Spring cleaning my thoughts and musings
Creativity can be exhausting and the lows of midlife friendship
Recently some good friends and I agreed that we aren’t supposed to be that close of friends. The line is something like “Yeah, you guys aren’t everything to me so it’s easy to be friends.” Externally, it works. Why set such a high bar with a friendship to only fall hard when the friendship fails? We’ve also been friends for coming up on 20 years, and I appreciate the candor we can have for all of our competing relationships. We’ve also outgrown some needs for each other. Once overlapping in things like relationship status, proximity of where we lived, and a desire to redefine male Millennial friendships, the competition of other relationships, the movement of cities, and the crutch of text messaging seem to have influenced where we are now. For the talking point about men's friend groups not communicating, this felt like an example of my friend group being ahead of the curve: honest and open. Keep expectations low so it’s easy to navigate when it fizzles or when there’s a gap. Everything becomes easier to let go. Come and go as you please. None of it is that significant anyway.
But internally I was deflated.
It was like hearing a politician’s calculated talking point that it supposed to say so much but says very little about the true state of things. It also felt like the new beginning of a potential future end. As Frank Bruni wrote in the New Yorker a few weeks back about friends that had simply vanished in his life.
Then more time went by. And here J. and I are — or, rather, aren’t. We’re onetime confidants who never had a falling out, never said a proper goodbye, simply evaporated from each other’s lives like dew from a blade of grass.
I’m haunted by how many times, and with how many friends, that has happened. By how the bustle of our lives and the bustle in our heads take people away from us, though we never intended to let them go. By how unintentional, unavoidable and subtly but stubbornly sad that is.
Is it now the norm to keep everyone at a distance? Is reliance on others a relic from older generations? As we grapple with the demands of modern society, are we simply at a point where saying we don’t need a lot from each other becomes easier than saying I need you more than ever?
American individualism feels like a threat to community building when the safest bet we can make is to be cynical about relationships, keep humans at a distance, and have the same level of expectations for friendships as we might have for a sports team you may like: care only when it’s the good times and get a little bandwagon-y when the bad times hit. In Seattle, where I’ve lived for the last 10 years, we candidly refer to it as a city attribute known as “The Seattle Freeze.” I want to thaw the hell out of it for survival.
I recently rewatched an old George Carlin interview with Conan O’Brien, where he talks about his loss of faith in humanity. Posthumously, George Carlin has become a voice of personal freedom, an illuminator of all that is corrupt and nauseating about the human experience. He turned human flaws into comedic gold. There was a time when George Carlin argued that because humans are assholes in groups, especially toward any individual that tries to be different, that groups are bad. He talks about really liking people one-on-one but groups freak him out. On the surface, I vibe with this feeling. Hordes of groupthink can be scary.
But there’s a comedic bit in his narrative where he’s being a bit tongue-in-cheek (I hope) with his obsession around disaster and destruction with humans. I think Carlin is brilliant here in his satire, in that he’s putting a spotlight on our society’s obsession with any form of “if it bleeds it leads.” That obsession, in his eyes, manifests into larger and more destructive human activities, like war and government policy. Yet as I watched, I saw a person hurt by not being able to connect with people, or simply seeing too much of the bad in groups rather than the good they can create. I love a George Carlin rant but I can’t imagine how dark his turmoil was if he thought all of this wonder around us was just a dark cloud hovering over evil lifeforms.
When I think about some of my modern friendships, I wonder if there’s too much cynicism in our understanding of reliance and support. Have we just given up? Is it too hard to keep people close? Is it too painful to experience the ups and downs of friendships, especially in a world where it’s hard enough to manage our day-to-day lives?
Maybe I’m alone in this, but I want more immersive and connected relationships. I want people to show up unexpectedly at my house. I want people to understand I have kids and that they are part of the friendship. I want to share vulnerabilities without them being held over my head six months later. At a time when concepts like having a “third place” are vanishing from our rhythm of life, it seems most pertinent to discuss how we supercharge coming together more than pulling apart. Maybe we’re all beyond that, but I reminisce about memories where inviting yourself over to dinner wasn’t frowned upon, but expected.
