hi dear reader,
A few months ago, I found myself weeping on a couch in Maine, while two of my oldest friends alternated between washing the dishes and holding me through a gnarly chronic illness flare from two days of driving.
I had tried to push through the dizzy weight of fatigue, catching my breath at the sink, my hands sudsy among the plates and silverware. They caught it and banished me with a playful glare: “I love you but GO TO YOUR COUCH!”
When I wept from exhaustion and relief, curled up in a corner — the silliest thing, to cry with relief over a sinkful of dishes! — they clambered on top, layering weighted care through the crocheted afghan — “holy shit, are you crying right now??”
“Nearly everything I know about love, I've learnt from my long-term friendships with women.”― Dolly Alderton, Everything I Know About Love
We are systemically connected through our energy, our labor, and our resources. I resist my own silence when I let myself be just as human — when I can be held by friends who love me, especially when I falter. How do we accept care, when it feels like too much?
And it was the concern and caring of all those women which gave me strength and enabled me to scrutinize the essentials of my living. — Audre Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” Sister Outsider, p 41.
My friendships with women and nonbinary kin have been some of the safest containers for my own scrutinies — for my learnings and unlearnings around race and racism, disability and ableism, wealth and capitalism, misogyny and feminism.
Conflict changes the relational fabric amongst people. A rupture can cause the hole to fray, a gossamer slip left to break. Without repair and over too much time, the smallest catch renders it unsalvageable.
But accountability and vulnerability invite us into deeper relationship with each other.
They start to braid a bridge back towards each other; they weave little threads of repair — a tapestry of intimacy, of care, of tenderness.
We learn how to ask for what we need and to offer what we can afford to share.
The give and take — in equitable measure, across the structures we can name and those we can’t name — forms the trust that serves as a bedrock for any exploration of power. The container of safe relationship — of the kind of friendship that insists on doing the dishes, sometimes; the kind that asks to be held, other times — is what makes it safe to unravel, to change, to adapt, to stitch a new pattern.
To hold change is to make it easy for people with shared intentions to be around each other, and move towards their vision and values (facilitate), and/or to navigate conflict in a way that is generative and accountable (mediate). — adrienne maree brown, Holding Change, p 7.
Making it easy is the hardest work, sometimes. Perhaps friendship — trust, care, tenderness, even love — is what makes it easy to make it easy.
I don’t want us to be afraid of tenderness. Let’s offer ourselves what we need, instead.
