Young Hearts Run Free: Friends, the Found Family

In this edition, we're going to deep dive into friendships. I say we, because I have special guest thinker, author Anya K. Jordan along for the ride. But first… a milestone.

Believe it or not, last year on November 16, I published the first edition of Weaver's Deep Thoughts. So today, it's one-year anniversary time! The first edition was called First! Moderating social networks and other deep thoughts and tackled social media content moderation in the wake of Elon Musk buying Twitter on October 27, 2022. Here's a sample from that first newsletter:

I've been a moderator in various places on the internet for social networks off and on for years: a writing forum, Google+ community for Blogger users that blew up, another writing community, Pluspora (a Diaspora instance that welcomed thousands of Google+ users when it closed), another writing community, and other online communities I can't think of now. All that to say, when I talk about moderating content on social networks, I come from a place where I've been in the muck and filth. I've dealt with Nazis, racists, sexists, antisemites, people who glorify mass shooters, videos of the mass shooting in Christchurch, reporting child pornography to authorities who can help the victims, and more. Muck. Filth. If I had to sum up content moderation in one sentence, it would be this: Social networks must have content moderation because without it a network implodes.

Skip forward a year later, and some people and businesses are finally figuring out how awful Elon Musk is as a person and that his approach to content moderation has created a cesspool of antisemitism, racism, transphobia, homophobia, and the like.

But that's enough about people desperately trying to turn a blind eye to grossness for as long as possible. It's been a heck of a year and I'm happy for all the folks who have joined me on the newsletter which was the direct offspring of leaving Twitter in November of last year and starting something new and better.

On Friendship

Let's talk about friends. I often think a lot about friendship in the context of fiction and in real life too. In fiction, friendship is often treated poorly. Or rather, it is weighted a lot lower than romantic relations and biological families. This really became evident to me when The X-Files butchered the relationship between Scully and Mulder in the 1990s. They went from reluctant colleagues to colleagues who respected each other, and then to friends who would go to the ends of the earth for each other — literally. It was so fascinating and real. And then, their relationship turned romantic. That was where it jumped the shark relationship wise. I often think about what might have been had they been allowed to remain friends and never became romantically involved. I could write for days about this subject, and it was the topic of a paper of mine this year regarding the relationship between Shakespeare's Mercutio and Romeo. Spoiler alert (not really): Mercutio's friendship was more important to Romeo than his romance with Juliet, as he threw that away to avenge his friend. But, of course, we all get hung up on romances.

But friends are so important in life. They get us through so much. Arguably, through anything and everything. For many of us, especially those among the LGBTQ community, our friends are our family. As Jess C. Scott writes in her book The Other Side of Life, “friends are the family you choose.” The family we are born with are not always going to understand us or even want to. Sometimes they don't even want us. But friends. Real friends. They want you. And they want to be there for you, especially when biological family is not. To quote a song from Disney's Pete's Dragon:

It's not easy,

To find someone who cares.

It's not easy to find magic in pairs.

…

Now that you have him, hold him,

Treasure him from day-to-day.

It's so easy.

…

It's not easy to share somebody's dream.

It gets easy when you work as a team.

I think I've always viewed friendship with such importance because as a kid I always struggled to be myself in my own home. It was with friends that I could open up with and be myself, free of judgment. That continued into high school as well, as I found even more room to grow into myself around peers and friends. It also helped that I had a couple of teachers who pushed me to be… me. They wanted to see me blossom and taught me some important things along the way. Things that weren't part of the curriculum, as good teachers do.

I remember one time I was in drama class and a couple of girls helped me into a renaissance dress, and then I turned to Ms. Jones who turned to me — she was surprised at first but then smiled, and said, “You look beautiful.” In any other environment, I would have been chewed out, called names, and who knows what else.

I guess, the point I want everyone to take away today is that your friends are really fucking important. Surround yourself with the best ones. The kind that lifts you up, support you through thick and thin. Find your family. And if your actually actual family betrays you, belittles you, or just generally doesn't support you, remember there are plenty of folks waiting in the wings ready to hug you. To call you beautiful as you are.

The following is written by author Anya K. Jordan.

In 2013, I handed in my thesis to my sociology professor. Its title was, roughly translated and shortened: “The Repression of Death in Contemporary Society.” Reading and thinking about death and dying every day for over a year had done something to me, something I couldn't quite put my finger on. I felt numb. I had taught myself to rationalize my own existential fears, to compartmentalize them. I had held my head high because that was what was expected of me.

I started an internship at the local hospice, and later went through a one-year certification to volunteer as a “Trauer- und Sterbebegleiter” – grief and dying companion.

