Gender Jumper (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
genderjumper) wrote2024-04-13 03:16 pm
genderjumper) wrote2024-04-13 03:16 pm
Entry tags:
Friendship Tides
I've never had a consistent best friend for more than a few years at a time.
As a kid, this was due to white flight and economic instability: most, but not all of my best friends were white; those who were white invariably moved away as our neighborhoods "got bad" (shifted demographics so whites were no longer the majority) and those who were not white moved around as often or more than my family. My parents did this, too, but refused to move to the suburbs for some reason (it also kept us close to my adoptive grandparents, though I'm not entirely sure how much that was a factor). Some of those friends were hugely influential long after our brief connection, while the one from high school and early adulthood just sort of hung around in the background for a decade or so due to lack of alternatives.
(Around the time of my quarter-life crisis -- which to be clear involved just as much platonic isolation as romantic or sexual stagnation, though I didn't fully appreciate this at the time -- I noted that I had one straight guy friend, one straight woman friend, and that everyone else close to me was a gay man or bisexual woman with at least some sexual tension. I reveled in the flirtation, openness, and cautious vulnerability of it all, even as my own queerness and genderfluidity lay fallow.)
My first truly polyamorous relationship, K and I were hot for each other physically and intellectually but were slow to admit catching feelings. For at least a year, we referred to each other as "my best friend", "my writing partner", or just "doll", our shared term of endearment. Looking back now, I think this dynamic faded from our relationship earlier than I realized: we became polyamours teamed up against the world and I was a low-key co-parent and we almost never wrote together or goaded each other into creative adventures, everything but friendship. Some old friends reappeared in prominence whom I called my best friends for a while and I don't know if she ever noticed -- but I certainly noticed when she exuberantly celebrated her "new best friend, Q" around 2013. (Q was K's new 5-year-old step-nephew, so I convinced myself not to read into her renewed sense of wonder through the eyes of a child with a rich internal world.)
You see, in those days, we weren't fully aware of how much we'd allowed nonmonogamy to subsume our platonic ties, and none of us ever processed our friendships the ways we processed our romantic and sexual connections. People just faded in and out and I treated them like the tide. After what I considered a 5-year crescendo and a 5-year decrescendo in our romantic bond, I suggested breaking up in 2016 in the interest of preserving our "friendship", but K remained closed off and slow-ghosted me over the next 15 months. It took two more years of trying to find and create "safe" ways for her to set boundaries -- all of which went unanswered -- before I could admit that she was gone.
In the midst of that year of uncertainty, I found a surprising and necessary platonic connection with B, a barista who had been a witness the powerful connection K and I shared in its heyday (there had also been a mutual crush, but her life was decidedly normative and she probably couldn't have processed how much K and I had giggled over her back in the day). Turned out, B and I had acquired some similar caregiving traumas, and over the next 6 years we slowly built up a powerful solidarity of our own -- mostly from afar. We both had family stuff and queerness stuff and friendship stuff and COVID stuff to process, and our calls were a shared sanctuary. When her family ended up moving here (well, about an hour away), we set a lot of hopes and dreams for spending time together, but most of them never came about. It seemed to be about COVID at first, but I later realized that her life was the opposite of mine in one glaring, potentially fatal way for our friendship: her life is hypercompartmentalized and she likes it that way.
It's an open secret (in that people never really think about it applying to them unless they want to, which is deliberate on my part) that I fall in love with nearly all of my friends, especially the close ones. There simply is no inherent boundary for me so long as I believe a person to be a decent human being who cares about others and is looking beyond social scripts for meaning and stability. This happened with B for about two years, but it ended last fall after I realized the compartmentalization thing. It has taken a lot of pressure off of what I hope or expect of the friendship, only to reveal even deeper layers of ways we completely misinterpret each other. We never fight in person or over the phone, but text is becoming volatile. Once activated, we respond in completely opposite ways, which turns a minor misunderstanding into a blowup requiring weeks for her to process. She is trying to get comfortable for the first time with her anger -- and I don't begrudge her that -- but this may mean I'm "safe" to be angry at. It's not that I wouldn't consent to being her chewtoy per se, just that I've never been quite asked or even warned that's what was happening.
As she deepens her relationship with her therapist, she's taking a lot more of the heavy thinkies over there -- which, again, is likely healthy for her -- but it's led her to withdraw from me and others she used to process with; I don't think she knows how to just hang out, and since she's busy (and getting busier -- she's crossing that threshold as a parents where kids stop needing you all the time but they have places to be and you have to plan around their burgeoning independence) my efforts to initiate are frustrating for both. The smallest but densest part of this situation is that I have my shit together 99% of the time, but I count on people like her to talk me through things when that other 1% arrives and without her calls, there has been no one to pick up the slack in processing my own stressors. I'm trying to make peace with yet again doing more of this alone, but I've always preferred to do my processing externally.
