds themselves responsible over the well-being of the entire community. Our society is to be economically self-sustaining and, as such, our aspiration is to be steadfast in our conviction that psychological and physical destitution can be averted.