This essay is part ten of my year-long project where, each month, I’ll look through old journal entries by using a random date generator to decide which day of my past to explore. This month’s was August 17th.
August 17th, 2011 - 2023
2011: I moved in a lot of freshman at DeHo with the FIJI guys. I also had my interview with Denise and I was accepted in the immersive learning. And, I saw my Big again.
2012: I moved all my things into my room and it’s a giant mess. We pregamed at Anna’s and had a Worcester reunion. We went to Eric’s keggar and I lost a shoe, but I came home wearing a hat.
2013: I cleaned our bathroom and worked out, then Allie and I had people over for pregaming. We spent the whole night at The Locker Room and Ian, Allie, Ethan and I went to the Puerto’s food truck, then all ate in my bed.
2014: I did my Sunday bi-weekly routine of getting my nails done and grabbing coffee before writing. I’m really trying to post a blog per week, but I’m not sure if I can do it.
2015: Chels and I went to Zach’s office during lunch to drink coffee and eat Oreo’s. It was pretty fun, even though we ate so many, I felt ill. Dana came into town and we went shopping before drinking wine at Zach’s.
2016: After work, Sam and I made our pre-teen selves very proud by going to a blink-182 concert at Barclays. It was such a fun night and we had the best time at the show.
2017: After work, I went to El Vez with Jamie, Carrie and Victor and we got drinks. It was so fun to let loose a little since everything seems to be extremely on edge lately.
2018: I helped Chrissy restyle the “50 Greatest Places” package, then came home to do laundry and ran into Ben in the elevator because he is living here with Justin now.
2019: We went to brunch, then pretty much spent the whole day drinking (including eating a flower that numbs your mouth) and smoking by the pool. I really like all these girls I’m with, it’s fun.
2020: My day started with being told I was working on more well stories, but it was when I was in the middle of my workout.
2021: I spoke to an incoming class of Ball State freshman this morning which was so fun, then I got lunch at Citizens with Sarah, who Julie put me in contact with. After that, I went to 305, so it was a very good and content day.
2022: I was really exhausted all day from taking a late train last night, but I am also annoyed for letting [REDACTED]’s lack of response to me last night affect my mood. I know I deserve better than what I am getting.
2023: I was still very sad today, but am trying to pull it together. I don’t feel very motivated, but I went to Book Club and I am very thankful to have these people in my life who make me feel accepted and safe.
At the beginning of August, when I used my random date generator and pulled August 17th and saw most of these entries had to do with social settings, I decided immediately to write about friendship. I feel lucky to have the relationships I do in my life – I’ve depended fiercely on friends over romantic partners on many occasions and am grateful for the support of my network, especially in times when I’ve let my insecurities overshadow reality. I, truly, thought this would be an easy piece to knock out early on in the month. And, then – I never wrote it.
Last week, when I finally looked at the date and started to get panicked about my own self-imposed deadline, I sat down to write. Almost immediately, as if he could sense I needed a distraction, Zach FaceTimed me and, instead of writing anything at all, him and I talked for an hour through our screens, eating dinner alone, but together.
We’re separated by three trains and a borough now, but in our early twenties, Zach and I lived three avenues apart. Often, he would come home and I would already be in his living room, having let myself in with my own key hours before because he had a microwave and AC and I had neither of those things. (Though he also had a key to my place, this was never reciprocated, mostly because I lived at the top of a sixth floor walk up closer to the FDR than the subway, with again, no air-conditioning and, for a long time, I forgot to tell him my exact address).
When I think back to that time, I mostly think about the air mattresses. I can’t remember all the details now, but due to some sort of mailing mishap with his mattress being delivered to his old downtown apartment instead of his new uptown one, ZG slept on an air mattress for, like, eight months. Also, while he was waiting for his couch to be delivered, he purchased a second air mattress to place in front of the television in the living room to fill the space. Some weekends, when we were severely hungover, I’d roll out of my bed to walk straight to his apartment so we could drag his bed-air mattress into the same room as the couch-air mattress and then we’d lay on them, alone, but together, each eating our own Domino’s pizza.
We are adults now and, while I love the iteration of our friendship at this stage in our lives, I sometimes do miss those early days when we first moved to New York, the same way as I read the entries above with a lens of nostalgia and miss those times, too. I would sooner die than let multiple drunk people (!!!) sit in their outside clothes (!!!) and eat rice and beans in my bed (!!!) now, but I do miss the physicality of feeling so connected. Back then, a big part of friendship for me meant we were constantly touching, constantly blurring the boundaries of our bodies because we belonged so much to each other – it just felt like a natural extension to be so close. As I grew older and, of course, after a pandemic hit, this physicality didn’t happen quite as often and I’d find myself inadvertently getting self-conscious about my friendships. I’d leave social events and wonder if I said the right thing, if I did the right thing, if my friends even liked me, if I was a good friend, if our friendship even existed outside the realms of my own mind. I’d be surrounded by people, together with those who knew and loved me, but my anxieties often made me feel like I was completely alone.
I’ve worked through this a lot in therapy and that’s what I was going to write about, but I think I had a hard time actually sitting down to do it because I have felt so isolated this month. On the first day of August, I — like a toddler — got strep throat and, as soon as I’d recovered, immediately began the process of egg freezing, a procedure I only pursued due to my employer’s excellent health plan (I am aware and grateful for my extreme privilege in being able to do something like this when I do not even know for sure if children are a path I want in my future), but something I naively did not expect to affect me physically as strongly as it did. I knew I wouldn’t be able to work out in my normal capacity, but I did have these visions of going to my daily doctor’s appointments, heading into the office and then – it is laughable now, but I truly believed I could do it at the time – walking all the way home from 30 Rock to Brooklyn each day to try to keep up my stamina.