It’s been over a year since I got laid off, bought my Fujifilm X-T5, and started finding my rhythm again with photography. It’s been such a vibrant year of creativity, but also a tiring one. I’ve gone through jubilation for making photographs and pits of struggle through learning. It’s been less about making photos I like (I think I capture what I want) but the reality that there isn’t much of a demand for what I’m creating. I haven’t found the community of photographers I thought I’d find. I haven’t found a forum for discussion or critique. Now, I struggle to even find time to reflect on what I’ve captured.
While every major artist and creative says “don’t care about what others like or don’t like”, I do. I have to. I find it riveting when people engage in the “why” of my stuff. I’m sure bakers or cooks do, too. They aren’t there to show off technique; they want to stir someone else’s soul, even for a moment, with flavor and love of making. I hope my photography is headed toward it, but I feel like I’m a long way away.
Yet, I feel so grateful to have found that thing that makes me obsess about this life, this idea of purpose, something to share with my family and friends, while including them in the journey. I’m no longer searching for purpose, but simply living it through this medium and what it helps me remember. I hope it continues.
I wouldn’t call myself a Beyonce fan, but I was in the car two days ago when KEXP played a “Blackbird” cover. A classic Beatles song inspired by the civil rights movement in the US. It’s a lovely and simple song with moving imagery and symbolism.
I love discovering new music while in the car. It reminds me of my youth and Sepulveda Pass bottlenecks and 405 traffic jams in Los Angeles, KCRW and Garth Trinidad, rolling down the windows and boppin’. That may not seem like something you remember fondly, but it’s a familiarity I treasure. If you haven’t heard Beyonce’s cover of this popular Beatles song, check it out.
Happy Sunday.
Damn homie, how can I get this Substack-level of vulnerability from you on the phone!? I don’t mean every conversation, but like one out of ten?
I like how community and attention weave both sections of this week’s newsletter.
You tell me if I’m wrong, but I think I’m the guy who invites himself over to your place for dinner … and that I show up with a bag of groceries, help cook, and play with the kids. My god, how I would love for one of my parent-friends to show up unannounced at my place with their kids, maybe order us some takeout, and even leave me with the kids for 30 minutes while they take a walk to get away from it all. I tell my parent-friends this. It’s never happened. Most of my parent-friends have constructed a fortress around their house, and either I intentionally, consistently break into that fortress, or the friendship fizzles. One of my favorite Substack posts ever was from Anne Helen Petersen: “ How to Show Up For Your Friends Without Kids — and How to Show Up For Kids and Their Parents: aka How to Be in a Community.”
https://annehelen.substack.com/p/how-to-show-up-for-your-friends-without
I pick up on a theme of your newsletter that you want people to show up at your house for more immersive friendships and you want people to engage deeply with the “why” of your photography. But what about the mutuality? Whose house are you showing up at? Whose vulnerabilities are you immersed with? Which creators are you engaging with deeply (and reflecting on the why of their work)? As a data point of one, I feel that I give more than I get in our friendship. Maybe you feel the same way. I don’t think it means either of us is objectively right, but it’s subjectively how I feel … which is obviously gonna limit the depth of the friendship as I veer toward other friendships that feel more reciprocal. I have a high degree of loyalty to long-term friendships and I’m down to do the work to deepen ours. We don’t have to “just give up,” as you put it. We can talk about what you’d like more and less of from our friendship, and what I’d like, and little things we can do to get there.
Last thought: I think that there is something beautiful about the midlife search for deep, immersive friendships. Friendship came so naturally in our 20s when we’re sponges soaking up the world. Then came the decade of career, marriage, kids, mortgage, stress. And then at some point in our 40s, we start to feel stable in all those other areas but at the expense of the creativity and friendships we had in our 20s. I’m so down to lean into both. Hit me up.
I feel like a boomer saying this, but I am done trying to find new communities to share my interests with on-line. Maybe I have not recovered yet from the zoom burnout or maybe is the toxic troll environment on social media or maybe is because is hard to keep track of conversation on virtual forums or maybe is all of that. I found my crowd signing-up for in-person workshops from time to time and going to the dark room of an independent artists space once a week.
I really enjoy this newsletter. Your insights on stuff have left me thinking for days many times and there are countless photos of yours I'd love to talked to you about, but to me it is very hard (and weary as a non-native english speaker) to have a meaningful conversation on the comments space.
Anyhow... You have a loyal reader of Visual Disclosures :)