ON OUR DISTANCED FRIENDSHIP, GOING IT ALONE, AND THE JOY OF RESISTANCE
Thursday June 4 and Friday June 5 2020
Dear Sarah,
I started this week’s letter to you yesterday, but somehow it’s gotten to be Friday afternoon and I’m still writing! I have been thinking more about what I meant when I said recently that I think of our similarities, our commonalities, as known territory. I said it with an inflection in my mind of the feeling of having a good friend and wondering how did it come to pass that we should be such good friends? It feels natural and inevitable once you’re down the road, but the origins of such a friendship always seem a bit hazy. When I think of what we share, I think of us as two people who are thoughtful, deliberate in the way we think, and interested in translating that deliberate way of thinking into writing and reflecting on the world. (That’s not everything we share, but those are highlights!) I think we are also extraordinarily different, which is where the fun is: since we are close friends it feels safe to think and talk about all the ways in which we are different. If I could sum it up in a gesture I would think about us having a nice hug and then holding each other at arm’s length and saying, Let me get a good look at you! When you aren’t close with someone there may be ways in which you’re similar, and more ways in which you’re different, but there’s no space to dive in and talk about those differences. By being close with each other, you and I have created a space to look at each other in a meaningful way, and see things about each other.
I felt warm and glowy (not weird at all!) when you said last week that you admire my way of being. It is interesting to hear that you see me as sturdy. I am re-reading your words about yourself and your sense that you are more malleable, more easily shaped by those around you. If this is true, it is interesting because I also find you to have a strong core of integrity, a consistent self founded on a commitment to think deeply about the questions of this world. Maybe you have a malleable outer layer around a sturdy interior. (Is this a description of a certain kind of ice cream popsicle?) I am recalling a conversation we had once — I think it was last summer because I can picture where I was while we were talking, I was out on a walk up and down a wide greenway near our place — where you were describing how you have had the feeling of wanting to bring together your different friends or groups of friends who you think would like each other. When I think of this conversation I am thinking about how you have a natural capacity to connect with all kinds of different people — and that is something about you (you called it emotional intimacy in your letter last week). You perceive things in people and you can see the connections that could be made. Malleability is one way to think about it, and I wonder if there are other ways to describe this quality of yours: you are perceptive, you find things in people to appreciate deeply, you want the people you know and love to know and love each other, because you see the good and interesting things in each of them.
How people get to know each other and to decide they want to spend time with each other is a mystifying kind of thing. That is also what I think our letters are about. We are in a kind of relationship, a creative relationship, that is built around some of our shared interests and ways of thinking about things, and which is strong enough in those ways to bear our differences, and to additionally make space for us to learn and think about each others’ differences. It’s also interesting to think about how little time we have actually spent with each other, in direct proximity with each other — it’s like we met on the internet! We have a distanced friendship, and it has been distanced from the start, not just since we’ve entered this global pandemic lifestyle. When I was seeing you in person more regularly I was perhaps in your vicinity for a total of three or four weeks of any year, and now even less than that. One way of thinking about our friendship and relationship is that it is one of words, spoken words and written words, and also of occasional physical proximity, but less so than those spoken and written hours we’ve put in. It reminds me of when people speak of “the early days of the internet” and how folks were finding their people and getting together virtually around shared interests. Here in our letters we are like the early days of the internet, a group of two.
I also found myself thinking about your words about me, You have little need for other people in order to know yourself or your worth, or to help you determine how to spend your time. It made me think about the feeling I have had from time to time that I am somehow “going it alone,” which is not true — even though we are each alone in our bodies — but I feel like I can function pretty well with a few dense relationships in place. I am thinking about a letter you wrote a few weeks ago in which you said you had had a good start to the day, but I didn’t start to feel subjectively good until I sat down in my office with my coffee to write this letter. The cold hard truth is I sometimes (often?) just need to be alone to feel good. (I’ll quote that here with the caveat that a few lines earlier in that same letter, you did also state that you did not wake up with a TGIF kind of feeling that day.) I wonder how this feeling pairs with your sense of yourself as being malleable, relying on other people for support and meaning? I think, simply, that we can have it multiple ways; none of us are all one thing or another.
