The Friendship Series: Part I
You wanna hear a story about how me and this b*tch fell out?
In this issue*:
An essay that kicks off The Friendship Series, a writing exercise I felt compelled to work through given how much I read about adult friendship, and even talk about it with my friends.
The subtitle, “You wanna hear a story about how me and this b*tch fell out?” is the tagline from the film, “Zola.” My story below, “I Had a Best Friend Once,” is not nearly as chaotic as the movie. But it’s a hell of a lead-in, right?
10 Things to Fill You Up
It’s included in “10 Things,” but also wanted to mention up top that I finally launched my website!
*You may have noticed this newsletter has hit more of a monthly cadence (rather than biweekly). After exclaiming, “I’m back,” we had a tragedy in the family and I hit pause again. Thanks for hanging in there with me.
The Friendship Series: Part I
I Had a Best Friend Once
In recent years, I’ve learned a lot about the precariousness of adult friendships. It’s become popular discourse that making friends – and perhaps to a greater degree, keeping them – is a challenge for modern adults. It’s a dreary truth – created by the narrow parameters of career, relationship, plus natural change and growth – that seems to be reported on more and more. As Ted Talks spread, studies emerge, and essays are written about how covid has presented even more hurdles on the implausible path to meaningful friendship, it follows that many of us are confronting the quality and quantity of our friendships.
Though this narrative has been circulating for a while, it never concerned me much. After all, I was always a person with a best friend. I realize the term “best friend” sounds adolescent and anachronistic, that it stands out against the beigeness of adulthood like a Hello Kitty backpack. But I think the term deserves a place in our lexicon as much as the concept. The ride-or-die energy of best friendship served me past, even, the age of thirty.
Up until two years ago, my best friend was like a sister. Genetically speaking, I have three. She’s the only child. Regardless of sibling structures, we both had single moms, and connected deeply on the weight and nuance of that dynamic.
Sometimes I’d impress upon her, “Do you know how lucky we are to have a friendship like ours?” As the years passed, I knew our closeness and longevity were increasingly rare, and it scared me to think how lonely the world might feel without her to confess my every internal struggle, dissect and laugh about whatever social interaction I’d had that day.
One of the ultimate privileges of best friendship, I thought, was the peace of mind we had around milestones. We reveled in anticipation of the toasts we’d give at each other’s weddings. Even if our future fiancés were faceless unknowns, we were certain we’d be there. When it came to the prospect of having babies, it was discussed that she would help me figure out just what the hell to do, given her experience with kids. And on the morbid front, strict orders were given surrounding the security of our journals and vibrators in case of sudden death.
We met in high school Spanish class – bonded over a shared celeb crush on Josh Hartnett, who at the time was squinting and smoldering from the cover of my three-ring binder. Soon we were helping each other choose our Spanish names – me, Paloma, her, Lupe – and whispering about the troubled dudes we were dating. As past participles sped past us, we commiserated over being forbidden by our Catholic moms from seeing our bad-boy boyfriends.
Our teens were consumed by a love of skater bois and one giant pot cloud. The latter mostly emanated from her turquoise Chevy sedan. I was useless when it came to handling the pipe, could barely take a hit without hacking and gasping for air. On a mission to impart proper toke technique (tokenique?), she’d queue me to release my thumb from the carb and inhale, urging, “Now now now!” I never improved but she never gave up on me.
I loved her company because she was a big personality, a paragon of authenticity. Anything she thought or believed, she’d express, usually hilariously. Think of the empowered lead in any women-led show – “GIRLS,” “Shrill,” “30 Rock” – she exuded main character energy, took up space and believed she deserved it. I basked in her unapologetic nature and anarchic wit, a true relish for someone as shy and restrained as me. With her, I could express the hammy part of myself veiled inside.
At 18, we watched every single episode of Sex and the City, binged them long before streaming was a thing. Every Friday after our community college classes, we’d rent seasons of the series from Blockbuster and watch them draped over her couch before her mom came home from work. We’d cackle over Samantha’s euphemisms, compare Big and Aidan to our own romances. I always wanted to blast through to the second DVD in the case, but she’d insist we save it for the following Friday.
