It was pointed out to me that I haven't written in this blog in a while. So, here I am! And my thoughts are all kinds of places, so strap in. Checking in on myself here a bit and...
Yay! And I have new t-shirts! YAY!!! it was getting pretty bleak wearing the same five over and over again when my arm got fractured. Being able to cut shirts up again (collars bug me) is really opening up worlds.
And since you're here, now, Hullo! Care to continue the check-in?
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fit checking for my napalm era...
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Seeing the beauty in the broken glass...
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Previously on Adella's House of Huh:
Aaaaaand back to the present-proximate paragraph.
So last I wrote I was living out the final gauntlet of The Fates, with a triple whammy of random ill fortune that could only be brought about by Jehovah placing bets with The Adversary, or possibly an angry greek god not liking that I can do anything remotely competently. Although, I can't say I remember the last time I did something as wild like "anything remotely competently!"
Though I will say that putting sticker album sheets on the closet so I can put up my stickers was pretty close to god-offendingly brilliant! I'm kind of crashed out from the long year, so I'm basically just shopping for dopamine on Etsy these days, but stickers are delightfully cheap and usually come with little handwritten notes and extra stickers that make me feel like I have lots of friends!
Evohe!!
STILL Previously on...
Anyways last I wrote...
Last I thought I wrote was Thursday night when I dream-wrote this entire blog, and I gotta tell you: it was a banger.
Was. Sorry. I can't really remember much of it anymore, and days later I still can't quite capture it. Blah blah blah horse camp blah blah blah Kpop blah blah blah ponderous ponderings about self and identity and relationships ... prolepsis!
Ongoing bummer is that Pam is having to get radiation therapy, which is too bad, because we thought she was done with all that nonsense, but good because I'm attached to my mom and I don't really want her going through all this again in half a year. Still, Jesus, it sucks! Rachel is out there helping out and I'm so grateful, as I'm not a nurse and just leaving the house to go down the block is a logistical and physiological nightmare for me. But I miss her and I'm sure it's part of the mulling coming on down the road!
The employment situation/family income is still holding steady until at least November, but hopefully we'll just find a happy little full time remote position at the end of the rainbow. Or cold, hard cash to last a lifetime... I'm open...
And, yes, shoulder is quite nearly functional again.
For reasons I can't imagine, insurance is still paying for a distractingly built twenty something guy to hold me in intimate ways and inflict inordinate amounts of pain on me while rocking me gently. I have been a good girl, I swear!
He's a PT, guys. He's a PT. yeesh!!! The places your minds go...
That said, I could seriously use some after-care following these sessions! Like daaaaaamn. When your PT starts off a session telling you to just let him know if you're about to faint, well... he means it. It's definitely a possibility, and it ain't from swooning at his tight lil as fuck abs!
But we are beating out some extra range of motion here, so that's cool! And my function is back to maybe 80%.
I have a lot of jagged edges coming off of six months of downers and they are standing up and catching the light. I'm still fundamentally shell shocked, but damnit I can finally clean the house so there's a decent amount of catch up, generally speaking.
But I promised you horses and you're getting car rides instead...
This week will not be one of those weeks because I am recovering from horse camp. Ok I didn't get to stay at horse camp. That's for Allan and she seems to love it enough we'll soon be auctioning off our kidneys to afford her burgeoning hippophilia.
Horse camp is/was/shall ever be in Redmond. We live in West Seattle. This means to get to horse camp one must not simply pass through Seattle, but also Bellevue and Redmond traffic. It's a lot. I've been marinating in vintage road rage/despair/panic/misery for about four hours a day.
I am not gonna lie, my body is not into this. Especially because it's been glaringly sunny this week and my windows are not tinted. Wednesday, it was 90 degrees out and air conditioning just can't quite take the edge out of the window-light when it happens like that!
So I'm happy Allan loves horses and I'm glad that we've wrapped on the experience, mostly.
Anytime it hurts, play another verse...
On the bright-but-less-glaringly-so side, my car stereo is lit. And my new playlist is so lit it's basically a conflagration!
