Hey.
I’m sorry I haven’t reached out since we got together. I think about texting you at least once a week, usually while preparing to go on a walk. The thought always begins with I could text her and see if, but then I shake off the idea mid-sentence because other thoughts invade my brain. This happens every time.
The cost of having good friends leave my regular orbit is a statistical one. Every interaction we get means that much more. It has to! Our relationship becomes defined in the past tense, leaving the tiny sample of one dinner across three years to form the crux of what “we” means in the new present. Every word, laugh, and minute we spend together in 2023 must bridge our connection forward one, two, or four years into the future.
I understand that if I texted or called you more, this would change. But this letter is me explaining why I haven’t.
There’s a lot to catch up on when three years pass in the middle of a friendship. Scheduling those three years firmly into adulthood should theoretically mean less radical change occurs—34 and 37 don’t sound that different, especially compared to, say, 17 and 20—but those bookends straddling a pandemic that radically shook up the operations manual for living made for greater shifts than normal. I make that change easy to recognize because I look so different from how I did before. That outward transformation reflects my internal one as well. Much has been overhauled.
Time, change, heartache—these are rich topics for catching up after several years. When you see people regularly, your conversation treads less fertile ground; you can let the mundanities fill the space because the big stuff already got hashed out last time. With us, there were three years to fill in, though. There was no room for secondary storylines; only the track fives, the deep cuts, and the big-picture plot lines made the final reel. Our brief scene had heavy lifting to do.
Before meeting up, I made no plans for what I might talk about in our conversation. That might not sound noteworthy, but it is for me. I’m a rehearser. I worry constantly about not just what I am going to say but how I am going to say it. Only with my closest friends do I not pre-select talking points or calibrate my tone by reciting lines in the mirror. To me, Nathan Fielder is a visionary, not some weirdo fabricating fake bars and simulated relationships.
My lack of planning was a nod of trust: no gap in time would erase the closeness I feel to you. I didn’t need to prepare talking points to ease my anxiety before seeing you because I didn’t experience any. That was a cool discovery to make ahead of our meal.
But I also knew certain topics would come up. Marking the biggest changes in my life over those intervening years would inevitably lead to discussion touching on specific aspects of my life, particularly because I’ve erased all social media save for Substack.
I’ll cut to the chase: one of the subjects I anticipated would come up did come up. We’d talked so many times about relationships during our friendship. How could it not come up? But I had secretly hoped it wouldn’t because it so often doesn’t with people. Sometimes I can be so active of a listener that my conversation partner never veers back to me; I run out the clock before ¿y tú? can arrive. But when we talked about your romantic history while I picked at chicken wings in a plastic basket, I braced myself for what would come next. You care too much to never hand me back the ball.
When your question finally arrived, I considered for a moment just lying. Lies by omission are easy to execute—just don’t talk—but it’s impossible to dodge a sincere direct question from an old friend. Something indirect and half-hearted? Sure. But not that. I have to answer your question. So I said my piece as honestly and plainly as possible. I told you, truthfully, where I was at with that whole arena.
And then you responded…with a question.
Your question left me feeling freshly flattened, embarrassed, and uncertain.
What you asked me in response to what I said was a super fair question in a vacuum. It was a clarifying question, one of the best kinds of questions because you have to understand something to seek clarification on it. You weren’t rude in any way—you never are—and you didn’t intentionally reject, dismiss, or invalidate me in any way.
But.
One of the reasons I lie by omission so often is that I still have trouble talking about this. It sounds more dissonant when spoken out loud. It’s like the notes look harmonious on the page, but when they’re played on an actual piano, they bleat out the sickly crunch of immature music theory. When I say it out loud, it becomes subject to sociology; it rubs against the way things are and the way people work, and it fuels insecurity over every part of myself. From the safety of my own head, I can buy into it and accept it as true because it so often feels true. But putting it out there into the world and standing behind the words and declaring “This. Is. Me.” feels as much like a pair of pants several sizes too small as my old conception of myself did.
You see, your question is unnecessary: I question this part of myself already. I question it all the time. In a silent solo space, I question it less—it feels mostly correct in my head—but in the wild, everything points me toward being in the wrong. It defines me in opposition to seemingly everybody else. It defines me in opposition to my former self! I spent so long laying tracks in the direction of marriage and kids that I still find myself choo choo chooing down the rails sometimes, and I have to interrogate whether that’s because I enjoy trains or because I board them instinctively after three-plus decades of boarding trains. Verbalized, it never feels right; it’s always impossible to explain since no single term ever fits. Sometimes it feels like a literal bomb is counting down inside me to decide on something that even I, in the deepest recesses of my primordial being, deem unknowable.