At the end of my first day at the hospice, I professed to a nurse that I was too shy to speak to the patients and their loved ones out of the worry that I might be perceived as an intruder. She took me aside and said: “Act like you're in a movie about someone else's life. Don't try to be the main character, or even a supporting actor. Be an extra. And don't be ashamed of it.”

Following this excellent advice, I learned when to offer assistance and when to blend into the background. I learned to ask if a guest – our more welcoming term for patient – wanted to be left alone, chat, or have company as they sat in silence.

I have a lot of memories of one guest, in particular, Mrs. M. She had a brain tumor and could only communicate in terms of vague “yes” or “no” responses. I remember helping her eat, reading to her, and pushing her wheelchair on walks along the nearby river. I fondly remember going to the weekly market once to get ice cream together, and her gleeful cackle when mine landed on my shoe.

Mrs. M's friends didn't seem to have the same reservations as her daughter who would sit by her mother's side and not know how to interact with her, how to hold a mostly one-sided conversation. Her friends took turns telling stories from their everyday life and updating Mrs. M and each other with the hottest gossip about their shared acquaintances. Maybe it helped that there were two sides to the conversation already, and she could be the quiet third. Maybe this had always been the dynamic between the three. I didn't ask.

In my experience, many of our guests had the desire to talk about their lives, whether it was to tell someone about it or to reiterate it to themselves. I treasure the memories of these conversations. I feel honored that someone trusted me, a stranger, enough to share their life story with me, and I don't mean this in the main-character way – in their lives, I was just an extra, after all. I wasn't special, I wasn't doing anything special, I was just there while they talked.

The common thread I found in these life stories was the fact that they were, indeed, stories, and as such, they were supposed to make narrative sense. The guests who seemed to suffer the most were the ones where it didn't add up. Such as the old lady, who, when her middle-aged daughter left the room for just a minute, blurted out under tears that her daughter had mental health issues and she couldn't die because she needed to “look after her.” The elderly man who never had any visitors and whose son told the nurses “good riddance” when they called to inform him of his father's death.

On the other side of the spectrum, the guests who were able to accept their coming death and leave in a peaceful way tended to be the ones who could look at their life like a story, like a book, where this was now the last chapter, sadly, but looking back, it was a good book. A good, satisfying story, with tension and story arcs, struggles that were resolved, hardships that were overcome, dramatic events and life changes to be lived through, tension, relief, laughter, love, loss, grief, ups and downs. Sometimes: hatred, repentance, and forgiveness.

This kind of story was never about just one person. Often, it was about family, about marriage, divorce, having children, seeing them grow up. But also, about friends gained and lost, and about those who were there from childhood and just stuck around. The supporting cast.

To me, these were revelations. What I saw was not a recipe for happiness, but a framework, a lens to view life through. As a closeted queer person, it gave me the drive to come out, to be curious, to shake off that numbness and welcome the possibility of disappointment and pain. To allow myself to be a main character once in a while, and to see what happens. To gather a supporting cast of friends around me, and to support them in return.

Without this experience, I wouldn't be writing at all. I don't think I'm blowing anyone's minds here: I think all humans are drawn to stories, whether we actively think about it or not, and what is and what isn't a satisfying one is a very personal thing.

Every writer knows how hard it is to write an ending. We try to weave a conclusion for ourselves and for the reader. We are making sense of our lives, in more than one way, because finishing a book, or a short story, or a blog entry, is about ending our own personal arc of struggling to create that meaning. That struggle is never something we go through alone – or at least, it shouldn't be.

Family is what we call the glue that holds the pages of our life stories together, and just because it's the default for most people, it doesn't have to have anything to do with being related by blood.

As for Mrs. M – she died the week after my internship was over. I got a phone call from one of the nurses, in case I wanted to come in and say my goodbyes. She was never able to tell me her story, of course, but I did overhear one of her friends talk about something funny that happened to the three of them as teenagers, and I heard the other make a nasty joke about Mrs. M's ex-husband. Her cackling laughter was all I needed to know.

Music: “Young Hearts Run Free” by Candi Staton

This particular song isn’t about friendship. In fact, it was written by music producer David Crawford after singer Candi Staton confided in him about her abusive marriage. As Staton says, “I was with a pimp and a con man… this guy was telling me that if I ever left him, he’d kill me. The hurt in my voice is real. I was singing my life.” There is beauty in this disco song, as it pours out not like a sad song, but as an anthem to young people everywhere. It seems a fitting anthem for anyone who wants to be free of toxic relationships and who may be looking for their found family. Young hearts be free, indeed.