#7: It's your friends who break your heart.
Wedding Pinterest boards, setting up your kids, and the Instagram soft launch.
pov: you’re watching your children fall in love. listen while reading for best experience.
On the imaginary children
E: I can easily see Kelly having a son. They would go to museums together on rainy days, and she would hand off her dog-eared, underlined copy of The Goldfinch—a most prized possession—when she feels like he’s ready. She would do the same with a daughter, I’m sure of it, but I fear the danger that comes with this level of closeness, showing its teeth every time her daughter falls for the wrong boy or stares in the mirror for too long. A boy would be more distant, inheriting the mother’s love for beautiful things and beautiful words but not the burden of being, well, a girl.
Truthfully, history has not been kind to women writers. I often think back to when Anne Sexton said, “Be your own woman... Talk to my poems, and talk to your heart—I’m in both,” when Adrienne Rich said, “Poetry was where I lived as no one’s mother, where I existed as myself,” when Virginia Woolf said, “We think back through our mothers if we are women,” when Amy Tan said, “Then you must teach my daughter this same lesson. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to laugh forever.” We admire their writing, but words couldn’t save them from drowning at sea, losing their breath at poisoned gas, and passing along a thousand sadnesses to their daughters. Most of the time, I think about how hard it is for women to think for themselves while caring for, and being expected to care for, another human being, how it is even harder for their daughters to exist in this space—of feeling like you’re tearing your mother away from her life and wanting to close the gap but never fully being able to.
I’ve written before about the ghosts of my mom’s past and how much I hate it when she sends me those horrific news articles of girls getting kidnapped, assaulted, and sold to unspeakable places where unspeakable things are done to them. She tells me I should stay home, make sure the door is locked and the stove is off, and call her when I’m not busy. When I don’t, and it gets bad, I wonder if everyone would have been more at peace if I was a boy (I almost would have been, if the gods had listened to my grandparents’ prayers and my dad’s prophesied name).
In 8th grade, I Pinned my first “I do” photos in the back of the school library, where I would skip class and sneak into as if it was contraband. And in high school, I helped my best friend pick out a vintage blue-sapphire diamond ring with her then-boyfriend (of course, they broke up a few months into college). Somewhere between then and now, I realized the dissonance between the love and the babies I dreamed about growing up and the one I am now scared for. When I bring the two closer together, I will be ready. (Definitely not reliving that 7 am trip to CVS ever again.)
Last weekend, my mom came to visit me in Austin. She posted about it on WeChat afterward, sweetly captioning it: “beautiful day in Austin, date with the girls❣️.” And I can easily see Kelly and myself doing that one day, too, with each other, our Audrey / James / Oliver / Evie, or the best friends from our dinner parties. By then, with whom, it wouldn’t matter.
K: Cam and I are chronically future-oriented people, and also exactly who we once used to make fun of, rolling our eyes in the sixth-grade cafeteria to disguise our envy and shame: mushy-gushy, bona fide girly-girls. We curate scattered Pinterest boards for our future weddings, Notes app entries full of baby names, and Zillow listings of astronomically priced vintage New York apartments. For me, there’s a weird dissonance that comes with being gay and not interested in having kids, yet unable (unwilling?) to shake off what feels like a deeply primal, deeply feminine urge to stockpile domestic artifacts of the future.
I care very much what color the kitchen cabinets are painted, whether we pick the city brownstone or rural farmhouse, whether Cam and I will live close enough to one another to take turns babysitting or if we’ll have to resort to organizing family trips every summer, where we might push our kids together out to sea in boats and purposely hang back on family beach walks to watch them bump shoulders in the distance ahead. The silliest hypothetical that we’ve talked about is the one where we laugh on the villa porch after a long day, gossip over a glass of something sparkling, and place bets on whether this will finally be the summer our children fall in love and we become in-laws—that is, a proper family at last.
This was the kind of stuff Jenny Han (The Summer I Turned Pretty, anyone?) and Taylor Swift (see: this iconic 2012 fan MV for “Mary’s Song (Oh My My My)”) taught me to want. Before I knew if I even wanted to get married, I knew I wanted an empire waistline dress and a pavé diamond band. Before I knew if I even wanted kids, I knew I’d name the baby Audrey if it were a girl and James if it were a boy. Does that make me a victim of patriarchy? I don’t think so. Of white-picket-fence WASP Americana, maybe, and of what I witnessed in my white friends’ backyards: dads in wrap-around sunglasses chumming it up over a Fourth of July grill, or moms bringing out the Kool-Aid pitcher, ruffling their sons’ hair to whines and groans and leaning up against the door to catch up with women whose children they had helped to name in the delivery room, women they could pull out an ’87 photo album and point to grainy portraits of, exclaiming, “Wasn’t your mother so pretty back then?”
