friends shape your identity

+ weekly recs

Announcement: there is going to be a Washington D.C. Bookbear Express reader meetup (!!) organized by Sarah and Pranay on Sunday, September 15 at 2pm in Meridian Hill Park. Here is the Partiful. If you want to organize a meetup in your own city, you can email me at avabearexpress@gmail.com!

I remember the first friend group I was ever part of. I was 10 years old and we moved to Surrey, British Columbia after my parents bought a new house and I changed schools. My previous elementary school was in Delta and I was one of two Asian kids in my grade. Fraser Wood, my new school, was around 40% Asian. Over recess and lunch I became friends with a group of other Chinese/Taiwanese kids who all hung out with each other. Julie, Jeffrey, Laban, Tiffany, Yun Yun, Shermaine, Kenney, Tina. I fell in fitfully with them; I had no social graces, and I spent every conscious hour swamped by intense awkwardness, humiliation, and self-consciousness. We did what kids do: go to each other’s houses, play dodgeball and Capture the Flag in gym class, hang out for hours at Guildford Mall, getting chocolate-coated ice cream bars at Purdy’s and trying on clothes at Abercrombie.

I’m the one hiding my face.

When high school began, the friend group expanded and shifted. We spent every lunch time camped under the staircase in the cafeteria, chatting and reading. Back then, all I wanted was to fit in. Of course, like every other kid, I also wanted to be special, but special good, not special weird. Mostly I felt like a freak. Everything about me was wrong: my face, my hair, my body, my clothes, the way I talked. Before I was 10, no one wanted to be friends with me at all, except Judy, whose mom and dad were family friends with mine so she didn’t count. It seemed miraculous that I had found people who I could sit beside at lunch and whisper with during class.

I feel lucky now that I internalized this early on: The people we sit beside at lunch provide safety and freedom.

By 14 adolescence had launched me into boy craziness. First reciprocated crush, first boyfriend, first kiss, first breakup, more crushes, heartbreak, the old story. But 14 was also the age I became friends with the two girls I would be inseparable from for all of high school, Kate and Estella.

Romance dominated so much of my mindshare back then, but it was those two who shaped my conception of myself. We were reading College Confidential posts and panicking about getting into college (in the end Estella went to Columbia, Kate went to NYU, I went to Penn), going to Model United Nations conferences together almost every weekend, gossiping at every opportunity. We fought, too. There were tears, resentment, changing alliances, jealousy, constant insecurity. But who else was going to tell me that they saw me and my first boyfriend making out on the Skytrain and by the way, what did I see in him? Who else was I going to walk to the Rexall across the street from our high school with so we could buy Revlon lipsticks and experiment with them in the bathroom mirror?

When I dropped out of college with no plan and a very poor understanding of how American visas work, it was also friends who helped my life cohere. Spare rooms, sleeping over on their couches, letting me stay in their apartments while they were traveling (thank you V!). Advice, introductions, late night phone calls. And just their general sensibility: my friends are curious, resilient, bright-eyed, excellent at solving problems. I didn’t feel as competent or clever or well-connected as they were, more like four to six Sanrio plushies stuffed into jeans and an MIT hoodie, but the fact that they loved me made me want to live up to their hopes.

I’m not as close to my elementary school and high school friends anymore, but I still think of them often. I remain close to several of the friends I made when I first dropped out of college, and I pray that we’ll be close forever. The thing I’ve learned over time is that friendships are not fungible—no two people are the same, obviously, but also you can’t replicate the experience of someone knowing you through a particular era of your life. You can never go back to that period of your life; you can never replace the people who witnessed you and supported you. To me, relinquishing an important friendship is literally giving up a piece of your identity and history. We store ourselves in others; they make us whole.

I still make new friends, but it’s harder now that I already have so many people I treasure. Time is finite and it’s not always easy to hold onto the friends you already have, especially as I reach the age where everyone is getting into serious partnerships and planning weddings. In the next few years my friends will buy houses in suburbs and start having kids in droves. That will surface a whole new batch of ways to lose them. I know that I don’t want to lose my friends—I want to learn how to keep them.

A big project of mine over the next year will be writing about cultural scripts and expectations in friendship. Friendship is vastly undertheorized as compared to romantic relationships, but they’re just as important: they affect our quality of life in the most fundamental ways. Friendship is an entry point to everything: work, romance, sense of self, and the desire to contribute and care. Our friends teach us how to communicate and what to value. Without strong friendships, it’s difficult to properly orient ourselves in the world.

Weekly Recommendations

A very nice subscriber, Dennis, wondered where this had gone… so I’m bringing it back.