I have, of course (you're shocked), gotten a wee bit hyper focused on the movie Kpop Demon Hunters and its accompanying soundtrack. It's been a couple of weeks and it is largely going to be my personality for the next month or so before the dopamine wears off.
Derpy!!! Sussan! That makes sense if you are me or in close enough proximity to me that I've probably forced you to watch it with me.
Or, say, it's early and everyone else is a asleep, but I'm up and Your Idol just came up on the stereo and, no, I will not turn my volume or stop scream-singing, thank you. That's not ok. There are rules.
The music is hitting spots way beyond A-G.
I love the fighting songs. Free sets me free. The pop song of the year is Golden. This is What It Sounds Like makes me sob and is an anthem for my fragile soul. And then... well...
Needless to say, some people are falling in love with AI chatbots these days, but me? I'm in a deeply committed intimate relationship with Your Idol (non-exclusive - we're cosmopolitan like that).
Because, this is me and I have serious "I Can Fix Him" energy when it comes to fandom crushing.
Yes, KP Demon Hunters might be hunting the demons because the demons are hawt.
Or - based on my favorite Etsy merch description - the "Evil Korean Twinks" are hawt!
You might think I'm just pounding the soundtrack on repeat, but oh no.
To optimize the pure catharsis, I need to balance my musical hyperfix with some temperance. Yes. Yes I could just listen to the same song over and over again for an entire commute (oh I absolutely could), but this runs the risk of hitting that saturation point where it turns all squeezed out like a sere lemon. And horse camp required about 16 hours of unadulterated vibe to keep me from either raging out or passing out mid jam.
Dry out the songs too quickly and then we're just raw-dogging the I-90 bumper bash with our own ceaseless thoughts! The horror!
Add to this that the entire Kpop Demon Hunters album is full of very intense and high energy music that makes me simultaneously yeowl along and sometimes sob. You need a little come down between those energy spikes. Some acoustic. Some chill beatz. Apparently, some raggaeton. There's an art. And I've arted it.
I've added my favorite entire soundtrack almost KPDH songs to a playlist I was already constructing. It's actually a beautiful synergy because the list was originally dominated by songs from the show Ironheart, which actually ends up verging on a bunch of the same themes from a different perspective. I even had already named the playlist Demons while working on it before the demon hunters even started seeking Evil Korean Twinks!!
Just for fun coincidence, Ironheart also features a fairly hot demi-antagonist whose dalliance with the demon world causes him to develop physical markings that look a lot like the demon "patterns" in Kpop Demon Hunters. And he has some real diva songs too, cuz he's Anthony Ramos, best known as to OG Hamilton, Jr. But also the guy who already did a song called Villano before he played a villain and then they played his song at the end of an episode where he was somewhat villainey! Which tickled me beyond reason...
I could go on. You have no idea. We could take it song by song and why exactly it fits into the greater landscape of my extensive plist ecosystem. I can hit all the beats on every KPDH hit for you. Say the word and I have info, beautiful beautiful passionate info to dump! You know you love it! Or... just message me and I'll send you funny memes all day long. It's my love language.
At any rate: I've spent several hours a day hitting repeat on specific songs for a rough maximum of 4-6 at a time, and then releasing my brain back into the musical wild. Which is to say I've been feeling all the feels a whole damned lot. In the middle of small metal death machine amidst several other distracted and disguntled death machiners. Alone. But together. And I'm in a mood. So bear with me.
I'm about to switch up these vibes...
I really do have openings for meme exchanges for anyone I'm not actively harassing already. I can't really do much outside of the house, which is staggeringly limiting for the whole friend-chain. It's kind of amazing how many people need to see you in person and do "fun things" together to really like you. Those lovely 7 or 8 people who accept my memes and drop rants on me from time to time: I love you. Thank you for accepting me and my cloistered ways.
This year has been a little rough in the cloistering as well. I miss my mommy! Thought we do see her, just not as much.
On top of which, Allan had a falling out with her first bestie. Which bums me the heck out, because I was friends with that girl's parents! And they were already hard to hang out with outside of playdates. And so now I'm assuming we'll never see each other again, as is the way of these relationships based on mutual children.
