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When we are oriented toward doing it ourselves and getting ours, we cut ourselves off from the kinds of relationships that can only be built when we allow ourselves to be open and generous.
Vivek Murthy, former surgeon general of the United States, wrote in the Harvard Business Review that “Loneliness and weak social connections are associated with a reduction in lifespan similar to that caused by smoking 15 cigarettes a day.”6
Freedom was the idea that together we can ensure that we all have the things we need—love, food, shelter, safety. The way I’ve come to understand it, freedom is both an individual and collective endeavor—a multilayered process, not a static state of being. Being free is, in part, achieved through being connected.
Real listening always brings people closer together. Trust that meaningful conversations can change your world.
“For a while now I’ve been hungry for a space and time where I can be
with women I think are brilliant and kind and have complex, deep conversation. I want to learn from you. I want to hear myself into my own wisdom.”
activist Ruby Sales said, “It is in community and in relationship with others that we locate a self that we can never find being isolated. It is in community and in relationship with each other that we come to know the consciousness and the spirit of god that is in each of us.
It’s not about getting as much out of it as we put in. It’s that our output is transformed into a wholly different material that’s not possible to create alone, like we are spinning gold from straw or transforming paper cups into nebulae. It’s only in an environment with others that this generative, multiplying power can be created.
we all have some “version of the story ‘I am not safe’ or ‘I am not loved’ or ‘there’s something wrong with me.’ These beliefs shape what we pay attention to. Our selective attention shapes our perceptions, our perceptions shape our experience, our experience reinforces our beliefs, and round and round we go.
when we respond by being passive-aggressive, defensive, pouting, or raging, we are violating their boundaries and not owning our stuff.
While we can presume that our romantic-sexual relationships will include conversations to negotiate and work toward shared understanding, we expect a kind of effortlessness when it comes to friendships. This can prevent them from being as deep as they might be.
Gaelic phrase anam cara, which literally translates as “soul friend”;
Alok Vaid-Menon, “Friendship Is Romance,” Alok (blog), February 15, 2017, https://www.alokvmenon.com/blog/2017/2/15/friendship-is-romance.
13. Lawrence Barriner II, “Friend Zones Update: How It’s Going,” lgb2writes (blog), February 19, 2019, http://lqb2.co/blog///2019/02/19/friend-zone-update/.
“As a single woman, what is your future as an elder? Because a lot of the old paradigms don’t exist anymore. There’s no 401(k) and pension plans, there’s no cashing out that house that you lived in for twenty years. That stuff is nonexistent. Even if you believe in it, it doesn’t exist anymore.
One of the things I take away from Rebecca’s story is the depth of choosing. They chose each other as favorite siblings when they thought they were biologically related. They remain each other’s favorites despite the absence of biological connection. So many of us struggle with feelings of obligation toward people just because we are related to them. This sometimes compels us to stay in relationship with people. But we do not have to stay attached to our given (as opposed to chosen) families.
There was no place in the world that I didn’t belong.
“I want to raise my kid with queer thinking—that you can be whoever you want. Your body is yours. Your identity is yours.
“We open up little windows into our relationship for our community to bear witness, and we do this because we want to make maps to the future and not monuments to ourselves.”
empathy can be uncomfortable. So, my efforts to soothe are partly about not having to feel bad alongside someone else. I’m learning to step back enough to make it not about me.
Hardship is very clarifying. It distills the relationships that can withstand real life.
it takes a lot of labor from many, many people for us to eat. It’s meant to make visible the people we are connected to through our meal.
boundaried spontaneity.
Hello, Friends, Happy New Year! One of the things I struggle with as an extroverted only child is my desire to have loved ones casually in my home more often, but a discomfort with the idea that people would just unexpectedly drop by. So I want to create an opportunity for you all to drop by inside of a container of loose planning. In the coming year, I will send texts or emails up to a couple of days in advance to let you know you can come to Drop By Dinner. Here are guidelines: 1. These dinners will not be anything special and will be potluck-ish with a very low bar. I will feed you whatever
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The Reverend Marvin K. White, a poet and public theologian, recited a poem he’d written for the occasion. In it, he said, “Everything is a gathering and a calling home. I want people to know they are welcomed and, more importantly, expected.”
We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond. —GWENDOLYN BROOKS
Ruthie Wilson Gilmore told us. “Real security is knowing that you will have shelter, that you will have food, that you will have beauty in your life. That you have a future, that your family has a future.”
I have a responsibility to not abandon others to struggle on their own.
the places that experience the highest survival rates are not the wealthiest or those where individuals have disaster kits, but the places with the strongest social cohesion—
The love of those heroes, as Savannah Shange, assistant professor of anthropology and critical race studies, explained to me, is deep and fierce, but not unconditional or without discernment. They “love powerfully while demanding accountability and respect.”
What does that creation need to look like so we are not just filled up when we are depleted but live a life that is less depleting?
So, in my thirties, I stopped spending as much time in those spaces. I created a bubble for myself of relationships where the humanity and value and dignity of people who are Black and female and queer and any other host of marginalized identities was not a question.
we could conjure the future, just by being in each other’s presence for a few days.
