The Friends Who Remind Us Who We Are
Finding each other in a world where it’s easy to lose ourselves
“the nights have filled my life with brutal music
that has taught me that we’re only here
to listen, to hold each other awhile
and to listen”
~Joseph Fasano
Last week, I wrote about the particular grief of losing those we don’t know but who have shaped us from afar. When the leaders and artists who have helped us make sense of our often fraught and confusing lives, or who show us the way toward change that we might otherwise have been too afraid or limited in vision to fight for, are suddenly gone, it’s easy to feel disoriented and alone. But, of course, there are also the people who help us to craft our lives and to hold onto our most honest selves in much more intimate ways—the people we do know, who know us and who encourage us to better know ourselves.
Shortly after hitting publish on last week’s essay about the grief that stretches beyond our individual reach, I learned of the very unexpected loss of a friend. She was one of those rare and special connections, who don’t merely keep us company, but keep us grounded in ourselves in the moments when it’s most difficult to do so, while also bringing lightness to all the other moments. It was surreal to be thinking about grief at a distance, while simultaneously holding grief in a much more personal way.
When Meg Falley, the wife of the poet, Andrea Gibson, who died last year, speaks of Andrea these days, she references “their alleged death,” both because it seems inconceivable that Andrea is no longer living and because their spirit feels so persistently present, still. There is something about this feeling that seems aligned with how the loss of this particular friend has sat with me over the past week. I’ve experienced a lot of forms of loss over the years, and this specific feeling isn’t always present. Some people just seem to stay with us differently—lives so bright and fierce that they defy a firm ending. This ineffable sensation isn’t the same as denial, and I don’t think it’s exactly spiritual either. There are just certain people whose souls are so enlivening that they linger with us in uniquely palpable ways. This particular friend wasn’t only brilliant in her own right, she somehow expanded the brilliance of those she, very selectively and discerningly, chose to cast her energy upon. There’s something about that quality that feels too determined and too radiant to be extinguished in any ordinary way, or to abide merely in memory.
I keep thinking about how James Baldwin once described love. He said:
“The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love—whether we call it friendship or family or romance—is the work of mirroring each other's light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when shame and sorrow occlude our own light from view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.”
If we are very lucky, we have a few people in our lives who operate with this kind of love, reminding us who we are and re-illuminating our spirits when we’ve forgotten how to do so ourselves. And, if we are consciously attuned to the frequency upon which these people operate, hopefully we try to take our cues from their illumination, doing the same for them and for others.
Friendship can be hard to find and to sustain, especially in a cultural context that often seems to make friendship both more necessary than ever and more difficult to prioritize. Our geographically dispersed, highly online, work-saturated, twenty-first century lives ask a lot of friendship while simultaneously devaluing it. Many of us live far away from family. Our work often dominates the majority of our waking hours, increasingly seeping into every moment through the buzzing alerts of our devices and the sense of urgency we’ve built up around every aspect of our professional communications and obligations. We reply with apologies when an email sits in our work inbox for even a few hours, while messages from people we love linger in the haze of our exhaustion and our anxiety. (I’m definitely guilty of this, as I’m sure most of us are.) Meanwhile, our social media feeds fill with the zingy reward of likes and follows that are mostly from strangers, and sometimes not even from real people.
We navigate all of this within an ever more frayed social safety net that forces us to rely upon the very people we’ve made it increasingly difficult to prioritize for our most basic needs. We do our best to care for each other's children when there are no viable care options, to contribute to Go Fund Me accounts when there are unpaid doctor’s bills, and to send food or offer a few hours of respite when a loved one is struggling to balance the work they can’t miss with the need to care for aging parents or a sick child. Truly intimate, caring community has become increasingly difficult and tenuous to build and sustain, even as we need it more and more.
All to say, we need friendship desperately for all the same reasons that it can be extremely difficult to cultivate and reciprocate. So, when we do mange to find and hold onto each other, it’s precious.
As a preschool teacher, I've spent a lot of my career thinking about how friendships are formed. Children's earliest school years are largely about learning to make and be a friend. When I was a school director, the beginning of the year was always filled with messages from parents who were worried about whether their children would be placed in class with their friends. It’s hard to start community from scratch, and we take understandable comfort in knowing our children will have familiar faces to anchor them as they make new beginnings. When organizing new class placements with teachers each year, we always aimed for every child to be joined by some old friends and some new friends in their new classroom. We would remind parents that one of the most important social skills children learn, as they move from year to year throughout school, is how to simultaneously hold onto old friendships and form new ones.