To top that off, a few of my other friendships have kind of chilled out or shifted recently due to bibs and babs. Leaving me feeling a little off my footing, and a smidge left behind.
So, naturally I've cleaned what can be cleaned, decorated what can be decorated, Etsyed what can be Etsyed, and now I have nothing left but the hyperspeed of my own thoughts. So you're gonna get some pondering. I don't make the rules. Once it's set in motion, it cannot be stopped.
Imagining what it will be like for the girls to see each other again in their newly formed non-relationship. Trying to remember what that was like for me back then. Knowing what it can be like for me now.
Better sit down for the show, cuz I'm gonna show you how it done done done (spoiler: at length and petering out without much resolution)...
What is that quote?
To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be."
It's a beautiful quote and goes on in a different direction than I'm really intending to take it. But in case you've not read the OG and want to take it in fully:
But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honour what emerges along the way. Sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame. Sometimes it will be a flicker that disappears and temporarily floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness.
I've been thinking about this a lot recently. I've often reflected on this in terms of supporting a friend going through a hard time, burn out, depression, etc.
But the dimension that I hadn't really mulled on until recently is "when who they are to you and who they want you to be to them changes." A whole distinct but interrelated funeral to crash that's also our own!
With most friendships, there's an inbuilt fluidity that defies this sort of definitiveness. In all relationships, there's a tidal element, but far more so when there are fewer formal or physical interdependencies. We off-source our needs to enough people that sometimes the need for "friend" is not 100% specific even if we're drawn to the unique qualities of certain friends.
You don't notice or feel impacted by the minor shifts any more than you look at a river and become distressed that the water and debris are never the same mix (assuming you aren't a philosophy student or tripping balls on some bad acid).
They are *friend*. Always friend-shaped regardless of the inner churn. Generally.
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That shape transcends the day-to-day adjustment in the same way the river or a forest can shift but always maintain an essence. Until they don't. Because even mountains crumble eventually.
Because it's such an ebb and flow, it's often quite ambiguous when they lose that form.
I've had many friends I might now call an old friend. Regular engagement evolves more into an annual check in to see what they're up to. And from there maybe that call drops off and you're surprised three years later to read that they died or got married or became the ruler of Sweden! But if they didn't, you might hang out together in another year or two.
So when did you stop being friends? Never exactly! You still could be. But also maybe not?
There were precipitating events, since friendship is quite heavily influenced by proximity and context, but there was probably never a time where you said "this is my friend" and then immediately shifted to say "now, this is my old friend" or "now, we used to be friends."
If you meet up with an old friend and realize you have nothing in common anymore, when did you stop being friends? Who knows?
Micromoments of death and rebirth come so constantly they aren't noticeable or definitive. Just like our cells are constantly replacing themselves. We are always evolving, so our relationships can never be the same from moment to moment. The Friendship of Theseus!
Everything dies all the time. A few deaths are mourned.
Sometimes the shift doesn't follow our natural pacing. Sometimes the person isn't just misplaced but actively lost. The elements of separation may have been building for years, but in effect, their removal is immediate. They're gone, but their outline still permeates your life. They shape your habits in absentia. Their silence is a resounding presence.
A contract may never have been consciously constructed, but you notice it when it's torn up.
As an adult, I've run into an old high school friend - first friend breakup - out and about. We had an explosive parting, but it was a long time ago. I feel very little connection to my high school self at this point. It's hard to hold a grudge or any particular attachment. We're Facebook friends now and I enjoy seeing pictures of her and her kids in the same detached way I would an acquaintance I'd never met. It all averages out to the same as it would have if we'd simply drifted apart. A slightly positive neutral feeling.
“Loving you changed my life. It should come as no surprise that losing you has done the same.” —Chloë Frayne
But it isn't the same. Who she was to me died much faster, and all I was to her collapsed cataclysmically. Nature abhors vacuums and those shifts are huge inflection points. That suddenness influenced every part of my life that came after it. And the loss. It opened up spaces that needed filling and the filling shaped me further. It changed how I thought of friendship and how I approached others.
