best friends
i'm thankful that the past few days i have been living some really angsty vibes about not being the official best friend of the person i thought of as my official best friend, even though i have known that our definitions of best friendship varied for a long time and am also not thankful for that because it has not been fun and also objectively we are very good friends who have shared many happy times and intellectually i know it is fucked up and unfair of me to not just be able to appreciate that and be happy with what it is and but for viscerally my body just has not wanted to accept it for some submerged trauma kind of reasons i think and so lately always around the edges of some very good days at work, in the flow of writing code for problems that are hard enough that they're challenges to solve and provide opportunities for choices of style and creativity and express and occasional provide a need to collaborate with others but not so hard that i constantly have to emerge from the woodshed to ask for help to progress, that i instead get to spend alone with form and abstraction building a thing outside of me that performs, but then also the design system engineer saying that i'd done well with something he'd started me on, and i'm thankful to recognize how dumb this feeling was, that around the edges of that and the beginning of summertime, my favorite season, while running long distances outdoors in short sleeves, i have been feeling in my nerve endings a deep ambient sadness (and a meta sadness at the stupidness of being consumed by this sadness that i think is unfair and i don't want to feel) about this friendship, about not having a best friend, never really having had one, and gone long stretches of time with no friends at all, and after dinner i talked about this with d, who is my best friend, and she had very thoughtful things to say and reminded me of a concept we learned about in couples therapy, which is the idea of a "bid", as in you making a gesture of connection and how when someone in a relationship makes a bid and the other person chooses to accept the bid and respond, that kind of interaction is a positive feedback loop for building or for repairing a relationship, and how her therapist had told her that it's always better to talk to someone if you can (which sometimes you can't there are people who might respond to this who i just don't have the capacity to talk with, which yes is its own weird dimenstion of this document) and anyway i felt better having talked to d about this and while i ate the mi goreng noodles mixed with sauteed shredded brussels sprouts that had grown cold over the course of the conversation and i reheated in the microwave (a story i always love about d is that in the past she would sometimes eat so slowly she would have to heat up a dish again, which is something that she shared with her dad and is so interesting to me as a vacuum cleaner of food), we watched this week's episode of the kardashians, which i think is an all-time great episode, so postmodern and self-reflexive, and i smoked some weed named after a super hero and felt better and checking my notifications saw that i had a snapchat from one of my best friends at work, who sometimes sends me silly little improv characters she does, and she was out to drinks with three other people that are some of my best friends with at work who were in town to prototype, and it began with a, the first designer whose designs i built with code, saying "hi justin remember you were my best friend first" and then the camera pans to k.d., the designer i work with now, and she says "justin is definitely my best friend" and then the camera pans to j, who is the first product manager i worked for, who lifts her wine glass and says "justin you know i was your best friend first" and then the person recording the video, k.a., hits the button that flips it to the selfie cam and winks and is like "justin, you know what's up, we're best friends" or something like that, i may not have the words right because i could only watch the snap chat and then hold the button to replay it one more time, but i'm thankful for the ability to write it down and encode the memory, this silly little moment of all my best friends just telling me they're thinking of me, and sometimes life really really sucks but sometimes life gives you some shit like that and god i am thankful.