Invariables

Where does friendship fit?

Hi, friend!

Spring Cleaning is a free newsletter delivered straight to you (or the Substack app) where I share personal essays and reflections on growing up, making meaning, and discovering who I am as an adult. I hope that it brings joy and mini moments of reflection to your day. If my writing resonates with you, please share it with your loved ones! 💌

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I hope you’re having a great week. And happy Friday! I just listened to this episode from The Ezra Klein Show on relationships. He chats with Rhaina Cohen, author of the new book The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life With Friendship at the Center which I am now dying to read!! This episode touched on so many things that I’ve found myself thinking about over the last few weeks and I highly recommend listening. Maybe it’s because we’re in the early part of the year and my New Year’s intentions are still fresh in my mind, but I’ve been reflecting on my relationships and the role they play in my life.

Klein and Cohen discuss how friendship is typically thought of as peripheral to our romantic or familiar relationships and ask, what would life look like with friendship as an ‘invariable’? Something at the center of your life; something you work around; something “infungible.” Their conversation really hit home for me because it gave language to emotions that I’ve felt but haven’t been able to name. My relationships and the way I think about friendship have changed over the last four years. My close circle of friends has become much smaller, which I learned is normal based on research discussed in the the episode (phew!). Most days, this is something that I’m ok with, but I sometimes find myself nostalgic for my college years and early 20s when I was part of various big friend groups. I’ve had to let go of previously close friendships that weren’t working - most of these have been unspoken gradual drifts… while some have been messier ruptures. Some of the biggest heartbreaks of my life have been friendship breakups. The texture of some of my closest friendships has also changed as we’ve gone through different seasons of life. Work friends become best friends, close friends move cities and you drift, romantic relationships come and go, in-the-weeds best friends become more distant, and you reconnect with old friends in a new chapter like no time has passed. Not sure why I’m writing about this from the ‘you’ perspective, because these are all things I’ve experienced personally (amongst others) and I know there will be more shifts in the future… but I think everyone experiences these relational changes to some degree. Accepting the ever-changing nature of relationships can be hard for me! I just want to keep everyone close :’) Side note, I was on the phone with my mom this week and she recounted how I was extremely (overly?) affectionate as a little girl. Apparently, some of my friends didn’t like how much I hugged them (lol). While I’m not a crazy hugger anymore, I still am bursting with love for my friends.

Not much has changed!

Many of you probably know that I grew up in a tight-knit community of my parents’ best friends. Some of them are even subscribed to this newsletter - hi, Cinque Familia!! Without blood relatives in the Bay Area, this group became our family. Besides the big things - special birthday rituals, holidays, and semiannual trips to Calistoga - the Cinque Familia was around for so many small moments in between: babysitting co-op, drives to school and chorus, and Valentine card making. In elementary school three of the families, including mine, moved to the suburbs and were lucky enough to live within a 15-minute walk of each other. I think this was on purpose :) All of the “kids” - I still think of us as kids even though we’re 27+ - are some of my dearest friends. Maybe one day I’ll even publicize our infamous Gatorade commercial.

Growing up, I didn’t realize how lucky I was to be raised in community like this. But I’ve talked to several close people in my life who told me that their parents didn’t have close friends that lived nearby when they were growing up… or many close friends at all. While I don’t want to replicate every aspect of my childhood (sorry, mom & dad!!), friends-turned-family is something that I’m striving for. I want to have my closest friends as invariables in my life. That said, there are only so many things that can be centered in life and it’s already hard to prioritize personal obligations, romantic relationships, work, family, leisure, etc. Much of the discourse I hear around friendship is that it’s supposed to be easy and fun, because life is hard enough. So many of the ‘asks’ even in my closest friendships end with “…but no worries if not!!!” something I rarely (ok, never) say to my partner or family. Of course, I don’t want my friends to feel like they’re obligated to do something for me, but as my mom would always tell me as a kid “sometimes you need to do things you really don’t want to do for the people you love.” And for me, that includes my closest friends, as well as my family and partner.

