Did we ever find the friction?
a brief check in on some stuff I was trying to do
I’d recommend taking some time to revisit Ethel Cain’s 2022 album Preacher’s Daughter. It rules and it is feeling very resonant as the Pisces thaw gets my juices flowing and I mentally (physically??) prepare for Neptune to move into Aries later this year.
Children of the aughts scarred by Southern Christianity rise up 🙌
After a month of trying to create more friction in my days…
I went to the grocery store with my dad a lot during the first few years after my family moved from Colorado to Texas. He had a more flexible job than my mom at the time and stayed home with me for part of most days which meant that we also ran many errands. We’d check the post office box in town, hit the library, go to a playground, and run by H-E-B on the way home. Like any good Texan, my H-E-B memories are the brightest and easiest to recall.
I remember oranges and plumcots and nectarines piled high with fluorescent lights painting them a flattened washed out version of themselves. I remember ricocheting between free sample stations, hanging off the cart while my dad chose between cheeses and cold cuts at the deli counter. I remember sounds of people casually and impersonally interacting and also the small town sounds of people bumping into each other and catching up on the past week. A loud, garish experience for a kid who got easily overwhelmed.
On the occasions that I was at the store with my mom we were frequent participants in the small town catchup conversation, because she’s an Enneagram 3 and grew up in that town and knew everyone. With my dad, it was much less likely that we’d find ourselves doing that. He’s an Enneagram 5, a social subtype like me, so he’d do the chitchat if he had to, but he didn’t take the conversations so far, didn’t seek them out. The one exception was with a guy who we’ll call Bobby. He worked at the store and was responsible for stocking the produce section.
It wasn’t ever clear to me how they met, but it was clear that this guy tended to be the one to strike up the conversation. They’d talk about basketball, how the Jayhawks had played and probably other teams, though I only really knew about the Jayhawks so whatever else they talked about has faded over time. Bobby would try to engage with me, but I was a shy kid, especially round men. It was low stakes, but consistent. Consistent enough that a grocery store acquaintance of my dad’s has a spot in my childhood story.
About a month ago, I impulsively pledged to do a few things for the duration of February with the hope that I could push myself into more “friction”. I was feeling a little (more than a little) crazy at the time. It felt like a lot of my life was being mediated by slippery technological portals. Any possible interaction I might run into, I was seeing through a fuzzy screen, like a contestant on Love is Blind, except instead of choosing a husband sight unseen, I was living a life sight unseen.
Here’s what I was trying to stick to, the rough guidelines I threw together:
Deactivate social media for the month.
Don’t walk with headphones in my ears.
No rideshares. Taxis are okay if absolutely necessary. Plan on transit time.
Use cash as much as possible.
No self-checkout. Ask the cashier how their day is going.
Physically visit some worship services. Be friendly. Absorb the vibe.
Volunteer somewhere in my neighborhood.
No ordering delivery -- avoid takeout, but potentially okay if being picked up in person.
No cancelling plans within 24 hours of their occurring.
I was very good at 3/9 of these, had middling success at 2/9, and completely flunked 4/9.
One that I thought would be especially challenging, moving through the world without headphones, ended up being the easiest. I also found it to be worthwhile and will generally keep doing it, though I might give myself space for the occasional idle walk with a playlist. As my friend Kyle said when I began this challenge, walking around and listening to music is one of life’s great joys. I tend to agree and have had more than my fair share of euphoric moments listening to MUNA and people watching on the bus. Still, while the tradeoffs aren’t negligible and I missed it sometimes, I definitely want “no headphones” to be my default.
One area I failed in pretty much completely was when it came to food. Both in the sense that I used self-checkout exclusively and in the sense that I ordered food several times to be delivered. I’m not positive why. With checkout, I think it came from more of a place of being on autopilot in the grocery store. When running that kind of errand, I tend to default to some kind of fugue state. The delivery of takeout came from a more… I don’t want to say lazy or hedonist place, so maybe I’ll just say it came from a place that I’m more suspicious of. A place I need to look at.
Generally, I’ve had more casual interactions with people on the street or in other public settings this month. I’ve been lucky in this, as it’s been a really great few weeks to be a person in Philly. We won the Super Bowl and the city has been feeling connected. The night the Eagles trashed that other team was lush with community. Just lots of familiarity and investment in each other, everyone on the street sharing the moment.
We’ve also had a few unseasonably warm days recently. It visibly relaxed everyone. I was taking a family FaceTime while walking in the sun (no headphones) and was gently interrupted by a man walking his dog and asking for directions. After sending him on his way, my sister commented that it would be extremely unlikely for a stranger on the street to interrupt someone where she lives in Seattle.
