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| From peopleiveloved.com |
If you had told me in my youth that the grand love affairs of my life would mostly be platonic, I would have been gravely disappointed, and that would have been wrong. I can honestly say that the people I've met in my 20s and 30s and now, in my earliest baby-steps of my 40s, are entirely amazing.
In 2024, the depth and breadth of my community astounds me. I have friends in their 70s and friends in their 20s. I have besties of many stripes, volunteer-colleagues and work mentors, mom-friends and pen pals. I'm not fooling myself that all these friendships are deep, but they are all meaningful to me. I cherish the warm relationships I have with people, and when we do get to know each other better—the family drama, the hiccupy marriages, the health worries, the rich wormy compost of the soul—I fucking love it. I love it! What a gift, to get to know each other in this way!
And this is post-pandemic, after a period of time when we could only be IRL with people with whom we shared an address. To be able to cultivate a garden of friends during and after such a life-weirding, world-altering, emotion-boggling event feels like a goddamn triumph, you know? I don't know if this is a small-town thing, where we're all just in the
soup together and unexpected relationships form out of sheer proximity. I
don't know if this is a product of being "on the scene" in several key Stratford spots (hello, Revel, I love you). I know that having weak ties is important; I also know that people like people who seem to like them (especially more than others). But I think we're in a moment where many people, not just me, are hungry for connections. Is it post-pandemic cabin fever? Being in our 30s and 40s? Are we all extroverts with social anxiety? Have we relaxed our definitions of what makes a person cool? (I know I, for one, find the folks with showing-up energy to be pretty sweet these days.) Or is the secret that we're all just kind of great and people like to fall in love with each other, even platonically? I don't know; it doesn't matter. We're here, together, now.
I find this current friendship boom, borne of school community and small-town civic participation, so enriching. By walking my kiddo to and from school every day, I've made some incredibly meaningful friendships. Volunteering has led to some lighter connections, but it's also been great fun to get to know the baby boomers in my life. Not since university have I made this many connections in such a short period of time, and I don't even have to live in a dorm this time.
That's not to say that there's never been friendship misery. Some of my most tender scar tissue is relational: fallout from two terrible years in middle school of being bullied full-time, of being picked up and then dropped and then ostracized. In my early 30s, two Very Important Friendships went belly-up, and I'm still feeling those reverberations nearly a decade later. I feel like any joyful reflection on friendship has to include these caveats, because I've had these spectacular friendship blow-outs, and it feels dishonest to not acknowledge them.
And yet! And yet. The opportunity to learn from these friendship implosions has been deep indeed. The fact that those failed friendships in my 30s hurt so very damn much helped point me to the fact that I needed some actual therapy to help with the bullying aftermath, despite it being 25 years later. It woke me up to the fact that I feared those losses so immensely, and I fought against them so hard, and I was fucking awful while I was trying to "save" the friendships, and it was sort of no wonder that those friends bounced. Understanding that my behaviour came from a wound that could be examined with curiosity and tenderness, rather than shame and a frantic need to hide it under the guise of "being chill," has been very healing. (YES I KNOW THIS IS THERAPY-SPEAK, I did the therapy so I get to use the speak, right?!) Understanding this dynamic has changed my life, my relationship with myself. And if nothing else, I know, even if those old friends can't, that I'm not the same mangled human that I was 8-10 years ago. I can gently let myself off the hook for those disconnections.
What I like about this phase of friendship is that no one is trying to be cool anymore. We all like ourselves more than we did in our early adulthood. We all know ourselves a lot better. We're all a lot more relaxed. And most of have been through some shit that has softened our hearts and shown us the stakes of life—we all lose eventually, so why compete so hard? Maybe it's the latent co-operative board member in me, but collaboration is where it's at. I sometimes refer to proto-friendships, the phase where we obviously dig each other but we don't really know each other yet, as the "mutual admiration society," but I try to carry that energy into even the deepest and longest connections I have.
I love and admire the hell out of my friends. And they deserve that love and admiration: they're cool as anything, generous, thoughtful, funny, creative, wise, sweet and salty. Knowing them makes me want to operate on that level. We elevate each other, as all good relationships do. There's some part of me that knows I'm lucky to have so many amazing people in my life; there's another part, sweet and warm, that knows that I'm kind of amazing too.
The oldest definition of the word kith, as in "kith and kin," used to be one's country, one's land. Our physical locations, the places where we root and grow. Now, it means our friends, who the other side of the coin to our relatives. I like to imagine my kith as somehow both: the people among whom I have planted myself, and where I bloom.
