to feeling in love with everything and everyone all at once
to having big feelings, to loving in big ways, and to dancing alone
a new friend and i were talking about his definition of happiness—what his pillars for happiness are (fulfillment, connection, etc)—and when he landed on human connection being one of the pillars, it made me think of this letter and how i needed to finish writing it.
i started drafting this two weeks ago, on valentine’s day, at about 11:53 p.m. and then midnight passed and i felt like it wasn’t the right time to send it, so it sat in my drafts until i re-opened this can of worms and finished writing it. it’s a little longer than my letters usually are, but it’s everything that i need to get off my chest right now. if it feels repetitive, it probably is, but sometimes repetition is good.
in my sketchbook, i’ve jotted down the following notes: goals for the 20s: have fun, love your friends, help people in the ways that you can, learn from mistakes, be kinder to yourself. they’re pretty standard and self-explanatory (and maybe a little obvious), but they work, and i’d argue that they’re goals that we should all have and hold each other accountable for.
being kinder to myself means learning how to be okay with rejection and falling (and failing), reminding myself that it’s okay to not go to the gym for a week (or maybe two), and being more honest with not only myself but everyone around me.
full transparency: i should be studying for my econ midterm right now.
i’m a haver of big feelings. big feelings as in the kind that are indescribable, too large to be contained by words.
things that are too large to be contained by words include the love i have for my friends, but i’m going to try anyway, because that is all that i know how to do. because at the end of the day writing is living and living is writing and sometimes trying is what matters the most.
i’ve always been a lover of love stories and romcoms. and in love stories all gestures of love are something: kind, sometimes messy and misconstrued, sometimes small and gentle, but other times grand and loud. blasting an 80s love song on the boombox on the front lawn of your high school crush’s house; passing notes back and forth in class; meeting someone behind the bleachers just to tell them you like like them; showing up at the door unannounced with gifts. these are the ways i learned to love—i wasn’t necessarily learning it from my parents, so i learned from what i had: the supply of romcoms on netflix. (though, to be fair, sometimes i give my friends fruit to remind them how much i love them. i guess i learned that from my mom.)
these are the ways i learned to love: fully and honestly and loudly and gently and kindly. i tell my friends i love them every day. i say i love you explicitly and i mean it—and the frequency of which i say these three words don’t subtract from their power or their worth. in some way “i love you” means just a little bit more and carries just a little bit more weight, every time i say it.
these are the ways that i have learned to say i love you: orange slices gently placed into the hands of my friends as we sit in the hallways of our building, links to playlists made especially with you in mind (my love for playlists and mixtapes is so intense and explaining it is hard, but drew schwartz put it into words for vice), screenshots of memes texted at 2 a.m., with warm hugs and holding hands, handwritten notes and hand-made gifts and simply saying “i love you.”
if there’s anything that i’ve learned in the past few years is that the worst thing you can do for yourself is to make your love for the people around you unknown.
this past weekend, i sent my friend daphne—who, despite being on the east coast, is always awake when i text her at 12 am—these words (they’ve been edited for the sake of flow because this chunk of words was originally sent as about 20 separate texts): sometimes you just have to try your best and do your best, and sometimes your best is not good for everyone around you but if they love you they will understand… and i am just taking it sleazy and enjoying life and trying my best, and doing my best for both me and everyone around me. because my take is that we are the best for the people around us when we are the best for ourselves and also the other way around. and that i need the people around me for me to be the best me that i can be and that i need to know others to know myself.
i’ve tried for the past week to break apart what i was trying to articulate and to explain exactly just what it means, but i don’t think that i can (and i think people who get it will get it).
sometimes people get alarmed and confused by the amount that i love my friends and the amount that i center them in my life. and i guess it’s because at some point i realized that the love that we need to thrive can’t and shouldn’t be fulfilled by just one person—that space is meant for an entire community to fill.
Love is the marrow of life, and yet, so often people attempt to funnel it into the narrow channels prescribed by marriage and the nuclear family.
