I have been trying to find inspiration. Lately this has been hard to come by. But I spent a few days in the Bay Area in California and was endowed with a renewed sense of hope. I do not know why I feel at home there--just that I do (maybe there is something about it's affect on me.) I am overcome with feelings of joy and really I have only been there three times in my life. I think at least for the last two I have been seeing people that I really love--people that make me remember what friendship in its simplest and most complex form can look and feel like.
What my trip really made me contemplate was the idea of friendship, and not necessarily in an interpersonal way, but in a cultural and often public form of friendship. What does it mean to perform the identity of friend? Does that look different depending on who you are around or speaking with at the moment? What is my role as a friend when my friend is hurting and in pain? Sick, emotionally, psychologically, physically, spiritually? How does my performance of friendship with certain friends affect my relationships with other friends, with lovers, parents, and or even pets?
How do friendships exist and maintain themselves when they began within a group, but when that group does not look, act, or even feel the same.
"Kathryn, it wasn't just you who lost it all in the fire, we all lost everything," I was recently reminded. In this moment this speech-act released me. I can't explain it but it made me able to let go of some of the personal hurt I had been experiencing because of things that had happened in my past. As much as I have tried to make losing my previous life about me, I am beginning to realize how far this is from the reality of the situation. Maybe it is my current understanding of the theory of affect, but I realize how public my feelings are, how public they have always been. It's not about me, or at least not just about me.
It's about cultures I have been a part of and helped to create. It is about the necessity it took to create them (whether that need was True doesn't matter, it was perceived as necessary). It is about people I have hurt in order to create those cultures to exclude them from participating in these cultures, it is about hurting people within those public cultures. It is about the "bad blood" that runs through those cultures, the blood that hurts to think about yet can never be forgotten.
While those cultures may seem to be more private or hidden (or are attempted to be kept this way,) they are always on display. The bodies that make up these cultures are often fetishized, made into a spectacle, and mostly cannot remain completely hidden. This is an affect of power on cultures, those in power have the ability to make those attempting to remain private, publicized, and publicized in a way that is often demeaning to the culture in question.
I don't want to become super theoretical here, I have to save that for my "scholarly projects," but it is valuable to think of friendship as public, to think of culture as public, and to think of the public feelings that help create and maintain cultures.
And I will continue to contemplate what it means to perform the role of friend. Does this mean listening to someone cry on the phone? Does this mean taking someone to the hospital? Or having an in depth conversation about gender? Does it mean reflexively looking at oneself to see one's flaws because a friend has suggested it? Does it mean letting go of a friend when your time together has ended? Does it mean forgiveness? What does performing "good friend" look like? And what does it mean to not perform adequately and commit to the performance of "bad friend?"
I don't have answers. I never have answers.
