june piece of friendship

i argue that friends bring out the best in u - use your discretion the same way you would choose your partner

my framework for friendship is to be deeply invested in your goals

dating - highly intentional

high openness for friends

social contract

alternative piece: the ghosts of past friends

*how to ask questions that actually matter how to treat friends as future partners

friends as life partners

transience of friends how to cultivate meaningful friendships?

resonance of energy

And to extend this: I see people online constantly lamenting that they can’t make or keep friends in adulthood, as if friendship is something that just happens to you rather than something you actively create. This, too, requires intentional effort. Want to get invited to dinner parties? Start throwing them. Menu planning, grocery runs, washing dishes until midnight while your guests laugh in the next room. Want good friends? Be the one who texts first, who remembers birthdays, who shows up with coffee when someone’s having a terrible week. Be the person who helps with moves even when you’d rather stay home in your pajamas, who plans the group trips that everyone will remember years later.

how to leave your friends behind walk away from a relationship that exists as a mirage the harsh truth they dont tell you growing up is how transient friends become as you grow older

“it was two people who remained together, day after day, only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified. friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs.”

compaignon meaning ‘one who breaks bread with another’ (com + panis) axioms for friendship:

1. curate your friends with the same care and intentionality you do in dating. find those who pour light into you the same way you can with them.
2. it is difficult to prescribe a specific code for how you should ttreat friendships, in terms of how often you text or hang out or how much you receive their emotions.
3. the old adage is correct: friendships either last a season or for a reason. letters to my friends.

find yourself friends who make you soup after a long day. the cornerstone of friendship is the act of nourishing each other.

“the only trick of friendship is to find people who are better than you are - not smarter, not cooler, but kinder, and more generous, and more forgiving - and then to appreciate them for what they can teach you, and try to listen to the when they tell you something about yourself, no matter how bad - or good - it might be, and to trust them, which is the hardest thing of all. but the best, as well.”

the only truth is that there is never needs to be real reason to walk away from a friendship. which means all the more to continually choose to show up.

find yourself friends who make you soup after a long day. intimacy is not a proxy for connection the cornerstone of friendship is the act of nourishing each other.

the slow cook of real connection.

m taught me that i always had a knack for writing, messy and emotional as i was.

Making food for others

daylight savings

friendship is shared meals

written to a friend i made during study abroad:

I miss cooking with you.

friendship as shared, home-grown, home-cooked meals. mutual endeavors peering over the soup bowl,

copenhagen last year. Sun breathes her last gasp at 4PM. the wind whipped itself silly and we stayed stagnant on our bikes, flailing. You’d be surprised that for a city that bred avant-garde cuisine, Danish food was primarily light on seasoning, low on the flavors we grew up eating. I tried to assimilate, but I couldn’t handle a daily ritual of rye bread and cooking became my lifeline.

I’d cling to bottles of soy sauce and gochujang from the Asian grocery store 20 minutes away.

I miss our conversations over boiling soup and simmering cabbage. How many times did we parrot wow. i love cabbage back and forth to each other? our viewpoint, so simple. we had so many questions about the next stage of life: would we make friends? would we be still creative? What are we outside of the classes we take and the books we read? what is love? What does love look like?

no one tells you the first year on your own, you’ll lose the will to cook. food, cooked over time, is something i rarely see at my dining table. now a creature of convenience, i live and die by my air fryer - i subsist on a diet of charred pre-washed broccoli and freezer-burned salmon.

time is something we rarely have.

the joy of cooking is cooking with others, for others. All those funny flourishes you did in upstate.

You cook batches of pasta and curry that wither away in the fridge. the first thing they tell you about pasta sauce, they being the ina gartner video you prop up on your ipad, is that a good sauce takes time.

It is difficult to repeat this practice in this city. There are unlimited options for food, an endless queue of friends to catch up with and cultivate.

all i wish is to be fed and fed well.

In my new apartment, I barely have space to cut vegetables.

Sometimes you ask rhetorical questions you don’t really reflect back upon. So much easier to speculate before a moment happens, harder to reflect in the middle of its happening.

Sometimes I wonder about what we owe to each other, as friends.

But in the kitchen, there is no worry that I am taking too much from you or vice versa. Even if one meal

friends are soup. our friendship simmering together.

what do you wish someone had told me about friendship at 22

→ theres no reason to walk away, only the decision to keep showing up.