I can’t even say “I came out to you, and you questioned me” because it feels so wrong to classify me as someone with any claim to a coming out narrative. How could I when there’s a closet inside myself that might as well house Schröedinger’s cat because I can’t figure out whether it’s open or closed any more than I can figure out the damn kitten’s status? I go back and forth the minute this subject surfaces; my sense of self is so fragile that they wrap my protective wrapping in styrofoam peanuts and a Sealed Air bubble mailer. Just talking about this risks sending my brain into a downward spiral where every thought and feeling needs to be strapped to a polygraph, even though everything I say sends the lines flying across the pages until the FBI guy says “He’s so worried he might be lying that I can’t read anything” with a shake of his head. I need to grapple with all of it once my brain goes there, but there was no time to start litigating my own nature because you’ve just asked me a question, and you’re politely waiting for my response. Your wings are getting cold waiting on me.
What I should have said in response to your well-intentioned query was “Yes”. I should have said, “Yes, that’s exactly what I meant” or “Yes, that’s who I am now, and maybe always was before too” and then changed the subject. I don’t owe anyone, even people like you whom I love, justification for who I am. Whether it jives with a person’s past history, society’s expectations, or any religious rule set, a person deserves some autonomy to define themselves.
I once overheard a colleague talk about this in the pod. She said, “What value is there in a parent questioning who their kid says they are? Just love your kid!” This didn’t surprise me from this person, but it did make expressible in words how I’d already been trying to treat people. The edge of adulthood is a chaotic time, and our particular era right now is especially messy; if I find myself still teetering as I enter 32nd grade, who would I be to question a young person on how they see themself? How arrogant would it be to purport to know anything about the internal mechanisms of another complex human being’s mind and heart?
If someone tells me something about themself, I take that as an axiom for who they are. Period. It won’t matter what they have said before because my love and support are not conditional. I won’t know whether what they’ve said is true, but I suspect, many times, that neither will they. I can’t control that, even if I gruesomely wanted to. What I can control is how I respond to their candor. Like so many other hypothetical interactions, I rehearse in my mind the act of giving them unblinking acceptance, just in case I am the first person they open their door for. Just in case they say it hoping it sounds true to their doubting ears.
Although your words impacted me in a non-positive way, that you followed up my statement with a question didn’t wound me; I wounded myself. I wound myself all the time. I am a self-sufficient wounder. The Oscar for Best Achievement in Emotional Own-Goaling goes to me. Now, as always: It’s me, hi, I’m the problem it’s me.
But when someone answers a statement like mine with a question, it slaps a question mark at the end of every sentence I form about myself. I worry internally all the time about whether I am reading myself correctly, whether this is what I want or a sacrifice to protect potential loved ones to be wrecked later, whether it’s a symptom of illness or the self-doubt is, whether everything is an echo of the past or an inkling of present truth, whether I am cursing or blessing myself, whether I am the biggest, most arrogant, deluded fool to ignore the collected pressures of human sociology to follow this one tiny kernel in my mind that says “No” in the meekest possible meow from behind a door I am to afraid to try, a meow I am not even sure I heard but that was just audible enough and just assertive enough to suggest that unknowable feline might be knowable someday. I am a self-perpetuating ball of stress even Sisyphus nopes off of, and when I attempted to say “I think this is who I am” and the response from someone I love was an incredulous question, well, it instantly ignited all of this disorienting introspection. It’s been months since your question, but I still can’t get it out of my head. I can’t get out of my own head either. Those two are connected.
It’s better, I think, for the first thing we say in response to something like this to be “Okay”. Maybe toss in a warm smile; maybe tack on a “Cool” or “Thanks for telling me”. The only reason I feel justified in labeling this moment a “coming out” story is the terror I felt when you asked your question and all of the self-acceptance I’d been practicing crumbled. Those feel like similar stakes.
I’m not mad at you. I love you; I always will. And how I’d love to talk with you about Past Lives. Do you know I saw it five times in theaters? It felt so good to sit down to dinner and talk about it with Jacqui afterward, after my fourth watch. I bet our conversation would be epic too. There’s so much to say! It literally focuses on a relationship across extended gaps between years. I’d love to hear your impressions.
But I can’t think about you without thinking about your question, which is to say: I can’t think about you without tumbling down a rabbit hole and collapsing inward like a petty neutron star. People can call me too sensitive if they want—reprise the “Anti-Hero” chorus, please and thank you—but I just don’t have the bandwidth to feel that way today. I didn’t yesterday either. I haven’t since June. I’m not sure when I will. I feel like I can’t reach out to you until I can answer your question, but it’s a question I fear I never will. I’ll pick up for you, always—maybe that’s why I’m writing this?—but I can’t choose to subject myself to that interrogation when thoughts about identity already drain my CPU while competing with all the other background processes as well.
Again: I’m not mad at you. I can only post this because this is about me, not you. And it is about me: I’m confused with myself. I’m perpetually confused with myself. It would be so much easier if I was angry with you, but I’m not. It’s just that the processing power required to confront my own uncertainty is needed for other critical programs. For now at least. I’m sorry, friend. My CPU is just an aging model.
I look forward to the next time we talk. I really do.
Hopefully, we both have fewer questions, though.
Love,
Me
I took a short course on fostering inclusive spaces for LGBTQIA+ young people this morning. It blows my mind sometimes how something unrelated and wholly independent of what I write can magically be in dialogue with my week’s piece.