As you may know, Jake and I were going to move Los Angeles at the end of April. For a few different reasons, that move has been postponed (maybe I’ll talk about this in a future Substack?), but one of the hardest things about a future move is that I have a handful of best friends living in New York. While moving to a new place is scary, I’ve done it 3x in the last decade, and know that I’m perfectly capable of making new friends wherever I am! I actually love getting to know people and building new relationships. I just felt really damn sad about purposefully moving across the country from some of the closest people in my life. And while my NY relationships weren’t the primary driver of our decision to stay here for another year, they were a factor that weighed heavily on my decision-making. My small community here feels like family, and I’m glad that I don’t have to give that up yet. I still have no idea where I’ll be living in the next few years… but for now, it’s BROOKLYN BABY!!

I hope that this didn’t sound like a sermon on friendship, because I very much do not have it all figured out. I’m not the perfect friend - even though I wish I was - and I’ve made lots of mistakes in my lifetime of friendship. This is just something that I’m actively wrestling with when thinking about the life I want to build for myself. If you made it this far, my hope is that this made you reflect a little bit on your relationships as well :)

I’m so curious about how you view friendship and its place in your life. If you’re up for it, please let me know your perspective in the comments!! When you really think about it, how centered is friendship in your world?

If you want to join me this week, here’s what I’m watching, listening to, and reading!

I finished The Covenant of Water this week and absolutely loved it. While it was long, the depth and quality of the story was so worth it to me. I now want to take a trip to South India!! I just started reading Never Whistle at Night and Braiding Sweetgrass on Audible. I listened to this Huberman Lab episode on Oral Health and its Critical Role in Brain & Body Healthy and highly recommend. It was fascinating and gave immediately actionable tools that we can all implement today to improve our health. Also, the episode on relationships from The Ezra Klein Show (duh). Watching Griselda on Netflix and am so impressed by Sofia Vergara’s acting and the insane physical transformation that happened for this role.

Anything else I should be watching, reading, and listening to? Drop your recs in the comments, please!

Things sparking joy this week

🍵 Matcha lattes - I am a coffee devotee. Jake wakes up before me in morning, brews coffee in the Chemex (angel), and even though this happens every day I still get so damn excited for my first sip. With whole milk, of course! When I first moved to NYC I tried a matcha latte from this trendy shop in SoHo and it was comically bad; I’ve been scarred ever since. Earlier this week I had a sudden impulse to try matcha again, and I took myself on a date to Kettl Tea in Greenpoint. I got a hot matcha latte and it was fantastic! Earthy, savory, and not too grassy. I’m a huge fan and have actively stopped myself from returning every day because they’re $8 lol. Do any of you like matcha?! What do I need to try? This is a whole new beverage world and I’m excited to explore.

👩‍🍳Cooking - There are few things I like more than a relaxed night at home cooking a new recipe, drinking orange wine, and listening this Otis Redding playlist on Spotify. We made this recipe for Valentine’s Day and it was insanely good! If you make it, you must add green curry paste and thank me later.

Nectar of the Gods

🏠Knowing my neighbors - When I lived in Manhattan, I never knew my neighbors (even in the units on my floor!) and it always felt strange to me. I’ve become friends with an older Polish man who lives in the building next door and seeing his face around the neighborhood makes me feel at home. He’s always chain smoking and I’m not even sure if he knows my name lol. We’ve had the best conversations about the changing neighborhood (he’s lived in Greenpoint since the late 70s) and his life before retirement when he worked at a meat processing plant. We both have a strong love for Birkenstocks & a good discount, and he thinks its hilarious how much I walk around for fun.

🍋Cait’s Key Lime Pie - The best KLP in the game. If you’re in NYC please do yourself a favor and try this.

Tangy, sweet, tart, whipped HEAVEN

📱Unplanned FaceTimes with long-distance friends.

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Thank you for reading and being here. Only 32 more days still spring!! 🌸 x