i had this moment last night when i was having dinner with a new friend and we were talking about anxiety. and we kept on finding ourselves saying that it was "unreasonable" that we were so anxious about "things beyond our control." but nonetheless we stayed steadfast and we listened to one another be unreasonable. and later that night i started to think about friendship and for me how friendship is about a commitment to being positively unreasonable with one another. what i mean is we live in a world that constantly shames us for the ways we have come to survive, for our coping strategies, for the ways we have been bruised. we live in a world that makes us fixate on small things because we know they are actually about big things. and there is something joyous and full of relief in being able to sit with someone and just bear witness say: "what you are experiencing is real and valid and i do not care if it is reasonable or not." i wonder if the anxiety is compounded by the fact that we have been made to feel like it's unreasonable. i wonder what it would look like if we threw out reason all to begin with and found another way to relate to each other. i'm trying to do that in my life -- to stop trying to find reasons, linearity, point A point B, simple origin stories. i'm increasingly realizing that none of us have simple stories. we are as complex as all of the things that have been done to us. we are as complex as all of the things that have been done to us.
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