originally written: 2/13/19
spent all day today texting with 10 strangers (potential friends) at @theinvisibledog ! we talked about anything & everything: finding home, how to negotiate boundaries with family, the apocalypse, how to get over heart break, worrying, energy, gender, kindness, forgiveness, spirit guides, becoming, grief. at one point someone taught me how to breathe through anxiety attacks! after they left i wrote each person a love letter. this week i am celebrating alternative forms of intimacy to challenge the glorification of normative romantic love. today was about stranger intimacy. stranger intimacy is especially important to me: so often we can talk to people we don’t know more candidly than the people in our lives. for a moment we get to re-invent ourselves anew, try something different — not just introducing ourselves to them, but to ourselves, too, every system of oppression is predicated on the production of strangers — that place where we hold all of our anxiety, fear & rage. the construction of the modern individual requires loneliness — the framing of others as threats, not friends. when we actually meaningfully engage with each other the divisional & fear-mongering logics which lubricate the status quo dissolve & we are confronted by another jug of stories, tissues, & bones just trying to figure it out. stranger intimacy is also important personally to me because i have been harassed & attacked so many times in public & had no one defend me or ask me if i was okay. sometimes it feels impossible to go outside as myself because of this violation of trust. today was also about exercising trust in strangers: remembering that there are people in the world who i do not know who care about me & would defend me (& i them). i am so grateful to everyone who came for taking time to bear witness to each other & i love & need you very much