Instead, after five days of injections, I no longer fit into any of my clothing other than oversized basketball shorts and was so painfully bloated that I only left the apartment for medical necessity or to buy things for my cat because, seemingly on a whim on the third day of shooting hormones into my belly button and playing directly into the stereotype of single girlie in her thirties, I adopted a kitten I named Olive. Summer is my favorite season (pre-egg freezing, my therapist had coined this summer my “Summer of Fun,” and she! did! not! miss!) and not being able to participate in the freeness of it with my friends was devastating, but honestly, I was too bloated to even think about anything other than how uncomfortable I was. For a week, I felt like Rapunzel, looking out at the world from my window, only instead of having long, flowing hair and a prince coming to rescue her, I was in my second floor apartment with ovaries that had swelled from the size of grapes to the size of grapefruits (!!!), trying to teach my kitten to please, please not puncture my Parachute sheets and listening to my landlord and super learn construction via trial and error in real-time as they continued their never-ending project of renovating the spot below me at midnight every evening (I am not an expert, but based on how my apartment shakes, I do believe there is a possibility they may be breaking down a load-bearing wall).
So many of my friends checked in on me virtually, especially after I had not been seen in the public eye for 5+ days and I am grateful for all those messages and FaceTimes. I felt alone, but the effort to make me feel included was so appreciated. All the messages made me eager to return to my life — to stay on the princess train, I was ready to be Ariel, wanting to experience where the people are, not this sad version of Rapunzel who could quite literally feel her insides shifting with every step. When I woke up from my retrieval in pain, I also awoke with the understanding that, although my ovaries were going to take a little bit to shrink back to their normal size because, again, they were absurdly gigantic, I could basically resume my old, active life in a few days.
Unfortunately, that’s not quite what happened. Instead, I wrote most of this essay over the course of two days while also sobbing in bed. Right after my egg extraction, while I was still swollen and bloated and cut up from the inside out, I woke to find that, seemingly overnight, every step I took no longer affected my ovaries, but instead caused an excruciating pain to radiate down throughout my left second toe. More specifically, the pressure was so great that it felt like my toe was going to explode right off my fucking foot which is, verbatim, what I said to the podiatrist with tear-stained cheeks when I was finally able to be seen for an appointment. (Ironically, it turned out the injury was due to under-use — I am so active normally that not working out for two weeks caused my body to go into massive confusion and led to the joints in my toe becoming severely inflamed – which, I fear, is a very funny way for someone who is constantly told “you exercise too much!” to get hurt). I had been so ready to leave the home and get back my friends, soaking up the last month of this “Summer of Fun” that not only being stuck in my apartment, but also unable to physically leave my bed really devastated me. I’d already spent so much of August in this unintentional isolation and feeling so alone made all the insecurities regarding my friendships that I’d worked so hard to curb come back full force. As I sat in bed, icing my toe and listening to the sounds of the summer outside my window while speaking only in person to Olive, I was intimately aware of my aloneness. I was spiraling — I felt forgotten and like I would never again be able to have another normal day.
My last normal days before it felt like my life was falling apart were not normal at all because they were spent with someone I had not seen or spoken to in almost a decade. Someone I’d dated many, many years ago reached out to me in July and we’d FaceTimed and I, manically, bought a ticket to Florida to visit him and then, equally manically, realized four days later that I’d never hit confirm on the purchase. So, he came to stay with me instead. The time we spent together was lovely, squeezing eight years into three days, this delightful gift from our past, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to see each other again — almost as grateful as I am that he thought it was funny and cute I have been using his real, god-given name on the Internet as a bit since we met in 2015 instead of what it actually is, which is certifiably fucking insane (in my defense, I truly never thought he would read any of this, but still — sorry, Jake. I appreciate you).
One of the nights he was here, we met up with a mutual friend, an old co-worker of his, and his fiancée. I hadn’t seen this person in almost as many years as my houseguest — while I miss the physicality of friendships from when I was 23, I do not miss some of my behavior from that time period and, when we’d stopped seeing each other, I’d slowly let myself fade from the lives of anyone who had known us together. I was embarrassed by how I acted back then and, walking up to the bar to meet them a few weeks ago, I internally was worried by what he remembered about me… or, even worse, if he didn’t remember me at all.
Part of my anxiety regarding friendships is that I am this invisible character who doesn’t make an impression and, so, it was really beautiful to find this was not the case. It had been so many years since I’d seen either of these men, but despite that, both of them remembered the same good moments I did. This confirmation — that I had said the right things, done the right things, that my friends liked me, that I was a good friend, that our friendship existed outside the realm of my own mind — made me feel so open and thankful.
I have a tendency to remember moments, the really good ones, in snapshots — here is Zach and I pulling an air mattress into the living room; here is the drunken laughter from the spilled rice on a pillow; here is the memory of us, making eye contact again for the first time, years later. I had thought I was going to end this essay with one of those moments from that night in late July, a moment I returned to often when I was stuck in bed last week — us, walking home, four heads overlooking the city, together. But, when I’ve tried to find the words to describe the secureness I recognized in that moment, everything I’ve written has fallen short. And, maybe that’s okay. The important thing, really, is that I no longer felt alone.