Friends They Are Jewels
First, some notes.
One is that I've officially changed my name, or as officially as I can without doing it legally. That will come later. Future installments of this newsletter will come from Daisy Lark, and they'll also come from a new email address. I've created a new website, so the email address will be daisy@daisylark.com.
The other is that I'm considering raising the monthly price of this newsletter to $10 a month. It was suggested to me because I've been feeling increasingly that it's not worth it to write one of these every single week if I'm not going to make more money from it, and without a larger online presence than I have and without the desire or tools to work on growing it, it's difficult to get new people to subscribe. Plenty of people subscribe to the free version, and I appreciate that, but I need money to live because capitalism and disability and location and a slightly wonky brain. I couldn't imagine that anyone would pay double for the same amount of content, but seven people so far have said they would, so it's a possibility that's on the table.
I don't want to do it without giving the rest of you who pay a chance to weigh in, so please, let me know if you would be willing to pay $10 instead of $5. If you wouldn't, that's absolutely fine and please let me know that as well. I want to have an accurate idea of what it would look like to change the price before I do it. The alternative is to make this an entirely free project and put out newsletters less frequently, which is also under consideration.
And now, the actual post.
There are few things that fill my heart like the love I have for my friends. It's something too immense to pin down with words, but this whole newsletter is an attempt to pin down the unpinnable with words, so here we are.
Last week I received a package of homemade cinnamon chocolate chip cookies in the mail and I felt so known and cared for. A friend knew these were things I liked and baked something in his kitchen specifically with me in mind, and he boxed it up and sent it across the country to reach me to say here, have this work of my hands, eat it knowing that you were on my mind when I made it. This friend has sent me many such packages over the four years I've known him, and each one is a little warmth to remind me that even when the wolves are howling outside the door and the walls don't feel strong enough to keep me safe, I have this and it means I'm going to be okay.
It hasn't been easy, historically speaking, for me to make friends. Or rather, it's easy enough to make them, but it isn't easy to keep them. Maintaining friendships requires things of me that sometimes I just don't have. Energy, vulnerability, commitment, follow-through. The love is something I have in abundance, the care for those who are in my orbit, who have taken up permanent residence in my heart. I think of my friends constantly and crave intimacy with them. I'm just not always good at channeling those feelings into action. It's scary to need, to want, to strip yourself bare before another person and trust them with yourself. It's scary to hold the weight of their beared selves and promise to keep them safe.
It's especially scary when precarious mental health combined with untreated ADHD results in regular overwhelm and burnout and a desperate need to retreat inward. Not everyone can accept these shifts with grace and wait patiently for the next time when I'll feel able to emerge. And that's fine and fair. I don't expect them to. There are times when I resent my friends for giving me less than I feel I give them, less than I deserve. There are times when prolonged silences from people I love hurt my feelings, even when I know they shouldn't because they're not personal. It's hypocritical of me to feel this way when I'm just as guilty of the same behaviors. So I know what it's like to be on the receiving end and I don't begrudge anyone if they don't feel it's sustainable for them. Go where you feel appreciated and valued and seen.
But in my life, the friends who have been with me the longest and have carved themselves the deepest into my heart are the ones who ebb and flow with me and who, even if they don't share my exact patterns and peculiarities, are willing and able to meet me where I'm at and see the ways in which I'm trying every day to show up. They're the ones who extend their hands and wait for me to take them, and don't meet me with hostility if it takes some time. I have lost multiple people from my life when I didn't reply as often or as promptly as they wanted me to, most painful of whom was the first woman I was ever in love with. I used to think it was my fault and maybe I just shouldn't try to form relationships with anyone if I couldn't keep up with the expectations that come with them, but now I view it as a mismatch of needs. No one's fault, only that there are certain souls that connect in spite of differences and there are some that don't, and there are some that do until they don't, and it's all part of the beautiful process of experiencing communion with other humans.
I know the most amazing people. Whether it's a package in the mail, or someone making me a custom perfume blend for free because I'm very poor and I love perfume oils, or a road trip, or a meme that made someone think of me, or hours spent talking and laughing about simultaneously the least and most important things, or a Venmo payment to allow me to order a meal when I don't feel capable of feeding myself, I remember it all and it's the purest form of nourishment and I would be emptier and less without it. Can you even imagine? A life without friends. A life without the tenderness and trust that comes from years of shared existence. A life without people who see you and know you and still want to be physically and emotionally close to you. A life without confidants to tell your most shameful or most exciting secrets to. No thank you. I don't want it.
I want people in my life who know that my house has an open door policy for them, that it's a space where they're always welcome. I don't know if I'll ever have a long term romantic partner, so if I'm to do the domestic work of creating a warm, comfortable environment, I need it to be for more than just me. I want the knowledge that there's always someone I can call or text, at any time of the day or night, and they'll be there for whatever I need, and I want to be that for others. I want to love and be loved in a way that carries with it no expectations and no demands, just the desire to hold each other close and hold each other up. I want the inside jokes and the stories that only matter to us, the stories that begin with, "Remember when..." I want to have a home in someone else's brain, as Becky Albertalli once wrote in Leah On the Offbeat.
I have forced myself to remain in unhealthy, toxic friendships that whittled me down to bones in the past in my pursuit of this. I wanted so much to be wanted that I allowed people to treat me terribly because they acted like they wanted me around and I thought that was enough. It was empty, words without care or warmth or action to back them up, but I thought it was enough. I thought it was all I could expect because I didn't value or love myself enough to believe I deserved better. Now I do, and the quality of my friendships has increased as my feelings toward myself have softened and grown. I am reminded on a daily basis of the importance I hold to my friends, of the ways big and small that I take up space in their lives and hearts. Friendship is so much, the best thing, and it embodies all the loves, romantic and platonic and familial, and I don't think I would still be alive today without it. Romantic partners come and go, and my friends are there to celebrate with me when I'm in the thick of romance and they're there to put me back together when I'm in the thick of the grief of losing it and they're there to remind me that I'm a complete person with or without it, and that's everything. They're everything.