(source thread) when i was a teenager I had an older friend who was a dick to me all the time I would write these long, rambly facebook status essays etc, and he would summarize them in a rather scathing and insulting way- “so in other words / you’re saying, just A B C?”

back then I was like, god, yea, fuck, you’re so smart, i’m so stupid, you took a few words to say what i took so long to say but now I look back and I realize, it is ALWAYS easier to summarize something backwards than to write it forwards, and this doesn’t invalidate the essay

and yknow, part of the confusion, part of why i tolerated him for so long, was that he *actually read* my essays. so even as he was abusing me in my replies, I saw it as some kind of tough love, like he must really care about me to read everything so closely

and looking back I see that it was complicated. a multi-part framework makes it easier to process. I think a part of him did genuinely care about a part of me. and those two parts were great friends. but a part of him was also a vicious, vindictive asshole

and I have enough context to have some idea of where that came from. he was himself bullied and abused as a kid, for reasons that had nothing to do with him personally. and there’s a part of me that really feels for that part of him, and wanted (and still wants!) to protect him

until I was maybe 22, nobody else had ever seen or known me as intimately as he had. it’s helped me tremendously to have sought out new and different people to confide in, learn about, relate to. it took me a long time to learn that love doesn’t have to be vicious

and, yknow. it’s not like I could point to my family and say, “see, love is supposed to be patient, kind, gentle…” lol. I knew it from books and movies and music, but I didn’t know it firsthand until I was about 23. I learned it largely from my colleagues. is that weird? lol

my wife always knew. we were bf/gf then. when we were ~18, she told me some soft version of “your friends are terrible” and at the time I was like, ah, this is a typical case of a jealous gf trying to tear a guy from his mates. nope. she is tremendously prescient re: these things

here again I find myself thinking that a multi-part framework would’ve made things much clearer and less contentious. people don’t have to be either terrible or amazing, they can be both

i don’t think my friend hated me or wanted me to suffer or feel pain or anything like that. even the “worst” part of him, I think, wasn’t trying to be abusive, but was trying to assert his own dominance. it was his insecurity that brought us together, and it also disfigured us

he was also simultaneously *the* most encouraging, supportive person in the group, and the most socially skilled. I mean, he was significantly older than everyone else, so. yea. at the time we all thought it was super cool/flattering that he hung out with us

but now that I’m older than he was when we first met, it’s like. wait a minute. why was he hanging out with teenagers, lol. couldn’t he find friends his own age? like, I have some younger mutuals on here – i have pretty clear boundaries with them, & I am v careful not to overstep

anyway. we’ve since mostly drifted apart and I think that’s for the best for both of us. I still feel a deep bond of kinship with him, that’s something that doesn’t change. at a glance I think he’s doing better than he used to, and I imagine he’d say the same about me

I actually had multiple friends who used to be vicious with me about my writing, lol. This is a different guy!! I think a big part of why we tolerated each other’s cruelty was that we each were also cruel to ourselves internally and we related to each other on that front

my social options when I was 16 seemed to be either to hang out with boring prestige-seekers or tortured artists with a full spectrum of undiagnosed issues. seriously ~14 years later it seems that *every* single one of us has a “surprise” – adhd, bpd, ocd, my old crew got it all

so like understanding this stuff was never a mere academic curiosity for me, I needed to know the truth, I needed to know what worked, so that I could learn to be loved by the people I wanted to be loved by, which is the people who were fucked up just like me

like yea y’kno it turns out there are people who do radiate genuine warmth & sunshine from their being, and if you hang out around them, it does rub off on you, and that’s fantastic, actually! it can be lifesaving! I’d say it saved mine! but few ppl talk about that last part

and here if this stuff doesn’t make sense I think I can use Frodo, Gollum and Sam as a proxy for thinking about it everyone agrees that Sam is a great friend, right? “I can’t carry it for you mr frodo but I can carry you!” wow, what a saint, beatific sunshine of a friend

sure, yes, and: consider about how sam feels about gollum. Sam does not see gollum as redeemable. he sees him as a cursed, pathetic wretch. we know as the audience that gollum is internally conflicted, and that frodo is enduring the ring’s corruption too:

< Sam and Frodo have very different POVs on Gollum. Sam believes Frodo is Good and Gollum is Bad and that’s all there is to the world. Frodo on the other hand can feel the Ring corrupting him, and sees Gollum as someone who was Once Good who has been corrupted — and he wants, he needs to believe that Gollum can be redeemed — because then maybe he too can be redeemed. Redemption cannot erase the past. It doesn’t undo the damage you’ve done. All you can do is own up to what you’ve done, genuinely make amends, do better, “go forth and sin no more”. This is a process that can take years. The people who know may never forgive you. That’s how it is. >

Sam’s disdain for Gollum is something that hurts Frodo, because Frodo knows that there is a Gollum of his own inside his own heart. I don’t think Frodo can find lasting peace and happiness just by trying to be like Sam. He has to face and love his own inner Gollum.

Although, here I would want to say something to Frodo, which is:

Just because you can feel the corruption of the ring, does not mean that you need to identify with every single person who has also been corrupted by it. Gollum’s torment does not prophesize your own.

It is not Frodo’s job to save Gollum.

The tender paradox is always… that insisting on that heroic rescue would perpetuate that problem, because it reemphasizes the frame that gollum is wretched, unbearable, and in some sense must be destroyed.

So how do you walk the path here? I think there’s a common impulse here to ask, “ok so what’s the remedy, what do I change, what do I fix”– and in here too still there is a neediness for things to be better. the challenge is really to accept things as they are. Sounds weird, I know. But we can’t fix our friends. we can’t fix our family. we can’t fix our children. they are not our property to fix. We can only be present with them. few people have spent much time ever being truly present. it’s rejuvenating, transformative.

it is precisely the impulse to fix things, that anxiety about things being broken, and brokenness being bad, that makes everything worse. the galaxy brain frame shifts are like, 1, brokenness is ok, and 2, nothing is broken actually

and this might sound like parlor game sophistry in text, but you can feel it in music. in music, the flinching from mistakes is what makes a mistake a Mistake. otherwise its just happy accidents that you can integrate into your play.