An Endorsement for Friendships

Among the eddying groups, tiny microcosms of society that contained in the school yard, I met the people I still consider some of my closest friends. A group of girls in rural New York who happened to find each other. I wasn’t the first and I would not be the last, I was a loop of yarn that got tangled into the rest. 

We lived with each other literally or emotionally for about two decades. It wasn’t until we approached 30 that we began to separate in body and mind. For a long time I had not seen much difference between them and myself. We were part of something spiritual. When we are together, still, a certain alchemy occurs, glimmering in an existence beyond reason. I wouldn’t say complete, but solid. That’s the beauty of love, it can make its own space.

As we aged, society began to guide us like melting wax into familiar structures, to separate and devalue friendship connections over financial or professional success. I keep hearing that friendships are one of the only relationships we can choose that is not monitored by the government or otherwise capitalist powers. Friendship has the strength to subvert authority and empower collectives through common interests and shared experiences. 

It isn’t always easy. Interpersonal relationships require work, patience, and self inquiry. I have lost friends who I’m not sure I will ever reconnect with. I am also on the rocks with some friends with whom I hope we can remain. But if I have learned nothing over the years, I see that the right friendships should stand on the same level as family, career, and work. They are worth spending time on. Friends will be the ones who are there through it in gentle networks of support, in the face of change, they will be the conspirators and confidantes.

While romantic relationships have a strong narrative beginning with being depressed about being single (and “needing” friends), thank you, romantic comedies of the late 90’s, early aughts, for the throughline here: meeting, courting, marrying, and babying. Friendships don’t have the same narrative because they just are not deemed as important. Female friendships are places for gossip, places to be “weak,” places to be mean to one another, exclusive, and ultimately doomed, or they are frivolous. Male friendships are brotherhoods, also exclusive to a standard of masculinity and bound with a kind of secrecy or code, but more related to collective work or goal.

I think of Audre Lorde’s description of the hegemonic women’s movement in her paper Age, Race, Class, Sex: Women Redefining difference, and other separations appear to cordon off connections. There are structural issues that have been internalized in varying degrees by all people. The work remains to connecting in difference whether that be race, class, or gender. I think it may be helpful to liqufy, to, perhaps queer friendships, and focus on needs and boundaries of individuals. 

I would like to take this a step further by weaving Donna Haraway’s essay Making Kin in which she aptly evokes Shakespeare’s connection of kin to kind and encourages us to go beyond geneology when marking our history and family: to make kin (rather than babies) to reach out in cross difference, even cross-species care. 

In so many ways this society is designed to separate us. But in fact, we are not alone. We are all experiencing these barriers together. Those people, if you are honest with them and honest with yourself, will be there for you. Just like you would be there for them. 

Maybe in all of this, I am really just reaching out from a certain isolation. Maybe it is something chemical, or maybe it is a result of social structure: financially or otherwise, that isolates me. But I miss my friends now. And I think there has got to be another way.

Relationships come out of a certain belief in narrative. And I disrupt this blog by introducing the next subject. I didn’t grow up particularly religious, but if I could find spirituality it would have been in the wildlife that surrounded me. The trees, the boars, and the horses who lived down the road; the grass; the water. The owl and coyotes who lived on the fringes of my senses, emerged in the dark as yelps or shadows. The lightning bugs in July. It felt true to me, the vastness and aliveness surrounded me so that I seeped into it and excluded myself from the idea that I was human and a participant in culture. 

Which is why it felt so strange when I began to second guess the term “biomimicry,” a term I thought held a sort of solution, but I find creates a lineage with the natural being the “good.” I’m not sure what natural is, and I’m not sure a primitivistic sentiment will lead to some sort of “happy natural world.” I am implicated, as are we all, in culture, as it is inextricably related to our physical bodies as Astrida Neimanis said in her essay Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water. 

Perhaps friendships are that immersion point in the membrane they create, while allowing for reach, in their simultaneous closeness and distance, in their very resistance to culture, and the new kinds of narratives they offer.