At some point, the desire for family and motherhood cleanly detaches itself from any anchor of reality and instead becomes a sort of suspended abstraction, a pleasant gap filler for what is otherwise a landmark-less future in the lives of modern women. At 20 and 21, Cam and I are old enough now to call ourselves women, I guess. Friends of friends are trying to get pregnant (on purpose!) and older sisters are getting engaged. Suddenly, we’re contending with the uncomfortable fact that our Pinterest boards may hold a little more weight now. Our first dates could mean something, lead somewhere. (Probably not, but you know...) Then it’s like. Do we actually want to settle down? Do we actually want babies, or are we still just playing at adulthood, pantomiming our mothers the way we did at 10 years old?
I worry, obviously. I worry that I’ll be smothered by a partner, and I also worry I’ll die alone having never learned to love someone properly. I worry if having a child, and obtaining the tremendous label of “mother,” will swallow up every other identity I bear. Even worse, I worry I’ll break that child’s heart. Reveal to them through the orange slit of a bathroom door at midnight that I am a bad person. A weak person. Fail them. I’m not ready. I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready.
But I’m also realizing that there are a lot of people I already love properly. I grew up in an incomplete family, never thinking it would be possible to accumulate such a vibrant and diverse array of friends that I’d grow to care for and want to stay close to throughout the years. I find myself genuinely excited for our futures in a way that is borderline creepy, were they to find out how much I lean on those visions when the going gets tough—I now know that I will, unfortunately, be the sort of woman who cries silently when the dreadful organ music starts up and the flower girls float down.
I will be the woman who leans over at the reception to tell you, a little drunkenly, that we will all someday love people, lose people, marry or divorce, adopt or conceive or fail to conceive, separate or love again. I will tell you that the only way any of us get to feeling ready, and worthy, for what’s to come is by knowing we do it together, side by side.
What we’re listening to
K: I’ve been on a queer Black music streak—the Spotify radio algorithm for BAYLI’s stories from new york EP has just been delivering jam after jam. Lots of Tiger Goods and Dreamer Isioma. These folx are genre-defying and either so ethereal-sounding or rocking a flow so sick, that I feel such a profound sense of sexuality affirmation when I listen to them.
When it comes to gay-girl music, I’ve noticed there’s a lot in the indie-pop realm that bumps to, like, repressed yearning vibes. Which I appreciate, but maybe not as much as I’m supposed to. Honestly, I prefer queer music that makes loving a girl feel less like an angst extravaganza and more like something you’d make out to in the hallway of a house party. I love how naturally and sensually queerness is integrated into BAYLI’s “sushi for breakfast” (check the massive titular innuendo lol) or how playful and irreverent something like Tiger Goods’ “Mean Girls” sounds. Maybe I just need to get laid.
E: I’ve been listening to Liz Tran’s Reset podcast and girl in red’s if i could make it go quiet album. Liz for when I’m walking to the gym and the sun’s out and I’m getting my life together. girl in red for when I’m not (aka walking home at ungodly times and losing my keys and getting kicked out of cafes after hour 7). Ebb and flow.
What we’re reading
K: Close to hitting the halfway mark of Deep Secrets: Boys' Friendships and the Crisis of Connection by Niobe Way, which I picked up for research purposes and then ended up loving. I’ve been trying to learn more about the constructs of masculinity and to identify it on a conceptual blueprint of gender as something other than “not femininity” or “the anti-feminine.” Obviously, these two are deeply intertwined, but it also feels presumptuous to suggest there are so few areas of overlap between genders that we should not attempt to academically extricate them, see where one ends and the other begins. It’s also no question that, for example, the desires, perceptions, behaviors, and beliefs of young girls are shaped by the boys and men they engage with—but we also acknowledge that other girls and women play an equally, if not more, important role in their developmental and psychological health. By contrast, we don’t talk much at all about how grossly misrepresented boys’ desires are in popular culture.
We ubiquitously accuse boys of only having one thing 🥵 😮💨 on their minds the moment they hit puberty, but research shows this isn’t true. In fact, boys between the ages of 14 to 17 consistently place discussion of girlfriends, crushes, and sex on a secondary tier of importance. At the top, instead, are their intimate friendships with other boys and their anxieties about whom they can “trust” with their “secrets,” usually pertaining to their family. I won’t regurgitate the book here, but I would genuinely recommend anyone of any gender identity to give it a read. There are also inclusions of interview transcriptions that, I feel, contextualize the hearts and minds of boys with such poignancy as I’ve rarely seen it done before.
