friendships

i’ve never really considered the possibility of lifelong friendships before, so when a friend brought up the idea (in the context of finding emotional fulfillment) i was really stunned.

it really feels like i’m just starting to exit the unstable crisis mode i’ve been in for oh, the past decade. i mean way more stable than other people’s lives. but i haven’t really felt stable before.

a longer article another time. but essentially since my second hospitalization was such a miserably formative experience i always thought of friendships as a support network. the primary purpose is a safety net and my goal is the robustness of the network as a whole rather than individual links. it’s imperative that the graph is well-connected so that, even if/when edges fail (people move away, people start families, work gets busy, there’s a falling out, etc.) that each node is still well-connected overall. 

i would be a poor friend if i didn’t make sure my friends could rely on each other and didn’t need me.

but for her the focus is more on sharing the ups, not just the downs.

i never considered having a lifelong friendship as a goal or even a possibility.

still not sure how i feel about all this. it’s in some sense the opposite of my goal. in her framework, each deep friendship is special and irreplaceable. in my framework, having any individual link matter so much threatens the stability of the safety net.

i suppose that someone could have multiple deep friendships, grieve the loss of one, while still remaining well supported. tl;dr still scratching my head about this

supportive workplace

another head scratcher. i keep being mildly shocked each time my manager(s) are responsive and want me to succeed. i can only think of the misery of pushing my paper through on my own (no coauthors, no lab) into ICRA, and then instead of my committee celebrating that, feels like i got thrown under the bus at quals. that was, well, not helpful …

so yea, still constantly surprised and wrapping my head around this