Does it ever seem like I’m trying to catch you out as I look through our archive like this, shining a spotlight on your words as if we are in an interrogation room? I hope it doesn’t read like that! (I could do it just as easily to my own words, but your words are ever new to me!) I find it interesting to shuffle through all the pieces of ourselves that we have tucked into our letters here, and to say, now, that piece squares up with this piece, but these other pieces don’t quite fit! I suppose if we think of ourselves as puzzles — like multidimensional puzzles in reality, but let’s imagine a two-dimensional picture puzzle here for ease — even in the space of one single puzzle, there are pieces that don’t fit together but that are still part of the same puzzle. They all come together to form a picture. I was inclined to write a single picture but then I thought about how it is very possible that the picture puzzle you would form of yourself, and that I would form of you, and that others who know you would form of you, would each be different, or maybe we would each just put together different parts and pieces of a much larger and more sprawling puzzle. More than a thousand pieces, for sure!
There is still so much I am thinking about and finding as I look back into our letters, but for this week it is time to draw it to a close! Happy early summer weekend to you, and I hope you are finding some peace in the midst of everything these days!
Until soon,
Your friend,
Eva
Thursday June 4 and Friday June 5, 2020
Dear Eva,
This has been a truly remarkable week to be alive.
Tonight as the sun set, I went for a brisk walk alone, without even a dog at my side. The moon was bright in the sky, looking like a round Babybel cheese. My mind was racing with thoughts of policy and politics, and I felt my adrenaline rushing at the thought that we are living through a moment of reckoning in this country. I have been devouring every bit of news I can find about the changes in our midst, the culmination of centuries of injustice, all coming to a head in this moment. I hate that I have been watching from the sidelines, trying to absorb the exhilaration of resistance through whatever I can read and hear. I want to participate! And not just by clicking “donate” while I sit on my bum here in my home office.
As you know, I have been wrestling over the right way to do my part, weighing my personal and civic obligations when it comes to joining protests during a pandemic. It has me thinking about how nearly every kind of activism—from protests to voting—is futile when you consider it from the standpoint of a single human being. My body at the protest, my vote, my letter to a Congresswoman will not change anything. We can tell ourselves that nothing would ever change if everyone thought that way, but I don’t think that is enough to motivate us off the couch. There is something more at work when we choose to act, I think. There is a sense of being part of something, an aliveness that comes from being reminded of belonging to something beyond our homes, a sense of righteousness about living the values we prize. I am thinking again about Rebecca Solnit’s writing, and how she was the first person I remember hearing articulate the link between activism and joy. It was something I had felt, but not something I had language for, which meant that I didn’t know it in the same way that I feel I know it now. Resistance is usually portrayed as a duty, she writes, but it can be a pleasure, an education, a revelation.
There is also a way in which this—like so many things—comes back to story. This question of who we want to be as human beings. This line of thought feels fraught; the line between identity and impression can be so thin. You and I have witnessed very directly in our professional lives how there are times when saying the right thing is only about words, not about a way of being. Words are important and life-giving, but when they are not backed by action, they are makeup. What does it mean to post a supportive message for the protestors on Instagram? Is it virtue-signaling, or is it shaping the attitudes of the people in your orbit? Is it both? I think we have to steadfastly interrogate ourselves in these moments, think about why we are doing and not doing, and where—why we are saying and not saying, and to whom. I don’t know the right way to be in my white body right now, and I distrust anyone who does. There is no checklist to follow that would be sufficient to erase or outweigh my place in an oppressive system. All I can do is ask myself whether I am being who I want to be, who I want my children to remember.
It is Friday now, as I finish this letter. Today Jonah made me a Black Lives Matter sign to carry when I go to a protest this weekend. I am having that experience these past few days where nothing else is really on my mind, where even when I am having a conversation about something other than these issues, my mind is not fully present. This letter reflects where my mind is, so I apologize for not carrying forward a single thread from last week’s correspondence. I do very much hope that you are well, and that you have some small (or big!) joys to look forward to this weekend! I look forward to reading your words.
Your friend,
Sarah