For my best friend’s twenty first birthday, each of us in our friends group made a list of 21 things we loved about her.
A few months ago, almost eight years later, she called me up holding the lists in her hand.
“I came across these while clearing out my wardrobe,” she said. “You won’t believe some of the things you guys wrote in here!”
I made her read them out to me.
We groaned over her ex being included in the activity and laughed at mine being a part of it. I teased her about some of the sappy things that were said and we both agreed that it sounded as though every person who wrote the list were madly in love with her.
Your child-like excitement when you see candy, how good you look in skirts, your love for coffee and fuzzy socks, the way you use reverse psychology to get what you want — these were the little things that made my friend the woman we grew to know and love during our years in college.
“You know,” she said, after reading the last list, “I miss these things about me. I don’t think I am this person or have things like this anymore.”
I thought of what we’d just read and the people who wrote it. While most of us are still good friends, we certainly don’t share the kind of physical or emotional space we once did.
“You wouldn’t know though, would you?” I asked her. “If no one is around to see you, how would you know what the little things about you are?”
The question lingered, caught in the hooks of our adult reality.
The lists were reminiscent of a particular time, friendship, and the person she was to each of us within that vignette. Without the time and space that came with university-era inevitabilities (a new city, boring classes, living together), we were no longer seen how we used to be, every mood observed, every emotion mapped, every like and dislike and quirk made note of.
After a certain age, most of us aren’t witnessed the way we were growing up — candy excitement, sock obsessions, and everything.
“That’s sad,” she said. I agreed.
—
It has long been proven that the need to feel seen is a primitive human one. But perhaps being witnessed against the backdrop of our everyday realities, full-frontal with our foibles and idiosyncrasies, is just as vital to sustaining our life force. If feeling unseen is perceived as a death sentence by our brains, not being witnessed is certainly one for our spirits.
Sure, there may be a tinge of vanity to the whole affair. But it’s less a mirror held to peacock our plumage against and more a necessary indulgence to reflect our humanness.
Being witnessed treasures the contents of our personhood, reminding us of who we were when we first fell in love, had our hearts broken, agreed to those terrible haircuts we never should have attempted, quit our soul-sucking jobs without a clear plan, and took all our giant leaps of faith. It creates living albums that store our strength, courage, laughter, go-to karaoke songs, and problematic favs, playing them back to us when we need to be reminded who we were and how we got to where we're at.
While the amount of time we spend with our people may dwindle as we grow older, it doesn’t mean that the way we look at and listen to each other has to change. We still have the power to record the in-betweens of those we love by looking closely and paying attention.
“I’ll write you a new list,” I said, made restless by the urgency of this realization.
—
I wrote down how I wanted to remember my friend as she was in that moment, what I wanted to store, save, and reflect about our friendship as we were right then.
At 28, after 11 years of knowing each other, my list was longer, less fun, more adult. But there was still a list because I still saw her and it still mattered that I recorded it.
Maybe some years only allow us to make rough sketches of those we love. But unless we keep showing up, eyes wide open, pencil on paper, we’ll forget the act of loving that lies in the art of witnessing. So do it anyway. Show up. Witness.
Watch how your friends and lovers discard old truths and fervently, with deliberate conviction, craft new parts of themselves. Listen when their tempo picks up and their pitch rises, signalling the arrival of a new passion, mood, and self. Carry their eras in your back pockets and tuck their histories into your heart.
Remember to behold the ones you love, their flighty, restless, petulant human condition cupped in your palms. This is how we help each other stay alive.
This is how we stay alive.
💌
Love,
Soumya
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Creators I love 👩🍳
Meet Nel Fernandes, an old friend, beautiful human, and goddess of baked goods.
Nel and I were schoolmates and I’ve known her, in some capacity or the other, pretty much my whole life. But the vein we’ve most been drawn to each other by and connected over is that of our ideas, values, and life’s work.
She describes herself as — an aspiring pastry chef, someone who left a superficially perfect life to explore my big scary "what-if?" because the monotony of it all ate at me.
A bit about her journey — I started simple, just being attracted to baking since I was 16 and not being able to pursue it then. But my interest since has drastically shifted to viennoiserie, chocolates, and the science of bread making. Everyday is a new day to experiment, learn, fail, grow and try again, at least 26378394 times in this chapter of my life, and that’s what I craved.
Miscellany ✨
These women saved their friendship by
going for Friendship Therapy
.
These living clothes
might just help our dying planet.
A Dalit woman’s
trauma and celebration in a plate of beef
.
A timely, thrilling, and incisive
short story by New Yorker's Jia Tolentino
. It’s free for Amazon Prime users so read away!
My favourite recommendation this month is this piece on
the invisibility of older women
.
Okay, I lied.
Elliot Page's profile on Time
is my actual favourite. I had that lump-in-throat-tearducts-filling-up feeling throughout reading this.
How to
write stories that come alive
.
A gorgeous
personal essay on Joni Mitchell’s Blue
, love, loneliness, and longing.
Current Jam 🎶
Sam Smith covering Cindy Lauper is every bit as perfect as you would dream it to be!!!! 😭😭😍😍
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