I've had three close friend breakups in my life. And speaking as somebody whose last romantic breakup catalyzed a 25-pound accidental weight loss and a few months of randomly collapsing on the floor in a giant gasping gelatin confection of painfully earnest agony (like damn I'm a fucking drama queen!) ... friend breakups are still worse, albeit less visibly histrionic. Or perhaps because they're less visibly histrionic.
But because of that, they're harder to talk about. The form, even with close friends, is so unspoken until it's spoken. The things you have lost are so ill-defined. We all know the rules for getting over a romantic breakup, but there is no form for the friend breakup.
And because of that I'm skipping over it a bit. It's really hard to dissect. Just a quiet loss you can always see in your periphery but never fully inspect.
We are constantly shifting who we are to others, but also constantly finding ways to cement it. This makes sense. If you're letting somebody into the deep gooey center of vulnerability, you don't want them to snatch a few items and run out laughing maniacally. There have to be protections! We perpetually up the stakes of interdependency, both through reciprocal vulnerability and more tangible methods.
We shape the physical and emotional spaces of our intimates with talismans, rituals, and mementos. We reify connection through object and habit. They celebrate and they bind. And we do this somewhat intentionally to remain present when out of sight. To make our absence felt in the reminders that we leave behind.
In our generally mononormative society, that's most evident in romantic pairings. Because we tend not to define our other relationships as aggressively as romantic relationships, we don't have as much experience undefining them. But it's subtly present throughout the range of attachments, because in the end we rely on each other and are defined by each other. Self is stripped away when a person is lost. Meaning depends on others. Being seen is being.
We grow our roots together where we can.
"The pleasure of remembering has been taken from me, because there wasn't anyone to remember with." - C.S. Lewis
The most glaring transition is one where the person is still with you in an active way. Maybe you aren't friends anymore but you still work together. Maybe you broke up but share kids. Or a connection worth keeping, but only if it can change form.
I've never experienced this kind of shift with regular-friends. Usually, besties drift or crash out. Coworkers/roomies/classmates say they'll write when we move on, but well... Close family remains close family in its steadily evolving fashion. Moving from close friends to long distance friends is perhaps the closest. Though the physical shift is so predominant there.
I did become roommates twice with old high school friends. The transition was surreal both times. In one case, extremely messy. In the other, just aloof? I loved the guy to pieces but I just wanted to be alone, and spent most of my time in my room. Then we got engaged to our respective significant others and moved apart and have barely spoken since. I have no idea why, really. I was mad about that kid in high school, but we evolve.
Fearless and undefined. This is what it sounds like...
I do have a few exes that I'm still friends with. It was actually a bit of a joke that the only way I could make friends back in the day was to date a guy and break up mutually. (Or become a pet project of a bisexual woman who didn't want to date me exactly, but didn't not want to... anyways.) Not gonna lie, it worked better than many strategies!
The transition has ranged from "so natural, we shoulda done this months ago" to "mistakes were made, pain was had." My best breakup involved an unexpected conversation and fifteen minutes of holding hands crying; and then we ordered a pizza, followed by being besties for another couple of years. But it's rarely that smooth.
What stands out is the juxtaposition of the 'ship-of-Theseus being there but also not there in fundamental ways. The way presence blends with a present-absence. Belonging with but no longer to? Sharing chapters of your stories but letting the mythology fade. Being seen, but from a different angle. And maybe not knowing what the angle is for a while.
I think the not-knowing is the biggest thing. "Friends" is amorphous and hazy. Friends can mean nearly anything, so you're going from a very defined relationship to a significantly less (usually) articulated one.
You don't even know what will work for the you-you-are-becoming going forward, let alone what they're working with, or even what they are and aren't taking from what was before. Things you thought would be totally fine suddenly land you sobbing and screaming in the shower for an hour. And you straight up just don't know how they're taking things. So it's inevitably a lot of trial and error. It's a strange and awkward dance, because things can't be articulated clearly.