This is a task we navigate again and again throughout life, as we manage the many transitions of our own continued development, evolving family structures, changing jobs, and moves. The children’s author and illustrator, Mo Willems, has said of his beloved Elephant and Piggie series, “Elephant and Piggie is not about friendship. It’s about repairing friendship. Because the essence of friendship is that it breaks.” Sometimes these breaks are the result of actual disagreement or hurt. Often they are just a result of the way time and life stretch us all apart, wittingly and unwittingly. And sometimes friendship is shockingly easy, taking root quickly and never letting go. But whether friendship falters and fractures or blossoms and grows, it is something we continue to learn how to find and hold for our whole lives.
So, as I’ve been remembering my luminous friend, who allegedly died last week, I’ve been thinking about the qualities that allowed our friendship to persist over years and distance, and about what lessons this might hold. We’d known each other for more than fifteen years. Her son, now in college, was a three-year-old in my classroom long ago when my own son, now a teenager, wasn’t even born. For the majority of our friendship, we lived in different cities, as her family moved just a few years after we met. We didn’t talk particularly frequently, but when we did it was as though no time had passed; we always had details of daily living and growing children to catch each other up on, but the ease was always the same and the love and laughter we shared were never tenuous or strained, no matter how many months had gone by.
I hope that you're able to conjure the image of at least one person in your own life with whom this kind of ease exists—the people who recognize us and whom we recognize instantly, no matter how much we change or how much time and distance tug at us.
I think there are two qualities that make these uniquely nourishing and sustaining bonds possible. The first may not be something we can intentionally cultivate, but is something we can at least practice recognizing and valuing when we find it. Much like falling in love, there is something about the friends who fortify us the most deeply that can feel like a kind of magic, and which we have very little control over—a chemistry or a feeling of recognition that defies words. This, I think, is what opens up the loving mirror that Baldwin described. The friends with whom we have this sense of deep, mutual knowing don’t simply understand us well, they reflect the best of who we are back to us. These are the friends who have the ability to remind us who we are when we've lost our way, or when the world around us has grown too dark for us to recognize ourselves. Sometimes they bring us back with their words or with gestures of care, but often they are able to work this restorative healing through the sheer light in their eyes. They seem to see us for who we are at our best even when we feel at our worst. They are also the friends we most easily share laughter with, the ones we instinctively know will recognize a punchline or a moment of irony that might perplex anyone else. Hopefully we shine this light back for them as well, in the hard moments and the happy ones and the ridiculous ones and the ones that blend all these feelings together.
The second quality I’ve been thinking about is one that is easier to cultivate with intentionality. It’s not magic. It's simply a willingness to recognize the complexity of life and to offer each other grace and patience—to allow time, distance, distractions, and all our many imperfections to exist without becoming default ruptures. The truth is that most of us are working harder to manage the day-to-day demands of meeting our most basic responsibilities, without falling apart or giving up, than we readily admit. The friends who understand this intuitively and brighten at hearing our voice, no matter how long it’s been, and the ones for whom we are willing and able to do the same in return, form the relationships that offer the sturdiest threads of connection over time. They are the ones who hold our laughter and our tears in equal measure and for whom we reach, time and again, just for the pleasure and the life-giving force that our voices nourish in each other.
These qualities—the ethereal chemistry of the bonds we can’t quite explain, and the grace we are able to offer one another in sustaining these bonds—are complementary features that allow our most meaningful and enduring friendships to keep our souls buoyant. These are the friendships that give meaning to our days, inject light into our darkest moments, and glow with shared pleasure in our happiest times. The chemistry of recognition may not be something we can forge, but it is something we can notice and elevate when we find it. My friend was especially good at that. And grace and patience are gifts we can all offer each other. We just have to remind ourselves to do so.
I shared this Kate Baer poem in a very early Notes on Hope essay. It feels right to share it again now:
“Friend Text Thread
did anyone hear the / link to the story that / have an opinion
on / dress for the weekend / meal to make quickly / where is
that place we / pictures from Tuesday / ache in my left breast
/ calling tomorrow / baby is coming / crying all night and /
remember the guy who / cannot stop laughing / sick of the
fighting / not sure if we’ll work out / results in the morning /
nightmare unfolding / we are right here and / tell us the hard
part / tell us you’ll try”
Wishing you a few of these magical friendships, the wisdom to recognize them, and the grace to sustain each other with tenderness and humor for as many days as you have,
Alicia
A few things I found helpful and hopeful this week…
- Grief Is Not a Verdict by Kelly Hayes
- A wish this Rosh Hashanah by Ruth Zakarin (from 2025)
- Documenting the Impact of US DHS Activity in MN
- I Spent 32 Years Caring for Children and I Still Can’t Afford to Retire by Cathy Hooker
- My So-Called Alpha School by Benjamin Riley (Buckle up. This is a wild one. Regardless of what you think about AI in education, this particular model has to end.)
