Befriending is the Hardest Work of my Life

Learning to trust through scars + a free Link Love!

I’m never going to tell you the whole story but sometime in not so very far away past, someone leeched onto me for reasons only they knew and I did not.

They came with a long list of unvoiced expectations for the relationship with me they had built up in their head, their kinship with me, but it was all less than kind. Our relationship was short-lived, measured in months, not years, but they spent the next decade destabilizing me. I’m not going to share all the ways they did this, but it reached the level where I had to consider a restraining order to keep myself and our family safe.

I never write of this. I rarely speak of it and when I do, only to my husband, my closest friends, and my therapist. The ways it tore at my ability to trust other humans and myself are innumerable. I’m still parsing through it all.

The biggest thing it took from me, though, is the ability to trust new people who come into my life.

South Wind, Clear Sky (Gaifū kaisei), also known as Red Fuji, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei) Katsushika Hokusai Japanese ca. 1830–32

Before this person, I was open to friendship with anyone. Anyone! While never an extrovert, I was always waiting for the magical sound of the click that happens when two people meet and mingle and it’s just right. It only happens (for me) about 1% of the time, but I wasn’t afraid of the other 99% because there was always that pulsing what if? What if they’re a new friend, a relationship waiting to happen? What if we become a part of one another’s story, inextricably tied to one another through the common grace of chemistry and time?

After these years, though, I stopped asking those questions. I began to see all new people—especially those who read my work before they knew me—as potential predators, waiting to crush my bones, eat me, eat my words, eat my life. It didn’t matter if they were the most humble, well-meaning, kind, gentle people in the world. I couldn’t know that for sure and so keeping them at arm’s length has been my only protection.

A few have slipped through regardless. A girl who went on the trip to Greece a year and a half ago, despite me not being able to go at the last minute. She has become dear to me. Our next door neighbor when we moved in here. The surprise of her, just living there, sharing a wall with us. A few others. I could count them on one hand and I do. I say their names to remind myself that not everyone wants to take something from me, my words, my safety, my reputation, my peace.

Recently I reached out to a long-time writing co-laborer, someone ten years ahead of me, who has also experienced deep betrayal and harm from those who merely wanted something from her and not her herself. We spoke yesterday at length and the thing I walked away with more than anything was her repeated statement: Me too.

I lament the ways I built myself up and let those who read me build me up too. Over the past six years, I have worked hard (hard, hard, hard) to both remain faithful in my calling as a writer while also stepping away from the trappings of grandiosity, celebrity, or the kind of continual breathless self revelations that keep people coming back for more.

The world has enough of that. And so many of those people are desperately lonely, propping themselves up against drama, trauma, likes, shares, and comments not because they lack the ability to make true and lasting friendships, but because they don’t believe there is enough substance of themselves just as they are to be loved just as they are.

Jia Tolentino wrote a review of Liz Gilbert’s newest memoir, and in it she wrote, “On social media, many of the most chaotic and emotionally lawless people you’ve ever known are posting on a regular basis about having at long last achieved inner peace.”

I keep thinking about that.

I do not blame the person I mentioned in the first paragraph entirely for my deformed view of new people over the last years. They had untreated mental illness and although it took my peace and destabilized my place, I accept that I was partially responsible for the reason they thought I would solve their problems.

At the time I think I believed I had achieved something others needed. Maybe it wasn’t inner-peace, but it was something else, and the lawlessness I had wasn’t outer, it was inner. It was an inner belief that my skin was impermeable to ego, to pride, to being at fault for using the applause of people to prop me up because I was afraid I didn’t have what it took to stand on my own two feet.

At the risk of sounding like I’ve found inner peace (I haven’t), I’m not there anymore. On my good days I refuse to use either the applause of people or their disappointment in or about me to give meaning and shape to my life and work.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not still learning how to make friends again. I am. It’s hard work. Some of the hardest work I’ve ever done in my life, I mean that.

I see blaring red lights atop the heads of almost everyone I meet or know, warning signs telling me to keep away. My therapist and dearest friends are helping me to see that sometimes those red lights are true, my intuition, gut, or the spirit, giving me permission to not engage. But other times, those red lights are actually yellow on closer inspection and possibly trending toward green, but, as my older, wiser writer friend yesterday said, “Go slow. It’s okay to go slow.”

Recently I opened my phone and saw that my most recent four text threads were from Season, Kelly, Jess, and Sarah, four former roommates spread through my single days. Two weeks ago, Steve (we’ve been friends since college) texted and then we talked for almost two hours. Yesterday, I opened a paper letter from Soley and her words made me cry. In two days my oldest friend Bean gets here for the weekend. Last week, after a pretty emotional doctor’s appointment, I called my friend Lauren while I drove home and she let me cry and ramble all over the place. The next night, Caroline, our neighbor who isn’t our neighbor anymore, came over and swung on our hammock swings with me for two hours.

With them, I feel like myself. Which is, I think, what a true friend should make us feel like. They don’t think of me as Lore the writer, most of them probably don’t even read most of what I write. They just think of me as Lo, their friend.

It is strange, isn’t it, how the presence of a true friend can help us come back to ourselves? How their work is not to enforce an idea of how small we are or how big we are, how puny or important, how giant or minuscule we might be perceived as, but just exactly how human-sized we are?

The more I’ve extricated myself from friendships where clout and capitalism reign, where there are tacit agreements being made about what we owe one another (loyalty, expertise, endorsements, availability, mentoring), where one of us is up here or down there and the other is always trying to claw our way to the other instead of just letting the other be where they are without that needed to say anything at all about us, well, the more I’ve extricated myself from that, the more whole I feel, the more integrated, connected, and true I am.

And the better friend I can be to my truest friends.

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(I write more about friendship in this little book, The Understory.)

~ Everyone is fighting social atrophy (don’t miss the animation she links to)
~ For some levity about friendships
~ Consider this a fix for friendships? Or at least friendship with yourself.
~ An interview with Margaret Renkl
~ What is scrupulosity from

Drew Brown

~ On the sandwich generation from

Sara Billups

~ Don’t miss this one on binary thinking after fundamentalism from

Katelyn Beaty

and

Tia Levings

~ You don’t have to make every moment count
~ Alternatively, tasks that repair the soul
~ Inside the world of The Great British Bake Off
~ A Man’s guide to Menopause
~ Everything I know about self-publishing (Kevin Kelly)
~ Do podcasts sell books? (spoiler: they don’t)
~ The mortifying ordeal of being published (can confirm)
~ Explaining publishing to non-writer friends (is hilarious)¹
~ Shrinking Women from

Elizabeth Oldfield

~ Alternatively, I Started a GLP-1 and I'm Ready to Talk About It

What a dreamy apartment!

I love, love, love this enclave idea.

Cannot wait for this movie. Have to wait anyway.

Nate and I finished the season last night. Gorgeous. Just gorgeous.

~ One of my favorite reads from the summer, from Maggie Shipstead.
~

Sara Billups

newest book releases in a few months! Nervous Systems.
~ The ending of this one was perfectly on spot. I loved it.
~ No spoilers but what is it with grief and zoomorphism these days?

1. Stop asking your writer friends “How is your book is doing?” That’s code for “Are you selling a lot of books?” which is akin to us asking you “What is your annual salary?”