We had disjointed college experiences – mine at UCLA, hers at San Francisco State and then University of Chicago, separated by time frames even, but recounted every significant experience over the phone. Moving through the world as women of color was disorienting; the slights and micro-aggressions were difficult to convey to others, but easily narrated in familiar shorthand with one another. I cried to her over a guy in my class who shamed me for not knowing Spanish – an experience she’d had, too – and we cringed over white dudes who routinely called her “spicy” or “fiery.” Every party dynamic, midterm all-nighter, and love interest’s defining characteristics were shared in excitable bursts while en route to our part time jobs or walking to our next class.
Throughout our mid and late twenties, we settled into the groove of long-distance friendship: she in San Francisco, I in LA and then Sacramento. We found ways to visit, and when we didn’t, we lived in the liminal space of The Phone. The best was when we both had a free Friday night and we’d each pour a glass of wine at the same time, gushing for hours about the week.
There was always an underlying tension, as there often is with any two red-blooded humans with distinctive personalities and needs. In essence, she wanted more from me. I’d miss her calls and respond to her voicemails via text, but either forget or not bother to call her back. Sometimes she’d saved up so many stories that our conversations became one-sided; she’d monologue for an hour before asking how I was doing.
I loved her stories, but the dynamic felt draining and untenable. In later years, I’d appeal to her that I was just a more solitary person (by then I’d learned about the differences between introverts and extroverts), that I didn’t always feel up to a long conversation. For a few years, we found acceptance, finding ways to accommodate and compromise.
But ultimately my fatal flaw – my insular nature – slid into being aloof or even selfish, she might argue. I became less pliant and available, sometimes during the times she needed me most. She became less patient, and we both grew more pugnacious when it came to our differences.
Though our issues were manifold, the friendship-ending incident might be drilled down to my failure to support her in the ways she needed throughout her father’s passing. Over the years she’d, without hesitation, taken a figurative machete to the relationships in her life that weren’t serving her. I’d always encouraged her to be more patient with people – probably out of an instinct that I, myself, needed space and grace – and, twist, ultimately I got the cut, too.
As a last ditch effort, I tried making a grand gesture. I left a card on her doorstep asking her to meet me at the halfway point of the Golden Gate Bridge, the way Steve asks Miranda when their relationship is on the rocks in the “Sex and the City” movie. I’d be holding balloons so she could spot me, I’d said. It was raining that day, so as a courtesy, she texted me she wouldn’t be there, that she didn’t want me to be waiting in the rain. I got the text as I was picking out balloons. Deflated, I put them back, one by one.
It was just too late.
So that’s that. After seventeen years of best friendship, I was out on my own. It’s been over two years since our falling out, and I’m okay. There have been times I’ve missed her voice, our bond, the pleasure of being intimately known. Most of all I miss our side-splitting conversations about bad dates, bad dicks, bad bosses. Anything painful was swiftly eradicated by laughter, by feeling seen for our best qualities and our flaws. By a shared history.
I think that’s the element achingly absent in adult friendships: history. You can’t manufacture a past. You can only start at day one with any one person, fill them in on the important stuff, and see where it goes.
I made close friends during and just after college, but they don’t live in my city. And I’m grateful for the friends I’ve made in my city over the years. But I have room for more. Friends I can relate to, share interests with, support and be supported by.
In this series, I’m writing about that experience. The chance, earnestness, vulnerability and comfort-zone obliteration involved in making oneself open to new friendship. These days, it takes more than hoping someone will notice your Josh Hartnett binder.
Join me next time for the first leg of the journey.
The “Claire and Erica” episode of the podcast, Call Your Girlfriend, which is part of its “Summer of Friendship” series wherein pairs of podcasters interview one another about how they navigate friendship. I wasn’t familiar with Claire and Erica’s podcast or newsletter, but was compelled by their story of becoming friends and business partners nonetheless.