“Love is the kind of thing that's already happening by the time you notice it, that's how it works, and no matter how old you get, that doesn't change. Except that you can break it up into two entirely distinct types -- love where there's an end in sight and love where there isn't.”
― Goodbye Tsugumi
― Goodbye Tsugumi
It can look a million ways because each couple and each friendship is different but typically there's a period where it's all a morass of sameness and rapid uncertainty. Certain ways of relying are cut off. Some habits persist, but carry an altered significance; other sacred rituals are mindfully tossed in the fire. A separation of identities and fate subtly infuses each common space with a miny tang of distinction.
In fairness, it goes both ways. If you've ever tried going friends to lovers (like enemies to lovers, but boringerer with way less frolicsome foreplay), there's loss there too. There is a certain kind of intimacy that doesn't survive the transition. There's a kind of separation that allows a different kind of closeness. I've absolutely felt the bittersweet confusion of missing a friendship that became something "more" even while enjoying the "more". Another thing it's harder to talk about but deeply felt.
We broke into a million pieces and we can't go back...
Friends-to-lovers-to-friends is additionally disorienting because the original friendship is also no longer there. There are underlying truths that still exist. There is familiarity, but it's never that simple. You can't simply cross that old river twice, but it has an uncanny similarity with just enough erosion and rebuilding to make it hard to simply walk about without a map.
(...OOOOOOOR we could try friends-to-lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers? Any takers? Any Evil Korean Twinks wanna a go??)
In the case of friends-to-lovers-to-friends, my brain has often mediated the weirdness by approaching reality as if (1) my lover died, straight up and tragically, and that simply is a trauma I'll hold in my heart going forward; (2) an alternate universe version of that person happens to have gotten stranded in my universe and we unsurprisingly vibe.
Which is a headtrip. But there we are.
They could also be an identical twin. Or whatever the heck happened in Vertigo. There's a reason that this is a trope. I suspect it's because we do look for the people of our past in the people of our future, and we do experience the exact sensation that this scenario evokes in multiple analogous forms.
In this brainspace, I don't fully know the backstory of this new person. I'm not even sure who my alternate version self might have been to them, if anything. That may eventually be explored, but in some ways it's less relevant. While they have similar mannerisms and histories to the one I knew, there are scads of subtle differences.
It is a new connection, but like all relationships it reinforces and seeks patterns we've previously experienced. Issues in the original relationship may bleed into the new one. Especially trust issues or unresolved pain that came up in the transition. This is always true even with genuinely different people. Always worth being mindful of, but I disagree it's unique to these situations.
“When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.” —Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
For sure, it could enhance or trigger deep pain to be with somebody so similar to a person who was lost. Just like old pictures of people popping up on your photos app can. Just like a necklace or a song or a turn of phrase can. Out of sight, less in mind. I have sympathy for the advice to seek distance while the pieces are sorting themselves.
But in the end, to me, the loss is there, whether it's actively in mind or not. New selves will emerge. New stories will be written. The process is inevitable. And it always begins with death no matter who is or isn't there.
I do know that over time, that dissonance fades, though perhaps never entirely. And closure never looks as neat and tidy as we like it in books. But eventually you've changed enough that you don't fit the person-sized holes that were once left. And that is what moving on is, ultimately.
Until the loss is mourned, there is no version of the new alternate relationship that can make up for it. Because self was lost. Mythology was crushed. Belonging irrevocably altered. It was never just about the person, but how their self mixed in yours, how the haziness that is you was defined and reified by their expectations. The loss goes on until you are no longer the self who lost it, or even longer. Regardless of the person... at least sort of.
Let the past be the past 'til it's weightless...
When I was in my early twenties, a very dear friend had to end our friendship for (legit) personal reasons. It was amicable. But painful. For a lot of reasons, it was a definitional loss in my life and the impact colored every single relationship that came after it, including with myself. As such The Loss itself became a character in my story of self. The same friend and I reconnected years ago, honestly not long after the event itself. We've lived a thousand lives and died a thousand deaths together and apart since then. But The Loss still haunts me in ways that are frustratingly complex and convoluted. I find its fingerprints everywhere in my life. I feel the way it holds onto me. It has persisted independent of the person while still being intimately enmeshed in any iteration of that relationship.
