Stay of Execution: All Request Day: Friendships

Woman of the Law asks me to blog some thoughts about friendships and how they develop and change over time.

I've been thinking about friendships a bunch these days, although I'm not sure I have anything profound to say about the topic. It's the one area of my life that doesn't confuse me at all. I have great friends, and lots of them. I keep making more, and I hang on to the old ones. It's easy for me to make friends. I feel known, seen, loved, respected, wanted. Even as my confidence about my professional path teeters, and my trepidation about romantic possibilities waxes and wanes, I feel great about my social life. Thank goodness for this, I think. It makes a lot of things easier. I realize, for example, that the outside world doesn't care very much what I do for a living. I don't need to be achieving Big Things to have the love and acceptance and respect of my friends. This is basic, I know, but you'd be surprised at how wonderfully freeing it is to really, truly feel it. My friends don't care that I don't have any money. They make me laugh when I'm feeling trembly and sad. It's neat. I feel like I fit in my life because of the strength of my social network.

It wasn't always like this. When I moved down to Portland from the middle of nowhere in 1998, I was pretty isolated, within a small and crumbling relationship. I only had a couple of friends in law school, and my best friends from college and childhood were scattered across the country. My boyfriend at the time was very guarded and I led a pretty circumscribed life. Looking back sometimes I can hardly recognize myself. It took me a couple of years to build a tribe of friends here that felt real and compelling.

I think the biggest thing I've learned about friendships is to say what you want to say. Ask the question that you want to know the answer to, even if it's scary or embarrassing. I learned that the hard way, when a dear friend was raped. I thought about it a lot, and had a million questions. My friend walked around sad, and it broke my heart, but I was too scared to ask her anything real. I was afraid of the answers, maybe, but I was also afraid that I might bring up the topic when she was thinking of something else and ruin her day. Instead I tried to dwell on happy things and kept our friendship at a surface level that was rotten for both of us. The longer this went on the guiltier and more estranged I felt, and the wider the gulf I didn't know how to cross. Luckily my friend saved me, and in a tearful conversation she said, "I'm always thinking about this. I don't want to be alone with it. I don't want it to separate me from you." And I realized my clumsiness and fear was really small compared to my desire to be close to her. Not long after, a dear friend's mother was dying. And I felt the same bafflement and shyness, the same not knowing what to say. But I charged in and asked all the questions I was scared to ask, and even though the conversation was painful and scary, my friend's response was gratitude. It was a big life lesson for me. People want to be known. And if you're trying, with love and sincerity, to know them, it's hard to screw things up, even if the words aren't happy or easy.

As for friendships changing over time, I don't have too much to say about that. Of course they do. Sometimes I'm in close orbit with a friend, and other times we're loosely connected. That feels okay to me. I love people pretty easily, and I don't need very many people. I'm not wedded to a particular form of a relationship with anyone. So although from time to time I feel disappointed by a friend, I've rarely felt betrayed or angry. Generally, it feels pretty easy and fluid for me to move from an active super-in-touch friendship to a mode where we check in from time to time and look forward to the rare occasions when our paths cross.

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Stay of Execution

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