really loved this and made me (re)think a lot about my relationships to people. the last section on transformative justice really made me sit with myself and my ideas about punishment, abolition, community, and futurity. it planted a seed i think i have no choice but chase.
i enjoyed how colloquially birdsong writes in this. she curses, she uses slang, she speaks directly and without frills at times. her intro/preface felt genuine, as she reiterates throughout this book, that she's no expert, none of us really are, and we're all figuring this out together because we need to. she stresses that we need other people, we need to connect with other people and lean on them, that it makes us stronger. healthier. more alive. more human. i couldn't agree more. she speaks about how she craves a closeness, an intimacy of truly seeing and knowing another person, and how that's actually so many people whom she loves and wants to invest in, in the same ways they've chosen to invest in her. through her description of her longing, i felt myself get misty eyed, feel the tendrils of my heart reach out to these words that finally encapsulated the very same longing i've carried my whole life. how friendship has always been so important to me, how i have always given my whole self, unabashedly, until the embarrassment and disappointment of non-reciprocation, especially to the degree i yearned for, the extent i put forth, caught up to me. i was so reserved and then not, and the shift towards vulnerability, made me just that, so vulnerable. now, i am reckoning with loving deeply and without expectation, giving to only give. feeling like i have so much love, a boundless source of love, and to learn and let go is the only way it can ever work. but reading this, i wonder if there are people like me out there, searching for deeper friendships, friendships like partnerships, but in the manner of equal give and take, a waltz toward truth and honesty, and a commitment to seeing each other truly. the only thing i didn't really agree with throughout her laying out the different types of intimate friendships she has and participates in was the idea of what seems like, to me, anticipating feelings because people don't want to ask for help. that's a slippery slope for a recovering people pleaser. showing up for someone without them asking really requires the person showing up to have strong boundaries for themselves. otherwise, it can all become poisonous. plus, i get that we live in a culture of not wanting to ask for help, but expecting people to figure out when you desperately need help and then come to the rescue isn't healthy to me. i think a more secure model of friendship that is still intimate, is creating that feeling of safety and that ability to be vulnerable, which makes divulging those things you need help with easier and for people to show up on their own for you. idk if that makes sense, but that was important for me to differentiate while reading this.
anyways, i liked that she provided stories and personal connections modeling how these ways in to cultivating deeper, more meaningful relationships to friends, family, community, and others, at large, could look. i loved how this book was really an envisioning of what human connection in these dire times could be. she's right about it. about the necessity of imagining a future in order to create it. dreaming it up is such an indispensable step. and this literary journey awokened the stirrings of a long slumbering yearning and overwhelming dream that was/is opaque in tangible manifestation for me and my life.
cause after all, "i am because we are."