I suppose that's what Live Journal knockoffs are for!
So we finally talked last night, and it was interesting how many of the same words and possibilities we were considering: her therapist asked if she wanted to de-escalate and she said no, but she also acknowledged some baggage with the term "best friend" and elaborated on just how easy it is for her to receive neutral statements as pressure. I told her that the chaos in the air tells me we're only going to have a harder time connecting away from text, and that my efforts to document my mental health cycles are intended to allow people to choose their level of engagement based on predictable dynamics, but I'm not sure she groks how literal I mean these things. I fluently shift between hyper-abstract and hyper-literal communication and it never occurs to me that someone might not be keeping up.
(Echos of Foucault, who must be read slowly because he writes theory in deliberately obtuse ways to foster caution and discourage misunderstanding; my unique style of communication intimidates many because they think it's formal or hyper-cerebral, but it's when I let my guard down and attempt to be casual with people I trust that the other person gets devastated by some offhand observation delivered without tact because I constantly process heavy stuff and fail to anticipate how triggering it can be for friends.)
It was a mutual conversation, but the agenda centered her worries and needs and left little room for mine. B tapped out after 90 minutes, literally starting to lose her voice as I rushed a couple of clarifying questions. I have a few action steps to hopefully nurture things, but I'm in no hurry to lean on her or be casual with my enthusiasm (which managed to trigger this latest explosion because I wanted to say I loved a book but didn't pay attention to punctuation or tone).
My enthusiasm may be the purest and most innocent part of myself. (I credit it to my best friend from 8th-9th grade, who taught me to love learning and be shameless in doing so. I last saw him in 2015, just before he moved back to Europe and a couple of years before I closed a lot of social doors because the people on the other sides rarely checked on me.) In person or over the phone, there's never any doubt that my clumsiness comes from excitement, but its impossible to adequately convey over text. The reflexivity continues.
As a kid, this was due to white flight and economic instability: most, but not all of my best friends were white; those who were white invariably moved away as our neighborhoods "got bad" (shifted demographics so whites were no longer the majority) and those who were not white moved around as often or more than my family. My parents did this, too, but refused to move to the suburbs for some reason (it also kept us close to my adoptive grandparents, though I'm not entirely sure how much that was a factor). Some of those friends were hugely influential long after our brief connection, while the one from high school and early adulthood just sort of hung around in the background for a decade or so due to lack of alternatives.
(Around the time of my quarter-life crisis -- which to be clear involved just as much platonic isolation as romantic or sexual stagnation, though I didn't fully appreciate this at the time -- I noted that I had one straight guy friend, one straight woman friend, and that everyone else close to me was a gay man or bisexual woman with at least some sexual tension. I reveled in the flirtation, openness, and cautious vulnerability of it all, even as my own queerness and genderfluidity lay fallow.)
My first truly polyamorous relationship, K and I were hot for each other physically and intellectually but were slow to admit catching feelings. For at least a year, we referred to each other as "my best friend", "my writing partner", or just "doll", our shared term of endearment. Looking back now, I think this dynamic faded from our relationship earlier than I realized: we became polyamours teamed up against the world and I was a low-key co-parent and we almost never wrote together or goaded each other into creative adventures, everything but friendship. Some old friends reappeared in prominence whom I called my best friends for a while and I don't know if she ever noticed -- but I certainly noticed when she exuberantly celebrated her "new best friend, Q" around 2013. (Q was K's new 5-year-old step-nephew, so I convinced myself not to read into her renewed sense of wonder through the eyes of a child with a rich internal world.)
You see, in those days, we weren't fully aware of how much we'd allowed nonmonogamy to subsume our platonic ties, and none of us ever processed our friendships the ways we processed our romantic and sexual connections. People just faded in and out and I treated them like the tide. After what I considered a 5-year crescendo and a 5-year decrescendo in our romantic bond, I suggested breaking up in 2016 in the interest of preserving our "friendship", but K remained closed off and slow-ghosted me over the next 15 months. It took two more years of trying to find and create "safe" ways for her to set boundaries -- all of which went unanswered -- before I could admit that she was gone.
