On Vulnerability in Friendship

Tomorrow is a place we are together

I spent the last week or so in the invaluable company of my best friend from home, who traveled to London to visit me over her spring break. We did so many things throughout her stay here, many of which were new to both of us — a garden tour at Buckingham Palace, fancy afternoon tea, even a day trip to Paris. Despite it all, though, we both agreed that our favorite part of her visit happened on the first day: we took a walk to my local park and laid in the grass in the rare shining London sun and talked with our eyes closed for two hours straight. It was reminiscent of the long talks in her basement throughout the first year and a half of the pandemic: sitting six feet apart with a movie paused, in the middle of an intense conversation about something completely irrelevant. It was those conversations, I believe, that taught me what friendship is.

I grew up with a fairly insecure perspective of female friendship. I was a broad-shouldered, taller-than-average girl with hairy legs in an elementary school where the majority of people fit the mid-2000s beauty standard. I was teased a lot for the way I looked and the love I had for things like panda bears and specific Nickelodeon sitcoms. Therefore, I don’t think I can remember a female friendship I had in childhood — and even into adolescence — that didn’t contain a sense of comparison. I remember walking into my fifth-grade classroom during recess one day, our teacher out of the room, to find my classmates keeping a running tally of who was “weirder” between me and another girl who was, in a way, everything I aspired to be. I was winning by a landslide. Moments like these haunted me throughout high school, but I was often relieved by my now-best friend who I bonded with over our shared Middle Eastern heritage on the second day of classes. We didn’t dig deep into that part of ourselves until later on, but there was an unspoken connection as we sat with our other friends in the lunchroom, to know that there was someone there who understood a part of me that nobody else truly got. Is that not the basis of all good friendships, anyway?

by Holly Warburton

I had a friendship break-up in 2019, after which I was forced to confront my relationship with female friendship and the importance of communication and vulnerability. It was a lonely half a year or so trying to grapple with the ripples of it until I returned home for COVID-19 with a newfound will to explore a different approach to adult friendship. I was lucky that my best friend was also home, a short ten-minute drive from mine, and I remember the moment the dam broke. We were sitting far apart in my driveway at some point in the summer eating Sweetgreen salads when she asked me how I was doing emotionally after the move back. Nobody had asked me that yet. She said something like it must be so hard for you and I remember tearing up at the sweet relief of being seen. Something was stirring beneath the surface, and she coaxed it out of me and held it lovingly in her hands. It’s been like that since — we meet and sometimes I’ll put my heart on the table and she’ll put out hers, and we’ll hold the other’s long enough to warm it and then hand it back. It makes it feel lighter in my chest. Dig deeper, we say to each other, sometimes. Maybe think about it this way.

I’ve mentioned this poem before, but I want to re-visit “Tomorrow is a Place” by Sanna Wani:

We meet at a coffee shop. So much time has passed and who is time? Who is waiting by the windowsill? We make plans to go to a museum but we go to a bookshop instead. We’re leaning in, learning how to talk to each other again. I say, I’m obsessed with my grief and she says, I’m always in mourning. She laughs and it’s an extension of her body. She laughs and it moves the whole room. I say, My home is an extension of my body and she says, Most days are better with a long walk. The world moves without us—so we tend to a garden, a graveyard, a pot on the windowsill. Death is a comfort because it says, Transform but don’t hurry. There is a tenderness to growing older and we are listening for it. Steadier ways to move through the world and we are learning them. A way to touch your own body. A touch that says, Dig deeper. There, in the ground, there is our memory. I am near enough my roots. Time is my friend. Tomorrow is a place we are together.

My best friend and I lost our grandmas at the same time in the summer of 2018. I think we both found that grief is too big of a feeling to be shielded by anxiety. It was new for me, to talk about that so openly. I spent a lot of my life being afraid of being vulnerable. Maybe it was because I felt like many of my darker feelings put me farther apart from the people I wanted to feel close to. But more often than not, I wanted to feel close to them because I wanted to be more like them. And there are a lot of virtues in my close friends now that I want to embody, but the pillars of my friendships have become the mutual acceptance of those darker feelings. A place to set things down, to feel understood. It makes the moments of laughter feel even brighter. Opening up is hard, and it takes time. It’s well worth it though. Really.

I am so grateful that I’ve been able to use what I’ve learned to cultivate both old and new friendships in the past two years. I have found that, though maybe not the tight-knit friendship circle I imagined my university self to have years ago, I have never felt such deep and meaningful companionships in my life. Writing about them has helped them grow. There is one person I feel I can trace it back to, and I’m thankful I was able to show her all the corners of my life here that she hadn’t seen yet. She blessed them with a piece of home. Love you, C <3

“Ode to Friendship” by Noor Hindi:

The night so warm I could fall in love
with anything
including myself. My loves. You are the only people
I’d surrender my softness to.
The moon so blue. And yes, what’s gold
is gold. What’s real
is us despite
a country so grieved, so woke, so death.
Our gloom as loud as shells.

Listen. Even the ocean begs.
Put your hands in the sand, my friend.
It’s best we bury ourselves.
What’s heavy.               What’s heavy?
Becomes light.

Further Reading

“Friendship & Vulnerability” from The School of Life

Closeness Over Time graphic by Olivia de Recat

“Loneliness: coping with the gap where friends used to be” by Olivia Laing

We Are Not Really Strangers

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What I Enjoyed This Week

Recent Reads

More Spring poems!

• “Praising Spring” by Linda Gregg. I love how so many poems about spring emphasize the idea of continuation, continuation despite. I love how Gregg looks at this growth with a silent and admiring observation. Sometimes we need to just silence our brains and watch the flowers grow, as they do and as they will.

• “One of the Butterflies” by W.S. Merwin. I am sometimes haunted by the idea that all moments of joy are fleeting. Merwin touches on this — expressing insecurity that sometimes leads to a longing for pain, as sadness is often the deepest emotion that stays the longest. But maybe true happiness isn’t the constancy of joy, but rather the confidence that these moments will return again and again, in different forms. That’s the beauty of it, though, I think.

Other Wonderful Things

• It happened. I went to a concert! For the first time since COVID-19, but in a way, it felt like the first of my new life. I saw Lucy Dacus by myself, swinging in the back of the O2 Kentish Town, deep guitar and catharsis rattling through my bones. She was incredible — even better live, I’d say. I came out with two new favorite songs of hers: “Brando” and “Addictions”.

• I listened to this episode of On Being today with Kate DiCamillo and found myself in tears on the tube. DiCamillo has such a special outlook on children’s literature and how deeply we should allow ourselves to trust children with darker topics. I think a lot about my inner child and what she has always needed, and how I can keep her alive. It was a real joy to listen to. It was this letter in particular, that she read aloud on the program, that struck me extra hard.

• This song, this song, and this song. Playlist

Thank you for reading, and for being a friend who listens.

<3

Tara