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End of Week Zen
I love you, Frida. Happy weekend everyone. Don’t forget to celebrate your accomplishments!
Illustration by Lisa Congdon
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It is amazing that Frida continues to inspire despite the mass media saturation of her persona. This considered with the Hanya Yanagihara quote from a previous post are just about the consummate description of friendship for me.
When I saw her speak last week, she talked a lot about friendship and how important and societally undervalued it is.
This is encouraging. I am getting the feeling that I don’t fit in with my regular pack of friends anymore because they pick on me a lot (for my hair, for my choice of movies, for the men I might be dating at the time and for how long it takes for me to build trust with them). They are relentless, but they think it’s all one big joke. I feel like I am in middle school again. Maybe some day I will find someone who is bizarrely flawed as I am and won’t make me feel like an outcast.
Serious question, Leyla. Why are your friends picking on you?
Quite frankly, I think it’s because they are insecure about their messy lives and relationships and they target me to make themselves feel better. I am going to keep my distance from them for a while.
I’m sorry to hear that your friends are treating you badly.
I feel like I’m on shaky ground in the friendship department lately. I decided to pull back from a close friend because there were some issues that were bringing me down. Now I feel like I’m starting all over and I’m not sure what to do. It’s challenging to find friends and it’s discouraging when a friendship doesn’t turn out the way you had hoped. I realize I put all my eggs in one basket and I should strive to diversify my friendship circles more.
When I moved to L.A. after 20 years in San Francisco, I had to create a whole new circle of friends. It took awhile, but it has been a most rewarding experience. I love my new friends.
How did you build your new community?
For the first time in my adult life, I joined a synagogue. The congregation is a very cool place with smart, talented, good people. It’s there that I cultivated a new community.
It is really hard to find a good friend, let alone one that you can be close to. I do believe, theoretically, that there are others out there who are as ‘nonconformist’ as me, but how to ever find them. And of course everyone would define ‘strange’ or ‘bizarre’ in their own way, and it has to be just the right type of ‘strangeness’ for two to mesh and form a friendship. Sometimes it just amazes me that anyone ever connects with anyone else, it often seems so impossible.
Being single for so long, friendship has been the anchor of my life. (And of course, there’s my dog.) I could not survive without it.
You would survive, Wendy. Your life would be different, but you would survive.
Survive, yes. But would I thrive?
Dogs- of course! That goes without saying for me as well. I know everyone is not in the position to have a dog for various reasons, but I can’t even imagine where I would be without them. And true, I would also survive; it would be different and sometimes I try to imagine how… though I can’t really picture myself dogless.
Rose will be 11 in a few weeks. I shudder thinking of her aging.