In the midst of that year of uncertainty, I found a surprising and necessary platonic connection with B, a barista who had been a witness the powerful connection K and I shared in its heyday (there had also been a mutual crush, but her life was decidedly normative and she probably couldn't have processed how much K and I had giggled over her back in the day). Turned out, B and I had acquired some similar caregiving traumas, and over the next 6 years we slowly built up a powerful solidarity of our own -- mostly from afar. We both had family stuff and queerness stuff and friendship stuff and COVID stuff to process, and our calls were a shared sanctuary. When her family ended up moving here (well, about an hour away), we set a lot of hopes and dreams for spending time together, but most of them never came about. It seemed to be about COVID at first, but I later realized that her life was the opposite of mine in one glaring, potentially fatal way for our friendship: her life is hypercompartmentalized and she likes it that way.
It's an open secret (in that people never really think about it applying to them unless they want to, which is deliberate on my part) that I fall in love with nearly all of my friends, especially the close ones. There simply is no inherent boundary for me so long as I believe a person to be a decent human being who cares about others and is looking beyond social scripts for meaning and stability. This happened with B for about two years, but it ended last fall after I realized the compartmentalization thing. It has taken a lot of pressure off of what I hope or expect of the friendship, only to reveal even deeper layers of ways we completely misinterpret each other. We never fight in person or over the phone, but text is becoming volatile. Once activated, we respond in completely opposite ways, which turns a minor misunderstanding into a blowup requiring weeks for her to process. She is trying to get comfortable for the first time with her anger -- and I don't begrudge her that -- but this may mean I'm "safe" to be angry at. It's not that I wouldn't consent to being her chewtoy per se, just that I've never been quite asked or even warned that's what was happening.
As she deepens her relationship with her therapist, she's taking a lot more of the heavy thinkies over there -- which, again, is likely healthy for her -- but it's led her to withdraw from me and others she used to process with; I don't think she knows how to just hang out, and since she's busy (and getting busier -- she's crossing that threshold as a parents where kids stop needing you all the time but they have places to be and you have to plan around their burgeoning independence) my efforts to initiate are frustrating for both. The smallest but densest part of this situation is that I have my shit together 99% of the time, but I count on people like her to talk me through things when that other 1% arrives and without her calls, there has been no one to pick up the slack in processing my own stressors. I'm trying to make peace with yet again doing more of this alone, but I've always preferred to do my processing externally.
I suppose that's what Live Journal knockoffs are for!
So we finally talked last night, and it was interesting how many of the same words and possibilities we were considering: her therapist asked if she wanted to de-escalate and she said no, but she also acknowledged some baggage with the term "best friend" and elaborated on just how easy it is for her to receive neutral statements as pressure. I told her that the chaos in the air tells me we're only going to have a harder time connecting away from text, and that my efforts to document my mental health cycles are intended to allow people to choose their level of engagement based on predictable dynamics, but I'm not sure she groks how literal I mean these things. I fluently shift between hyper-abstract and hyper-literal communication and it never occurs to me that someone might not be keeping up.
(Echos of Foucault, who must be read slowly because he writes theory in deliberately obtuse ways to foster caution and discourage misunderstanding; my unique style of communication intimidates many because they think it's formal or hyper-cerebral, but it's when I let my guard down and attempt to be casual with people I trust that the other person gets devastated by some offhand observation delivered without tact because I constantly process heavy stuff and fail to anticipate how triggering it can be for friends.)
It was a mutual conversation, but the agenda centered her worries and needs and left little room for mine. B tapped out after 90 minutes, literally starting to lose her voice as I rushed a couple of clarifying questions. I have a few action steps to hopefully nurture things, but I'm in no hurry to lean on her or be casual with my enthusiasm (which managed to trigger this latest explosion because I wanted to say I loved a book but didn't pay attention to punctuation or tone).
My enthusiasm may be the purest and most innocent part of myself. (I credit it to my best friend from 8th-9th grade, who taught me to love learning and be shameless in doing so. I last saw him in 2015, just before he moved back to Europe and a couple of years before I closed a lot of social doors because the people on the other sides rarely checked on me.) In person or over the phone, there's never any doubt that my clumsiness comes from excitement, but its impossible to adequately convey over text. The reflexivity continues.
no subject
I am glad you have your enthusiasm, still, and I hope that you never lose it. It is one of your most charming traits, in a personality with a constellation of others.
I know that reflexive usually means something in relation to itself, but Iām not sure thatās how youāre using it here? But I donāt know how else to take that. Are you talking about your contemplating of your selfhood? Your relationship to yourself? Some secret third thing?
no subject
no subject
no subject
I've just come to accept that such misunderstandings happen, and I process them quickly and move on. But she reads this as diminishing and turns a brief irk into a weeks-long explosion. I don't think she's deliberately punishing me, per se, but I do think she's luxuriating a bit in the power of knowing someone will let her be angry for that long.
Meanwhile, shit's going down and I need people I can process with, but she literally has no clue.