Mind if I bleed on you?

(licking wounds at brunch)

If there has been any dishonesty to myself in the last 5 years, it has been the willingness to ignore how the female friendships in my life have atrophied. My friendships and relationships have dulled, like rocks in a river into an unbearable civility, and perhaps I am being kept around  in their life purely out of nostalgia and politeness.  

Being in the same city most of my life means many of my friends are family friends and so for many of these girls. I can not remember time without them. I also attended an all girls school for a majority of my schooling and find myself very emotionally dependent on the opinions of other women. I find myself very vulnerable to cruelty and kindness of girls, who I believed somehow held the secrets of my own womanhood and thus were held to divine standards.

I tried to figure out what had changed, the jokes were the same, gifts and baked goods still exchanged, but it seemed...empty. I realize now that they have stopped sharing their problems and their worries with me. Venting is often an honor we share with only our closest confidants (or complete strangers) our joy and accomplishments are for just about anyone. In truth I'd argue there's no better feeling than sharing your greatest success with a sworn enemy.

When I last went back home and caught up over dinner I found myself floating outside my body, an observer of old friends who could not bear to share anything above a superficial level of discussion, as if I had not known their wounds and had not watched them stretch and grow. Whatever form their life held now I had not been allowed access, I looked at them and saw my teeth marks, clinging hard to something I could not have. 

But foolishly I allowed myself to believe this was just the way friendships were, particularly with women in relationships. I've made no secret that I consider myself chronically lonely; When you're a neurodivergent woman particularly from a religious household, there is a demand to be held apart, to keep secrets, to mask, and to project an image of, if not perfection, constant adequacy. So the last year I have sustained myself on polite conversation and small offerings of my own vulnerability. 

However this week on a whim I invited two women, neither knowing the other but both of whom I knew only enough to know they would be happy to meet up for brunch. We found a small table at a busy Italian cafe, packed with elderly women and couples and ordered coffee and began small talk. Four hours later we moved only because the cafe was closing. 

I had not anticipated that they like me possessed the same longing for female friendships, of a connection and opportunity to bear our souls without judgment. A Floodgate had opened in all of us and it felt both visceral, in a disturbing yet euphoric way. An image of wolves tearing a carcass comes to mind.

We shared our pain and our strength and none of us could speak without our voice shaking, without our hand trembling with the effort to remain composed. I had not noticed the depth of that hole until it was filled, we discussed the things that could only be trapped somewhere between grief and rage, of our lives, the depression, the anxiety attacks, the abuse, loss and grief and how far we had gone to survive it. 

I find myself thinking about muses, both these women who at a distance I admired so deeply. Often for surface level things, the way they dressed or spoke, their homes, even their instagram, had an elegance and ease that I aspired to. 

How much larger they were in comparison to my own ideal of them. It hurts to think of how my friends who I'd known for 25 years could not find me worthy of carrying their burdens. I had never betrayed their confidence or judged them, but time still chose to separate that bond. It takes a certain strength to allow pain to be shared. We walked by pastry shops and the rush of city life and I found myself once again on solid land, able to express the things I could not express to my family, to my love or the friends I have chosen to forgive. But it ignited again the fire for things I thought I had lost. Strange how here at the corner cafe with no such history we had somehow all been strong and willing to expose our wounds, to bleed in front of someone openly, to beg to be licked clean.

Yours wounded and howling,

Chanda