do we ever get over things?

control and release

Ann Craven, Night Swan, Quiet Rosy Moon, Red Water, 2023

Hello! I mentioned a few days ago that I wanted to do a writing accountability group. I’ve emailed the people who expressed interest but for those who missed it: I want to write 50,000 words in November, so I could really use some company. We’re going to do a writing group on Tuesday and Friday at 8 AM PST for one hour from November 12th to December 6th. That’s exactly eight sessions. Basically we’ll just all get on the Zoom call and write silently for 60 minutes. No one can miss more than one session. I’ll make a chat for participants so we can discuss how things are going.

I’m gonna ask everyone who participates to pay $40 because, well, accountability is important. As with the matchmaking I am happy to refund you after the fact if you’re unhappy about the experience. The link to sign up is here. We have about 10 people right now!! Join us, it’ll be fun :)

Other people live inside us. There is a friend I no longer talk to whom I still think about a fair amount and today I came across a piece someone else had written about his work. It felt so intimate to read it—prurient almost, like studying the veins in someone’s forearms too closely. Sometimes, overhearing a remark about someone I love can feel more private, more personal than hearing someone discuss me.

There are the indisputable boundaries of personal identity, I suppose, and then there is the way we actually live: entwined with and melted into other people. I’ve noticed that I am often as invested in my friends’ personal lives as I am in my own. Their dates, work disputes, friendships, breakups, marriages—I’m always curious about the emotional space they inhabit. Like who said what to you and in what tone? What happens to them isn’t happening to me, but also in a way it is.

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As you might imagine, I have a really hard time with friendship breakups. Like any other kind of breakup, there are the practical elements and then there is the personal pain. By practical elements, I mean: was there a fight? Did we make up? Did we agree to stop talking, or did one person just stop replying? Do I want to reach out? Do I think they will? I will at this point perhaps overstate my competence and say that I have enough relational skill to handle many of the practical aspects, as in, decide on some kind of plan of action. But how I feel is a different story.

There are so many ways to lose people. And most of them are so benign. Someone moves to another city. Someone moves to another country. Someone gets into a relationship and becomes absorbed in it. Someone has a kid. There are small resentments that build up in the relationship over time, and it all explodes in a big fight. Someone says something mean without intending to. One person is too needy. One person is not needy enough. Your friend works all the time and you understand nothing about their work so there’s very little to talk about.

Relationships are delicate equilibriums and can easily be thrown off. The balance I’ve been trying to find is accepting that this is natural and to some extent inevitable, and also accepting that… well, I don’t like it.

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There’s one model of the world that goes something like: platonically and romantically we fall in love with people, and then we fall out of love with them. Romantic relationships end. Friendships drift apart. It’s very sad for some period of time, but everyone involved recovers and moves on.

There’s another model of the world that goes something like: the love we experience basically lives inside us until we die. It’s not fungible, it’s not like I can be best friends with Edward and then Edward stops talking to me and then I become best friends with Annie and everything is fine. Annie might fill the same functional role in my life Edward does, but since my love for Edward is uniquely linked to his personhood, his absence will also be linked with a longing for this one particular person I loved.

One reason why I think this second model of the world is unpopular is because it basically posits that no one ever gets over anything. I don’t think that’s precisely true because memories and emotions do fade and practically speaking people “move on” all the time, but also: other people live inside us. They just do.

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I’m actually pretty okay with never getting over anything. This has been the biggest shift of my 20s: I spent the first few years of young adulthood obsessed with being less vulnerable. And I have spent the last few years essentially searching for ways to be increasingly vulnerable. And with that has come the understanding of how vulnerability is a form of strength.

When you open yourself up to desire and attachment, when you accept the love you feel and permit yourself to receive the love you’re given, you become more resilient, not less. It’s a paradox: vulnerability makes us feel exposed, but that exposure—that ability to let the light in—is what allows us to live transparent and aligned lives.

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When I was a little girl, I used to cry all the time about how much I loved my mom. If she was late to pick me up from piano practice, I would lose my mind with anxiety. Looking back at that now, I understand that the way we’re bonded to our parents is our first lesson in how heavy love can be: attachment can save and it can kill.

For so many people, vulnerability is inseparable from fear. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I understood that fear of my mom not picking me up from piano practice was the same fear that flashed through me when a friend or partner answered my text late. This sense of: what in the world am I going to do if you abandon me?

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It’s true that life is a series of abandonments. Also true is the Saul Bellow line that life is a series of “unexpected intrusions of beauty.”

I believe that complicated arrangements can work for a long period of time. When people talk about how communes, book clubs, platonic life partnerships don’t work, I’m always more focused on the ones that do. I’m always thinking: isn’t there a way we could keep going?

Two of my friends are about to have a baby on another continent and I was telling my therapist that I’m sort of worried I’ll never see them again. She laughed and told me that life is long and there lots of twists and turns. I am trying to become someone who holds on when I can but lets go when I need to. Control and release, over and over.

When we met 10 years ago we sat and talked for about six hours and I felt so utterly comfortable. Like I could tell you the most deranged thing about me, the worst thing I’d ever done and you would laugh about it and maybe you would understand or you wouldn’t but you would accept me. And you felt that way about me, too. It’s still the same today. A lot of things happened in between, but this is the story that matters.