friendship personas

and endings

of all the websites i’ve ever created, my three favorite ones cannot be shared (in no particular order: a personality test, a rhythm game letter, a walking map of sf). they all came about as birthday presents for close friends and contain too much personal information to ever distribute widely. it is probably not a coincidence that my best work seems to emerge only when i have left myself behind, when i am wholly fixated on another person. there are few other avenues towards the purity of heart that good work demands

the last few years have been dominated by a series of intense friendships. each one completely transformed how i saw the world and then ended shortly afterwards. it feels strange to recognize that i owe much of my current life to people i no longer interact much with, and vice versa. i used to be quite possessive about this sort of thing, like, hey, you only work in your field of study / have your current friend group / developed certain skills because i introduced you to them, you should be more grateful and text me more often!

that was back when i had an expectation of lifelong friendship with everyone i ever became close to. nowadays i expect that interactions are typically short-lived and i will probably not directly benefit from most of the changes i induce in other people. that’s a little disappointing? but it also becomes easier to give freely and truly wish the best for friends because i no longer need to worry about my personal preferences for how they should be. we are all just passing people along to their eventual destinations

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i like rules and predictability. i enjoy reading sheet music and have a hard time making music via improv or chords alone. i feel much more comfortable in finite games than infinite ones. when i did math contests my favorite subjects were geometry and number theory, because circles and integers are governed by so much hidden structure. my brain cannot help formulating laws even when the occasion is totally inappropriate - i’ll develop very detailed models of how my friends behave, and they’ll be quite accurate, but inevitably my friends will eventually do something that goes against the model and i’ll think hey, you weren’t supposed to do that! and they’ll shrug well, nobody said i had to follow your models, which is true of course. i can appear spontaneous at times, meandering through random parks and stores during a walk, but only in the context of a larger plan (i had already planned to go on a walk in an interesting area with extra time to spare)

this is perhaps my single least favorite thing about myself. my life is always collapsing towards fixed routines and death. i wish i were built differently, more fluid and adaptive, a waterbender, funnier and faster on my feet, better at yes-and’ing, a visual artist instead of a writer perhaps, properly able to harness the chaos of the universe. i hope that funemployment and trying improv and learning to draw and liberating myself from my fears will help, but i do not know how far those interventions will take me

the only truly successful intervention i’ve found is friendship. i like people who are similar enough that conversations and hangouts can flow effortlessly, but different enough that i can’t predict ahead of time how any of our interactions will go. many of my close friends are people i was drawn to because they were sources for a kind of uncertainty and entropy i needed but could not manufacture myself. and it is only through these friends that i learned to internalize concepts such as: openness, safety, generating instead of discriminating, being less serious and less self-critical, not putting myself in a box with respect to research and writing

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so i am not exaggerating when i say i owe my life to my friends. then why is it that, more often than not, these friendships flame out?

the simplest explanation is that i am a volatile person drawn to other volatile people. the enneagram institute notes that relationships between two enneagram 4s tend to oscillate rapidly between extreme highs and lows. of course 4s can learn to be less volatile, especially as they become healthier, but people in my age range usually still have a ways to go

and then of course there are other reasons. perhaps i am attracted to someone for the persona they draw out but eventually tire of that persona or learn to integrate it into myself. perhaps the same qualities - consistency, thoughtfulness, an ability to resist external pressures - that initially made me attractive to someone else now bore that person. should we consider this a tragedy or a success, that one party has outgrown the friendship?

i don’t know the answer to that question. i do know it is simultaneously true that 1) i hold a lot of care for the people who have shaped me 2) life is too short to spend lingering in places where you don’t belong. i am constantly breaking peoples’ hearts and having my heart broken in turn. and that is a much better outcome than never getting to know anyone at all

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(but the truth i learned here is, you had to leave because you’re you. and the reason i liked you is because you’re you. and who you are is someone who leaves)