E: Since we last spoke, I have started more books than I’ve finished (which is 0). So, I thought I’d just talk about some articles that I did finish (and like).
“It’s your friends who break your heart.” The article talks a lot about midlife friendships and the difficulty of losing them to career, family, etc. I’m not in my midlife era, and I was afraid it would make me sad, but it was a really good read.
Two things it made me think of:
I remember when my dad took me to play tennis over the holidays and we kept bumping into this group of Chinese dads who unabashedly took over both of the tennis courts. It turns out they have a standing reservation at our local tennis court every Tuesday from 8-10 PM—without fail. Inconsiderate, sure, but there’s something endearing about their commitment to meet up every week and invite my dad to their WeChat tennis group even after my dad got noticeably annoyed at them.
“All deep friendships generate something outside of themselves, some special and totally other third thing. Whether that thing can be sustained over time becomes the question.” (MBF is an extension of Kelly and I’s friendship, obviously.)
“Classic Instagram poses to confuse people about whether you’re dating someone.” Like, it’s been two years since Kelly and I lived together, but everyone thinks we are roommates. Also, one of the best parts about being single is soft launching random people (K: Including me lol).
What we’re watching
K: Kate and Anthony tiktoks against my will!!!!!!! So, to be clear, I’m really happy to see the Sharma sisters presented so elegantly and graciously in this second season of Bridgerton. (The writing in general is still not great, but within the parameters of the show, and considering the full creative scope of the character designs, I am genuinely celebrating!) But Anthony! Wow! Insufferable. I have only watched an episode or two of the first season, so maybe I’m working off an incomplete picture here, but what I’m seeing so far in S2 is not changing my mind. This man is growling on my FYP, I’m not claiming himmm help 😭
E: I know I promised a Gossip Girl analysis, but alas, it’s 3 a.m. on the Sunday of this newsletter, and I’m tired. I did binge-watch all of Euphoria last weekend though!!! Season 2 was a shitshow, but Hunter and Dominic’s Oscar photos made it worth it (almost… still can’t get over Fez/Ash and Lexi’s whole Dan-Humphrey-esque play).
How we’re living
K: Don’t want to glamorize hustle culture, so this is not that, but wow. I am tired. All the time. I try to keep some semblance of balance in my day-to-day life, but when I get too caught up in work, school, or a project (and I am juggling all three and more right now! aaaaaahhhh), my life has a way of really spiraling. Yesterday, I came out of what felt like a fugue state to an empty fridge, a bedroom floor full of clothes, two pairs of missing sunglasses, body aches, and puffy eyes. I spent the better part of my Saturday restocking and recovering, but I hate that I drive myself to this point in the first place, where I need to “recover” at all. I am so over wearing these signs of clear mess and fatigue as badges of accomplishment.
This overwhelming anxiety I’m wrestling with is only partially related to my GPA or summer internships (yes, plural; no, don’t ask ⚰️ ). I think what I’m really freaking out about, and what’s causing me to go a little crazy, is the possibility of earning this newfound autonomy and control over my life, and then promptly driving it all into the ground: My budget. My relationships. The opportunities I do and don’t accept. And, most daunting of all, my writing—something I’ve avoided calling my “life’s work” for 12 years (becausethatisscaryohmygod) but who are we kidding. I only care about, like, three things in this life: Good books, good taste, and writing.
E: This is me with a Kinship milk tea at a work event! Barely surviving after a 2-day-straight stint of writing everything from law papers to Texas Global essays 😭 I love writing, but it kills me every time. Is there a word for dreading the thing you love the most? Or is it the opposite...
Our brilliant friend
Congrats to our driver-mentor-grandfather-editor-best-friend Jade for his upcoming workshop series (👁) and hitting a newsletter milestone! We hope you and lady Jade have the best time in London. 💕
Yes, this one is very very good. K, I think you might like pop culture detectives video essays if you haven’t seen them. They have very thoroughly crafted essays examining the long history of film and tv depictions with topics like “Boys don’t cry, except when they do,” and “Sexual assault of men played for laughs.” The book you mentioned made think of them.
C, really excited to check out that article. I can’t tell y’all how often I hear about people wanting a better basis for understanding “friend-breakups” or those otherwise deteriorated bonds.
But yeah, y’all’s best one yet! Great stuff!