getting love right

Blue note, 1976, Piero Dorazio

I care a lot about feeling responsible. It’s the reason why I enjoyed school so much: I’ve always loved doing well on an assignment. I like the sense that I’ve prepared adequately, that I’ve approached things the right way, that I’m a diligent student. No matter how much I change, I seem to retain this quality: I’m always looking around to see if I did a good job.

I think the thing that I really value about having a dog is that it’s pretty easy to be a good dog owner. The guidelines are clear: you feed your dog, you take your dog on lots of walks, you play with your dog, you don’t leave your dog alone very much. I know that I take good care of Akko. With people, however, it’s a different story. Because people are so impossibly complex. I’m always wondering if I’m a responsible partner, a responsible friend. There are guidelines for these roles, and I think I follow them decently well, but obviously there’s a lot of murkiness.

I’ve had two major friendship breakups in my life, and I’m haunted by both of them. Both these people were hugely important to me and I still think about them all the time—they were phenomenal people who loved me very much. I would say that the story for both breakups was something like this: we were intensely close for many years, and then there was friction that built up over time because of the closeness, and then we had a big fight that in both cases resulted in a loss of trust on my end. And then I felt like we couldn’t be as close anymore because I didn’t trust them, and it was so painful to have someone casually in your life when they used to be so important to you. So I let the friendship go.