It is astonishing how there are people in my life for whom I have lost zero love, adoration, admiration and gratitude, despite how much time and / or distance continues to unravel between us. Simply revisiting their words or nonchalantly reaching out reminds me how incredible, kind, wise, and funny they are, and how lucky I am to be anointed by their love and care and friendship. It makes me want to write a book, I swear to god. I could fill page after page about exactly how and when someone impacted me deeply enough to guarantee I’d love them for the rest of my life. People I might have connected with over a decade ago whose souls seem to have only deepened and sweetened further as time has passed. And what’s so endearing about the entire thing is they don’t realize it. As effusive as I am to the people I love about how much I love them, I routinely find they are surprised at what I remember about them, or what they might find out much later that I have done for them out of love - how I have captured and memorized exact verbiage from something they wrote, how I cut ties with someone I knew had hurt them without saying I did so, how I put in a good word for their creative project, how I can summon all of my favorite memories about them within five minutes of reflecting.
I have been so unhappy lately - I have only felt happiness in ways that are practical and compartmentalized, and that has been the case for the last month, six months, twelve months... who knows when this malaise really started. I miss being light-hearted, optimistic, and effortlessly silly. I miss delighting in absolutely everything that human existence had to offer and feeling so full of bliss just imagining everything that is possible to experience in my life.
At some point, I became serious, practical, and guarded. I still found joy in my friendships, but everything else just felt more and more like opportunity for disappointment. Jobs, trips, movies, current events, social media “content” of whatever kind, my relationship, my family... things that used to feel effortless somehow became underwhelming at best, and draining / damaging at worst. So I contracted my perspective, focused on my “career”, my finances, and keeping my house organized.
Comparing these two snapshots of my identity, a strict, serious one that has newly emerged and a more jovial one who I identified with in my early and mid-20′s, the former is like my personal Antichrist... Who is this person full of dread and anxiety? Who is this person who is worrying what everyone thinks? Who is this person who can no longer find an ocean’s worth of things to laugh at or be grateful for?
In trying to scratch away at this newly formed layer of my identity to reveal the bright, engaging, joyful, enthusiastic person I used to be, I have been visited in thought or word by patron saints of my past, present, and future. My beautiful, incredibly holy friends of several years who live states away and nonetheless still manage to uplift me, inspire me, reassure me, validate me, amen.
It’s so silly, but I’m looking at them through the lens of the internet and our cellphones, the only lens available, and I’m so satisfied that I am even aware of them in this life. I’m so lucky to be alive at the same time as them, to have forged a friendship with them that is mutually understood as defying and disregarding time and distance, to have experienced such sweet moments of compassion and sheer love for one another. So grateful to be loved and understood by such wonderful people.
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