I used to be so anxious about these kinds of interactions. There was a time when I’d cross the street if it looked like I might have to interact with someone or I’d basically hide behind the couch if I heard a salesperson knock on the front door. Back then, the idea that I might encourage these kinds of surprise encounters wouldn’t probably have entered my mind. Eventually I realized I was twisting myself up into knots in an effort to evade the stuff that, I think, actually makes up a life. The stuff that adds texture and, yes, friction.
That anxiety was a big part of why I sought out psychiatric meds in the first place. I wanted to stop avoiding and start meeting the day with whatever it brought me. And it worked. Before long, my lovely little cocktail of Wellbutrin and Lexapro had done their job. It felt like being lifted up a little taller without even realizing I was being supported. I noticed it when I answered the door, had a little chat with the AT&T salesperson, and sent her on her way. I noticed it when I chatted with the guy behind the deli counter and sampled a few options before choosing the BBQ Chicken, shaved thinner than standard. These things that had felt so difficult were suddenly easy. Maybe even frictionless…
The question has to be asked: is that kind of psychiatric medication “streamlining” my experience? Mediating it, limiting me? I want to be careful wading into these waters of anti-medicine, anti-science. I promise I am not supportive of RFK and the like. It’s way too challenging to get life-saving medication (psychiatric or otherwise) to casually entertain the idea that these meds are “interfering”. But, literally, they are. So does the weed I sometimes smoke, the alcohol I sometimes drink, and the sun lamp I sometimes sit the recommended 16 inches in front of. Interference doesn’t have to mean evil or wrong, but to designate psych meds as “only good” is wild.
It wasn’t that long ago that one would have clocked being anti-Big Pharma as a more progressive stance than it is today. Like, as recently as pre-2020, I’d say that most of my leftyist friends were exceptionally skeptical of anything advertised as a medical solution to feeling bad about life in late capitalism. Not that they avoided medicine or doubted science, but we all knew we were often making a deal with the devil when engaging with the pharmaceutical industry. Now we’ve found ourselves in the uncomfortable position of having to defend an industry and its products and their value in a much less nuanced way than I think would be ideal, because we know that nuance does not tend to win the public policy argument.
To be clear, I think psychiatric medication rules. For me, it has been wonderful with minimal side effects and maximal results. Still, it’s important to push against these things from time to time. I was going to cite Strangers to Ourselves by Rachel Aviv, a semi-reported, semi-memoiristic book about the ways that mental illness and its treatment is shaped by context and culture, but looking for the single point I wanted to make was driving me crazy and I’m already late sending this. Know, basically, that this book exists and drives a lot of this conversation farther than I am here or could here. Our mental health, our beliefs that we are suffering abnormally on the one hand or have flattened our feelings on the other, are contextual. When does friction become an obstacle that is holding you back and when does ease become a fantasy that is isolating you from experience?
We are all best served by using our faculties of reason and experience to inform decisions like these. This life is an experiment, one you don’t necessarily get to do twice (definitely not more than once with the same consciousness). All you can do is contemplate or act, generally one at a time. I like to think of it as a microcosm of how Pierre Teilhard de Chardin describes physical and spiritual evolution of the human animal: a kind of reaching and stumbling forward, grasping at what might work and only knowing if it does through time. Threads of life sometimes end while others “successfully” march onward. In the microcosm, in our immediate experience, we can only hypothesize, do, and adjust.
So, what am I going to do regarding friction and striving for immediate experience in life? By that, I mean, what am I going to do with my next month? I will keep taking my meds, don’t worry. I will also probably use headphones while walking occasionally, but mostly I won’t. I’m going to redouble my efforts to not use self-checkout.
It seems like a small thing, but those “grocery store interactions” really matter. I want those, to casually engage with the people in my world. I’ll have to ask my dad how he first met Bobby, who started the first conversation and how it progressed. I don’t have a kid I’m taking around to run errands, but I like to think that if I did they would see me as an adult who seemed to know and care about the people around him.
Some things to read:
Hard to articulate exactly how this covers all that it does, an article about women on death row in Texas and some nuns who built relationships with them. Emotionally deep and confronting. Thank you to my friend Cullen for the rec.
A gross message from the new Secretary of Education, giddily proclaiming her intentions to destroy one of the only good things our government tries to do at the national level: make it (marginally) easier to get a quality education. Call your reps etc and if I ever run into her…. I’m gonna yell!
A palate cleanser, Kelsey in Vogue lol Good advice here for anyone attending bach festivities in the near future.
Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.