Just wanted to insert one friendship-themed “thing.” The rest are random as usual!
I FINALLY LAUNCHED MY WEBSITE!
Last week’s Modern Love story in the The New York Times, “When a Summer Hookup Lasts 12 Years, It’s Time to Reassess.” Whewf, this one got me. I wrote my own Modern Love story (rejected by the column earlier this year, wah wah), and this tale of an unusual-yet-enduring-relationship echoed some of the beats and sentiments in my essay.
Illustration by Brian Rea The more stories I absorb, the more I see that nearly everything that happens in our lives defies convention. Rules were meant to be broken and all that.
The challenge of trying to find a cute, mid-range Apple Watch band. Is this the best there is??
“Stories They Never Told,” an essay by Amanda Borquaye for Roxane Gay’s Emerging Writer Series, which explores the ever-present sadness felt by children of immigrants. The resonance of this piece really struck me – it’s about the distance we first-gen kids have from our parents’ and grandparents’ lives: culturally, physically, linguistically. Their pivotal coming-of-age experiences exist only within our imaginations, adjacent to memory but just out of reach.
Every episode of Poog. I know I’ve raved about this podcast before, but I cannot overstate how much joy this podcast has given me this past year. Hosts, comedians Kate Berlant and Jacqueline Novak, skewer wellness while also being totally enthralled by it, an irony/hypocrisy to which I wholeheartedly relate.
I live for Berlant’s fiercely candid reactions, like her admission that she “freezes up around crafts” (same), and her response to when a therapist inevitably asks where in your body you feel an emotion – “Oh, go to hell.”
I have only one question for these ladies. Where. is. the. merch.
“Fair as F**ck,” an episode of the Dating White podcast that goes beyond dating white partners and into BIPOC representation in media.
Image by Charlotte Lapalus, shared by Dating White co-host, Nkechi Njaka. So crucial to the process, guest contributor Quintana says, is not just having representation, but getting BIPOC folks to occupy behind-the-scenes roles like art directing, writing, and casting. Otherwise, we’re seeing people of color onscreen but only through the prism of white storytellers. Such a fascinating ep!
Chelsea Leu’s essay, “Can This Two-Week Program Make You a Better Reader—And Do You Want It To?” for Electric Lit. This piece is about self-help author Ryan Holiday’s “Read to Lead” challenge, and I read it chortling self righteously.
It’s right up my alley, since the self-help genre and some new age culture read increasingly problematic to me. (A recent New Yorker book review that examines the racist and ablest prism through which most self-help books are written helped me get in touch with why I feel this way). Anyway, Leu’s essay gently explains why it misses the point to use reading as some kind of greasy optimization or leadership tactic, and I loved it.
This story from The Cut on the evolution of the trendy fashion brand, Lisa Says Gah, which I’ve been a fan of for years (queue the “I liked them before they were cool” claim). Do you avant-basic, or nah?
Bo Burnham’s new-ish comedy special, “Inside,” which he recorded in a small studio, entirely on his own during lockdown. A lot of the songs slap, but my favorites are the short ones. “Content,” “Bezos I,” and “Bezos II” are bonafide bangers and total ear worms. The full special is available on Netflix; YouTube audio linked in image below.
Extra Thing: My home tour for The Fold Magazine’s series, “Single Women in Their Spaces.” In the Q&A, I write about the overwhelming-yet-fun process of interior styling and the ultra personal journey of being creative.
From my home tour in The Fold Mag. Photo by my talented friend, Susan Yee.
Thanks for reading,
P.S. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Why did I CRY at this line?: "I think that’s the element achingly absent in adult friendships: history." Making new friendships always feels so burdensome for this EXACT reason. Loved this essay, Vanessa!
Loved the line “You can’t manufacture a past.” Being in a decades-long friendship doesn’t need explaining; a raised eyebrow, a twinkle in the eye sums up years of shared history, something that cannot be said about meeting someone at the bar.