When we are seen - truly seen - and realize that doesn't last forever. It changes something. An understanding. Even if we're subsequently seen again.
"No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear." - C.S. Lewis.
I'm wondering if in some way it's always Loss itself that endures in these situations. That our mourning is just as much shock at the inevitability of loss in a world where we try to pretend we can build castles on sand. That love may be unconditional, but commitment, connection, and presence are not. That the selves we find in others' eyes, the things each loved one nourishes within, are subject to unpredictable destruction.
That nothing is guaranteed. Nobody is guaranteed.
"There is a certain bleakness in finding hope where one expected certainty." Ursula K. LeGuinn
And, frankly, sometimes we change so much in our own selves that our love isn't actually eternal. Some people I have loved, I no longer have any feelings for or about, and that is just weird!
And if that's true for us, then it's also true that anybody could look at us and say "I no longer accept what you were to me." The person who sees you could at any moment stop seeing. And that, truly, is death. But also life. Which is death. Which is...
No lyin', I'm tired! The constant evolution and cycle and death and rebirth is a little exhausting. Do we really have to jump into the fire yet again?
What if we heal what's broken?
I've mused before about the marks people leave in you. How every interaction has an eternal impact. How some people are core to your being no matter the form they take. I can't yet articulate how this interacts with what I'm musing on now, except things both die and don't and there's immortality in the way that patterns replay.
Perhaps it's simply that when we break, we also heal, but the healing is never a return. We come back with a scar - the scars are part of me - the bone is denser but malshaped in the broken places; and often we're just more fragile and cautious than we used to be. But there's a depth to that that brings poignance to the connection - darkness and harmony.
Obviously some relationships are more precise and defined. But never decisively so. Yes, Allan will be shaped by my influence for the rest of her life no matter what. What impact I had on her in her early child is not erasable. It's also true that families can be found, and are. It's our instinct. But sometimes they're lost too! In ways we don't like to talk about. Nothing is guaranteed. Even that.
So we're not heroes. We're still survivors.
We inhabit certain shapes for people for the time we can and then... maybe we don't anymore. Our wave slips back into the ocean. Is there something timeless to that?
I once asked a friend how she could entertain any what-if counterfactual that didn't end with her being with her husband and she said "well, I would find somebody else in that universe who meant the same thing to me and still be as happy." And that was jarring at the time. But also... true? None of us are that unique, even if all of us are singularly distinct.
I don't have any answers. And appropriate to my ADHD, I'm petering out at 80% done here.
But perhaps. where I falter, Ursula K. LeGuinn can take it home for me:
“This is. And thou art. There is no safety. There is no end. The word must be heard in silence. There must be darkness to see the stars. The dance is always danced above the hollow place, above the terrible abyss.”
“You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose... That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?”
“I see life as a shared gift, received from others and passed on to others, living and dying as one process, in which lies both our suffering and our reward. Without mortality to purchase it, how can we have the consciousness of eternity? I think the price is worth paying.”
So, yes, I continue to wonder what it will be like when Allan goes back to a class and sees her old bestie. I will wonder about a million old friends and whether we will pick back up again or continue to drift. I will cherish the friends I have to the extent I can as long as I can have them. And I will wonder is the meme really right that I haven't met everyone who will love me yet? Are there really still cherished friends yet to make?
If so, will it be a 400 year old Evil Korean Twink? Or... no, no maybe not
In the end, I'll always have Etsy. They flipping value my ongoing support!!
BFFs 4-Evah!!!
And to those of you who somehow made it all the way to the end here? Can I just say "wow!" Because I had to take some pretty long power breaks rereading this myself! I hope you packed a snack!
And if I couldn't offer any profundity ultimately (sorry, I started so well), I hope at least you got some good quotes and a strong inclination to watch this crazy movie I'm obsessed with! I should send you all handwritten thank you notes with bonous stickers! Like 4-Realz!!!
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