EXIT INTERVIEW, Part 3
Katie and Sonia
The following is Part 3 of 3 of the first EXIT INTERVIEW to appear in Mommy’s El Camino.
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EXIT INTERVIEW #1: KATIE AND SONIA, Part 3
Katie: I mean, I do think, and I've said this to you to some extent before, but I do think that at least some part of me was in love with you. Like, not necessarily romantically. I didn't really know what to do with any of that. And it's really hard, because I met [my partner] so quickly, it's really hard for me to try to think about what I was doing all that time, like that I wasn't with women or what I actually really wanted.
I cannot make any sense of any of that.
Sonia: Yeah.
Katie: You know, there was something about that promise [we made] in high school about, if we can't find anybody, then we'll marry each other. There's a really intense part of that that was not in the least bit a joke to me. Even though I didn't really believe it myself or I was disgusted by my own desire for that to happen or for that to be true or something, or to really want that, whatever that would be, whatever it was I was imagining it would be.
I make it impossible to leave me for a reason. It really was very bad, but also it's what you needed to do, and it's what I needed you to do in order to let it go.
Sonia: Maybe we can feel sad for ourselves that that was the case. Because I think maybe you're right about that. I mean, that's so sad.
Katie: Why?
Sonia: Why is that sad? How much hurt and suffering did we both experience?
Physically, if you prick me with a needle, I'll do whatever you want.—Katie
Katie: I mean, it requires an enormous amount of pain for me to really shift something. I have a big capacity as a result of my beginnings, with emotional pain. Physically, if you prick me with a needle, I'll do whatever you want.
Sonia: Ugh, now you tell me.
Katie: I mean, I will be angry, so…
It's unfortunate thinking about it now being on the other side of it. What I don't love is that I have this very bizarre dynamic with Ben that I feel very uneasy about.
I don't love that I wasn't at the wedding. I don't love that. I didn't know when you got pregnant or how you got pregnant or how that happened and didn't know when you were giving birth or any of those things. All of that is really shitty.
But I think I said it too many times for it to ever have come true. I definitely jinxed the shit out of that, like threatening you that I’d be in the delivery room.
Sonia: Right. Um, I mean, I was always afraid to reach out after the bad phone call[, that first one after we stopped speaking,] because I felt like you hated me and thought I was a bad person.
Katie: No, I never hated you.
Sonia: Maybe I didn't think that you did, but I felt like you had a certain estimation of me, of what kind of person I was and it wasn't someone you wanted to know.
Katie: I didn't recognize the person in any of those choices. I didn't recognize you in any of those choices. It's clear to me because, because of the way [my sponsor] did the exact same thing, that you didn't know how to do it, how to not have me in your life anymore. And [my sponsor] didn't know how to do it for years. I kept her around for five years after she was trying to let me go.
…I felt like you had a certain estimation of me, of what kind of person I was and it wasn't someone you wanted to know.—Sonia
Sonia: Also, that's the second time you've said that and I just wanna call attention to it because it wasn't the goal: to not have you in my life. I mean, I needed what was happening to stop and maybe that's a distinction I need to be working on in therapy or something. But it wasn't the end goal, “get rid of Katie, an objectively bad and useless person.” It was: this hurting, hurting must stop. You know? And I had exercised all of the ways I knew. Short of not having you in my life.
Katie: I don't remember what I was gonna say. Um, yeah, it was the phone call. None of it was familiar to me. The, the year of silence and the phone call just didn't look anything like the person who had been my friend. So that's the person that I didn't want to have anything to do with. I think, you know, that was why I was doing a lot of emotional carrying, because I felt like there were things that you didn't know how to handle or that you couldn't handle that you didn't know how to say or articulate or deal with.
I think that put our friendship at a real disadvantage also.
I do think that we should talk about this question of, when you think our friendship was at its best?
Sonia: Yeah, I think that's a good place to end. I feel like there's so many things I want to know still. But.
Katie: Mm-hmm.
Sonia: A lot of years. It just occurred to me that I think the way I wanna answer the question is more impressionistic.
Katie: Mm-hmm.
Sonia: But do you have an answer?
Katie: It is a really hard question to answer because the question isn't, when did you have the most fun in our friendship, it's the relationship as the entity at its best. And I don't really want to answer it in terms of a period of time, but maybe that's the easiest thing, or at least an easy way in.
It is sort of painful to think about and a little uncomfortable because whatever may or may not come as a result of us being in touch or this conversation, whatever the future brings and whatever it is that you and I individually decide, I do think that there's a reacquainting that's necessary.
I think in a lot of essential ways it seems like you and I are still very much the same people and then in very daily essential ways, entirely different and do things entirely differently. And it would be really tricky not to… well I don't think it would be tricky not to fall into old patterns because it's not of any interest for me to do anything that we had done before. So it feels like a kind of sick nostalgia.
I feel the turning point for me was that very first time that I drove over to your house, I think in [my mom’s] white Bronco, maybe it was my pick up truck, I don't know. For the first time after my mom just had a full flip out and we hung out on the swing outside and you had, no fucking clue what I was talking about, what I was going through, what had happened. And I didn't wanna believe that, but I felt it. And despite all of that, I felt for the first time, listened to, made space for, cared for, in a significant way. So I feel like that for me was an essential part of our friendship at its best, was feeling that.
I think that I am ruthlessly supportive and a cheerleader and a pusher and I wanna see people do well. And I think likewise, I needed the sort of softer version of that or the side of that that I didn't get. I learned how to cheerlead like that from my parents to credit them. That's what they gave me and it's real and they were right. I think that's like where the dynamic was at its best when we were holding each other up, in these very different ways.
Sonia: I had a similar thing come to mind. The exemplary memory of it is when we were at Math Calculus Camp and I only remember this actually because of the embarrassing incident following it, which is that [our friend] overheard this conversation we had, and I denied it. I was really upset, I was really anxious and upset about college stuff. And you were encouraging, you were doing some ruthless cheerleading. You know, you were like, “Fuck everybody. I don't care what they think. And if you don't get into Yale, fuck Yale.”
Katie: Mm-hmm.
Sonia: The other thing, impressionistically that comes to mind is, I feel like we had a lot of fun.
Katie: Mm-hmm.
Sonia: Lots of times.
Katie: Yeah.
Sonia: I think of the fun as having a lot of freedom and playfulness. You know, I get flashes of wandering in Europe, driving in your truck with the windows down. You know.
Katie: Yeah, for sure. And I think because I felt safe with you, I was better able to take more risks.
Sonia: Hmm.
Katie: But when I'm on my own, I'm just much more careful.
Sonia: I think it's probably the same for me. Like I'm not gonna speed, but if Katie's gonna speed while I'm in the car…
Katie: Yeah. That's another annoying part… I could get in trouble…
Sonia: Did I want you to speed?
Katie: No. Right.
Sonia: Did I have a firm boundary around it? No.
Katie: Cool. Good talk. Two and a half hours.
Sonia: Classic Katie and Sonia move. But in a nice way. In a way that reflects well.
Katie: Yes.
POST-EXIT INTERVIEW:
Katie: We’ve texted since this conversation, and in the process of editing out all of the “ums,” also wrote comments to each other in the document with follow up questions and things we still want to talk about. I hope that having this in digital print will act as a kind of accountability for us to keep working it out.
