Temporary? Insanity

Dear Friends,

Did you ever grasp a truth but grasp it imperfectly? As if you’d managed to catch a wee bitty corner of it between your fingers and somehow missed all the rest? I do that often. Have done throughout my life and continue to even now, when a marriage, mortage, and three children hint that maybe I should be more grown up, more clever than that by now.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that I have a history of grabbing the wrong end of the stick entirely. I grew up skinny as a rake, thinking being overweight was a silly choice for people to make (I’m now 50 pounds overweight and at one time was much more than that). I thought depression was just an excuse to be lazy and melodramatic all the time (and after my second child experienced severe PPD that locked me in a very bad, very dark place for a very long time). And I once got it in my head that Kindred Spirits had to be kindred in nearly every sense. That particular bit of nonsense has limited my friendshipping to a severe degree.

I thought we had to be the same. I thought we had to think the same sort of thoughts and see the world in the exact same skewed and fractured way. I thought we had to love the same loves and hate the same hates. It disturbed me to find that you loved pickles or couldn’t start your day without your morning cup of coffee. I felt estranged when I learned that reading wasn’t your thing or that you loved to run and feel the pavement stretch grey and fleeting beneath your sneakered feet. Your sun worshipping seemed so foreign to my pale too-easily-freckled self. How could we be friends when you were so, so strange?

And then I reflected on the strangeness of ME. The way I hide in my house and wrap myself in my solitude as if it could protect me somehow. My tendency to hide dishes in the oven when unexpected company arrives and burn the heck out of them later the next day while preheating. My picky eating and the way I read and love the books I touch till they are wrinkled, worn, and waterstained. My absentmindedness and the way I put things off till they become URGENT and panicky. The way I panic over things that aren’t urgent and fall apart with so little provocation.

Oh yes, I am strange indeed. And as the years pass and I come to love you for the friend you are to me, I realize how peripheral it all is. The likes and dislikes. It doesn’t matter if you are married like me, a mother like me, a reader, writer, and musician like me. It doesn’t matter if I can’t understand why you love the things you love, or if you don’t love all the things that I do.

That isn’t what kindred spirits ARE. I got that wrong oh so many years ago and it’s taking far too long to right itself. We are kindred in the ways that matter. Loving, laughing hearts. A desire to be better than we are. Kindness. Tolerance. And a heaping helping of gratitude that we are so blessed to know each other.

This is what friendship should be. What so many of you have taught me that friendship IS. I think I finally get it.

But? Please stay away from me if you have pickle breath. Seriously. I’ll gag.

With love,
Your Friend Kim