hug your people tight
the human condition can hurt ❤️🩹 Solo: A Show About Friendship can make it hurt less.
I am getting this in just under the wire of my weekly deadline. I hope you’ll forgive me for being tardy. I was feeling incredibly uninspired these past few days and I planned to send out a list of things I have been doing / enjoyed recently to just churn out some content. I would’ve sent it out, too1, but the past few things I’ve written on are things I am very proud of2 and I am trying to challenge myself to keep that cadence up.
Brian was sick all week, so I spent days at home that I would’ve normally spent in the office, and meals that I would’ve prepped had been relegated to pastina with butter and chicken soup. I don’t mind taking it slow every once in a while, but to be quite honest by Friday night I was starting to go a little stir crazy. However, this weekend turned out to be incredibly fulfilling for me in ways that I didn’t really expect. So instead of hot links, I am going to share some thoughts on something that really impacted me. As always, leave a comment or dm me. And if this essay moved you, in any way at all, please forward to a friend. I’ve had a lot of momentum building up the past few weeks and it’s because of all of you and your support. Thank you for being here.
Act One: Friendship
I am chronically online, super informed, and usually bogged down by multiple forms of media at once. But I hate podcasts.
One thing I do enjoy, is listening to the dialogue of sitcoms I’ve seen 100 times. I know that’s a really weird thing to admit, but when you think about it, it’s really just like having the TV on in the background. I do this a good amount, but lately, I find choosing what episode or what season or even what show to throw on an exhausting choice. It occurred to me one day, that I needed to find something else to listen to when I wasted 30 minutes at work trying to decide which series to rewatch for the umpteenth time.
It was on this day that I randomly threw on an episode of This American Life. I don’t think I had listened to it in years, at least not since ninth grade English with Mr. Shanksy. I don’t really know what COMPELLED me to put this on, but I did. On that day, the most recent episode was entitled “Say it To My Face,” a phrase I love. I had no idea, at that moment, how this episode would stick with me weeks and weeks later.
There are multiple parts to that episode, and it is a fantastic episode start to finish, but I am going to focus on Act One. Some background: Gabe Mollica is a comedian who had a falling out with a friend. Instead of talking about it with said friend, he wrote, produced, and performed a one-man show in various US cities. A producer at This American Life reached out to him and asked if he would be open to going on the show, inviting the ex-friend to a performance, and recording a conversation between the both of them to then be edited and condensed down into a radio story for nosy people like me. (Listen to it wherever you get your podcasts.)
While listening, I learned Gabe was performing his show, Solo: A Show About Friendship, at the Connelly Theater on East 4th Street for the next couple weeks, and I would be able to go see it. As I listened to the episode, the first few minutes I was like, “oh yeah, this sounds like a really cool show, I’ll definitely go see it.” At the end of the episode, I was like, “I need to go see this show because I need the full STORY. I need MORE.” So I went on Saturday night to the 9:15 PM showing by myself. I’m glad I went alone. I needed to see it alone. I felt like I had invited Gabe over to my house and he was telling me this story one on one, that he had experienced this crazy thing and was like “I have to tell Victoria about this!” I had never felt closer to a stranger than I did sitting at The Connelly Theater Upstairs.
I resonated with everything he said. From calendar anxiety, counting how many days you have remaining in x place or with x person, the stress of feeling torn between two friend groups that can’t actually be friends with each other, the pain of going through a breakup, feeling like you’re being a bad friend when you’re obsessed with a budding romantic relationship. All of those things, which I’m confident all of us can relate to, on some level, are part of being a human on this planet. But the one part that stuck out to me like a sore thumb, for obvious reason, was his commentary on when tragedy strikes.
Gabe’s mother had a health scare. He struggled to talk to his friends about his mother’s diagnosis, and he felt angry that they weren’t giving him exactly what he needed. When my brother got into his accident, I felt the exact same way. Gabe talked about how there were conflicting diagnoses for his mother, how every day the consensus seemed to change, and no one really provided him any comfort. My brother’s consensus never changed, it was simply paralysis, but I couldn’t help but feel horrible when people would ask if it would change. I somehow felt responsible for their awkwardness when I had to tell them, “yeah, probably not.” How do you text that condensed emotion to a friend and expect them to comfort you?
I’ll be blunt; navigating that shit and those feelings SUCKED. I’m sure I could write that more eloquently, I could explain it more articulately, but that’s all I want to say. That period of time in my life was really hard, and I felt like no one understood what I was going through. There’s a good amount of people who aren’t really in my life any more, and I have a sneaking feeling it was because they didn’t know how to talk to me when I was going through that. I didn’t actively cut people out of my life over that, it’s not like I kept tabs on who texted and who didn’t, but you do start to notice things like that. You see who’s there for you and who isn’t.
Gabe makes a claim early in the show that “he’s 30 and doesn’t have any friends.” But this gives the audience pause. Is that really true? Does he really not have friends? Or are we as a society so completely enamored by the idea of “friendship” and what that should look like, that we write off people every single day? I have fallen victim to this. My entire life I’ve never had one of those classic, Instagram-ready friend groups. I’ve had friends since childhood, friends from college, friends from jobs, camp, etc., etc. but they never really meshed together. The only thing they seemed to have in common was knowing me. I have always struggled to understand my own friendships because I didn’t have what society convinced me was the ideal group of female friends. And while I’ve become way less insecure about that over time and focused less on what these relationships look like and more about fortifying them, the less intense that pressure felt.
Gabe plays with nuances of what we think friendships are supposed to be. Does it really count as a friend if you only talk about Adam Sandler movies? This got me thinking; I have to acknowledge that certain friends serve certain purposes. I don’t talk about everything with every single one of my friends. And I think it goes both ways. I’m probably not a both-day weekend friend for most people, and that’s okay! Mostly, because, I believe that we all see our friends like people that we can simply place in our own hierarchy of needs. But it can hurt to know that truth; some people don’t see us the way we see them.
To Gabe, it seemed freeing. Maybe that was after a lot of years of careful reflection. Maybe I caught him at a high point, where he was able to focus less on the friend he lost, and more on the friends he has currently. Maybe he’s working towards fortifying the relationships he’s in now, something we all can do.
This show has encouraged me to think differently about the people in my life. I could tie this up really nicely with a quote from Gabe’s show, but I’m not going to because I think you should all go see it instead of assuming you got the gist from reading this. I met him after the show and it felt like I have known him for years. You can buy tickets for that HERE and follow him on Instagram HERE.
(and if you’re interested in stuff like that, def let me know. I think I can find a way to work it in!)
and for those who have shared kind words about them, THANK YOU, you give me energy to keep going)