hello friends.
I’m taking a little break to start off 2024 and work on some other creative projects, so this month I’ll be revisiting past posts from the archive. This post is selfishly a favorite of mine because it is about the people I love the very most in this world.
One of the things I am most grateful for in 2023 is getting to take a trip with some of my very best friends. There is no feeling quite like being in a car with the windows down, music blasting, surrounded by this impossible, wonderful group of humans, and I am still affected by it all these months later. That kind of joy feels like a very good way to end this little break experiment.
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rivers and sober friendship
A river runs through the city and the people here know it. When we arrive, the waterfront has become its own swiftly moving force of adults, children, and pets flowing through the bright sunshine. After so many years of pandemic separation, it feels good to be a part of something again even passively, to move anonymously through a crowd. I am with the people that I love most in this world and it is one of those perfect days where we have nothing to do but be together. For many reasons, like time and distance, we are rarely in the same place and the specialness of it keeps tapping me on the shoulder to remind me to be right here right now.
When I got sober, the people who I thought were my friends fell away. The booze that I had made central to my identity and social life was no longer a reliable pillar for our friendship, and we could not find stable foundations upon which to build something new. I did not mourn them, I understood, but I still felt lonely. My life was changing and evolving but I could not see it coming together yet, and it was hard to trust that something was forming in all of the empty space.
Now, at the edge of this river in a city I do not know, I can see what has been built. I can feel these bonds, which have grown stronger through the years after we got sober in different pockets across North America. There is a strangeness to working remotely and getting sober online in that you form incredibly strong bonds with people on the internet. To the other people in your life who do not live this way, these invisible friends are like phantoms. Over time they become like that middle school mythical summer camp girlfriend, they sound too good to be true.
And they are, though somehow they are real. And somehow, when we arrive in this city after years apart, we immediately and intuitively fall into the patterns of people who know how to care for each other. We take out all of the things about ourselves that we are usually so careful to hide and we place them on the mantle, unashamed.
If I could write music, I would draw you the shape of each one of my friends’ laughs. I know the lilt of them deep in my bones, the cadence, the big and small of it all. I know their singing voices, the pace at which they navigate a store, and what makes them cry. I know too the shape of their hands and how (or if) they take their coffee. I want to be a student of how to care for them, though I know this is selfish because caring for them is caring for myself.
In a forest of oak trees, each tree pushes root through the soil, trusting that somewhere in the close darkness, it will meet one of its own. Above the soil, the forest looks like it is made up of individuals, but underneath these trees have entwined their roots tightly, holding each other and becoming one giant force of a thing. It holds them there, grounded in who they are because they are grounded in each other.
There is no ceremony of commitment between friends, so we must make our own. Sometimes this will mean a big, beautiful, tangible thing performed in the space of togetherness, but other times it will simply be the rituals of showing up, of checking in, of bringing my joys and my challenges and placing them on the altar of this thing next to my flaming heart. It will mean the continuous practice of not holding things alone, of not letting them hold their things alone. Of committing to wrapping my roots up in theirs until I become something both bigger and smaller.
From here I can see the whole of the story. How my deep fear of being alone in recovery gave way to my deep fear of being vulnerable with people who are in no way obligated to love me back. I can see how that fear has since given way to something that is still vulnerable, but also feels so obvious and natural. I am starting to relax into this love. I do not believe in the relationship hierarchy that requires me to declare my friends a chosen family to imply how special they are to me. Friend is a vast and powerful word. But the chosen part is true. They are my Chosen.
There is a sacredness to friendship if you let there be. So today we walk along the river, doing ordinary things, parts of a whole that has its own rhythm, winding our way back to each other through time and space.
And just like that, we’ve wrapped January Revisits. I’ll be back in your inbox in February with new work and brain noodlings.
I’ll see you then,
Lisa
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