Mandy Len Catron — What You Lose When You Gain a Spouse (What if marriage is not the social good that so many believe and want it to be?)
and when i let myself step into that truth, the need (or maybe the pressure to) to find a specific someone faded away.
“Truly intimate friendships are like those nets underneath a tightrope. Life is the tightrope. My friends are the nets, who are there when I test my balance by trying new or difficult things. When I fall, they are who I trust to catch me. And for that, I could never be grateful enough.”
Elly Belle — How Platonic Intimacy Improved Everything About My Life
my friends, who take me rollerskating, who will crawl with me to the edge of the rink after i’ve fallen (listen, my lower spine took the hit, and for a whole two minutes i felt like i couldn’t breathe or stand, much less roller skate my way out); who send me letters from across the country; who hold my hands as we’re walking through the woods at 1 a.m.; who know me so well that they can take buzzfeed personality quizzes for me and end up with a result that is so accurate it shakes me to my core (my hot take is that buzzfeed quizzes are fun, and that we should let people enjoy them, because i don’t think the quizzes have ever hurt anyone); who let me put butterfly clips in their hair; who will say yes to taking pictures with my new stuffed animal (earl, the fox) without question; my friends, who know how much i love hugs and know me so well that they know that something is off when we greet each other without one; who will remind me to eat when i haven’t (which is regrettably pretty often (i’m working on it!)). i don’t know where i’d be without them.
it’s not really a surprise that some of my closest friends are other queer folx, either: when you grow up in spaces that don’t feel like home, or with parents who aren’t affirming, you learn to find the support you need from the community around you (it’s something i mentioned in my last letter, “when home isn’t a place”). queer people push the boundaries of platonic intimacy and love and care for one another far beyond the structures of marriage and (blood/legal) family—putting work (though it doesn’t feel like work) into the friendships i have in my life feels like second nature.
sorry. tangent. like i said, i really don’t know where i’d be without my friends, at all.
and lately it’s been feeling like my community—my network of friends, my support system—has been expanding. for every day of the past week, i’ve introduced one of my friends to another. i don’t believe in coincidences, but i’m a firm believer in fate, and i think that maybe these moments were destined to happen.
earlier, daphne and i talked about this idea of fate and destiny, but as it pertains to past lives and energy and stardust and the first law of thermodynamics (that energy is neither created nor destroyed), the timing of all of these events has me wondering if it’s at all possible that at some point, our energy existed as parts of the same being.
who knows? maybe that’s why we often have the feeling that we’ve known someone we’ve just met for so much longer.
do you believe in soulmates?
i do, but i believe in soulmates and the really necessary s attached to the end of that word. soulmates, plural. the plurality of it all is incredibly necessary here.
daphne and i have this running idea that entire groups of friends are meant to be, or just that we have multiple soulmates, and that the energy and stardust that exists in us (soulmates) came from the same source or existed in the same space at some point in time (maybe just a hundred years ago, or maybe thousands).
i think that, in some sense, every person we meet is someone we’re meant to meet. even the people who don’t stick around. even the people we never talk to, or have only run into once. i think even brief interactions at the grocery store are meant to happen.
and i think that, because all relationships are commitments, we make a conscious choice to allow friendships to blossom and bloom—and that’s what matters. and when we center these relationships in our lives, our universes expand & grow in unprecedented and radical ways; it changes how we love each other and how we love ourselves.
and on the other side of the same coin, it makes dancing alone in the dark more meaningful and worthwhile; it makes hours spent with yourself more enjoyable; it makes the quiet less terrifying, because it when you know that you have these people in your life, you know that being alone doesn’t mean that you’re lonely.
to supplement this very long letter about how much i love my friends (and how much i need them in my life), please also read this past letter (if you want to): to giving love letters a chance (and writing them for your friends)
Very nice...I see you haven't written in a while so I was wondering, would you be willing to part with the name, Breadcrumbs? I tried to start a pub called that and saw it was already taken.