Wading Through It

On small talk, the least-missed COVID casualty

Hi, friends. First of all, thank you. The news of this little letter was met with so much support, praise, and kindness. It’s so nice to have you with me to wonder about the world. Thanks for sticking around.

I’ve been on the East Coast for a month now, and today I am sitting on a train, gazing down the edge of the Northeast. I’m off to see my dearest friend, who is living and making art in Philadelphia for the summer.

So today, I’m thinking about friendship.

Last week, I got to see an old friend that I haven’t seen in over a decade. We were classmates together as kids, inseparable as awkward preteens, and still friends as we stumbled through our teen years. But eventually, time and location pulled us into peaceful but distant acquaintanceship - an all-too-familiar series of events.

A reunion with someone like that is a strange interaction to prepare for. I felt it a few months ago, when I got to see another friend for the first time in years on his visit to Seattle. When so much time has passed, how exactly are two people supposed to “catch up”? Where do you start? Do you sit down, order a drink, and say, “so, what have you done for the last twelve years of your life?”

Historically, yes. In fact, adult friendships seem to be built on a never-ending treadmill of catching up. I’ve always found it exhausting. To be honest, it’s made me dread seeing people I’d otherwise be thrilled to see. It’s a circular kind of backwards-facing small talk. We go over superficial details of the past until it’s time to promise we’ll catch up again soon.

It’s a discouraging cycle, but it also seemed like I was the only one feeling worn-down by it. I kept catching up; it was what was expected.

But in 2020, something happened to us. We closed our doors and windows to the world, sat with our minds, stewed in fear, and slowly re-emerged. And when we did, we were different.

I’ve noticed something beautiful about my generation since then. Far and wide, there seems to be an enormous rejection of small talk culture. Maybe it was the sudden abundance of public mental health discourse on our feeds. Maybe it was social starvation. Maybe it was the unbearable amount of collective anxiety and trauma, and our subsequent need to talk about it with literally anyone.

We don’t “catch up” anymore the way we used to, by skipping stones across the surface of our lives. Instead, we dive in fully to the viscera of our experiences. We talk about the ways the world is affecting us, the profound ways we’ve changed as human beings, the meaning of it all.

The reunion I got to have with my old friend last week was nurturing and rejuvenating because of exactly this phenomenon - in fact, we talked about it quite a bit that day. Our coffee catch-up was heavy and real; I left feeling relieved, grateful, and actually connected to someone I’d been disconnected from for so long.

I’m realizing that this is the only kind of friendship I really want in my life. Yes, there is room in a life for all types of friendships - but in this strange moment in history, while the world presses in from all sides, I’m not sure there’s bandwidth. I want “grabbing a drink” to mean toasting to our perseverance in the gloom of it all, not exchanging weird banter about our jobs. I want “how are you?” to be a question we’re not afraid to look in the face and answer in our truth. Personally, I’m too tired for anything less.

This is just to say, cheers to friends that wade through the weeds with you, messily and often. May we hold them extra close.