Why deny the obvious child

I have spent so much of this year thinking about friendship. About connection. About that rush of a feeling when you find yourself comfortably vulnerable with another person, able to stay the thread of multiple conversations and wandering points. It’s being present while also in this sort of other-worldly flow outside of your body, and being able to tell the person sitting across from you is in it, too. It’s one of my favorite places to be.

I knew that friendships this year would be an unstable field of change - I expected it. I prepared for it. I had the knowledge that my best friend would be moving to another country for a year in advance, and I’m really grateful for that. I had time to process it all with him. If only all great adjustments had such a lead time. This time last year, I was also acutely aware of the changes happening in another very close friendship that I had relied on for the greater part of the last decade. I spoke loudly, emotionally, and often with my romantic partner about how this was effecting me. Distance in two great relationships that helped to define my full understanding of myself. I knew that it would be destabilizing, and I did all that I could to prepare for the pressure it may put on the other areas of my life. I drew a little diagram of a pyramid after a particular helpful therapy session to help explain where my unstable areas were and where I could focus more attention on things that were perhaps more within my control.

In my attempts to relinquish control over my growing and changing friendships, I turned my focus into my relationship with myself. Getting sober, meditation, somatic therapy. Suddenly there was a me to reckon with that was pretty fucking loud. Quitting drinking exposed several raw nerves I wasn’t aware of. It’s been a really complicated and vulnerable endeavor. One that I didn’t anticipate to feel like a closing of a door to connection.

As a creative person with a 9-5 day job, I often feel like I’m straddling two worlds. Living a double life where my musician friends laugh at my 10pm bedtime and my office friends think I’m always up to something very exciting, but truthfully I spend most of my time at home with my dog. This divide has only become more prominent throughout the year. The veil between my worlds was much more simple to cross when drinking. Easier to shift my mood from exhausted and quiet to ready for fun, ready for dancing, ready for socializing, no matter how I actually felt underneath it. I’ve learned a lot about my ability to do those things sober, but I’m much worse at adjusting or hiding my distaste for something I’m not feeling these days.

The opening for that vulnerable, connected place is much smaller than it used to be. Similarly to my best friend being in Japan, the time difference is our biggest hurdle. To exist in different spaces of different days - when we find a common ground and conversational flow, I glow in every second of it. That dynamic feels similar with friends who are drinking. Our daylight hours of connection feel fewer and farther in between. I’ve also found that many of my friends who don’t drink anymore do smoke a lot of week. Which I have never been able to do comfortably. I have zero judgment for substance use in any capacity, especially when the world feels impossibly intolerable lately. We’re all trying our best. But it’s been difficult and lonely to feel like I’m actively choosing something that builds more doors between us when the opening of those doors is what I want more than anything lately.

Especially in the wake of a heartbreak. I ended a loving, sweet, nearly two-year-long romantic relationship last month. Sometimes getting to know yourself better means more clearly seeing dynamics that impede love and connection, even when loving is exactly what you’re both trying to do. It’s felt impossible to look back at this time last year, point to the three people I felt the closest to and the most connected to, and look at how much has changed in a relatively short amount of time. An ocean of distance between one, and complete disconnection to the other to. And not just disconnection, but silence and heartbreak. And a whole lot of space to fill with more understanding of myself eventually, but currently that space just feels like great big empty holes.

It feels easy to get lost in that grief these days. And while feeling that grief and processing it and letting myself cry over it has been incredibly important and necessary, there have been a couple bright spots that I actually sat down to right about today because I was inspired.

First of the two is that in spite of and perhaps because of the great distance, Jordan and I have started really digging into our next album. Feeling creative connection with him across the ocean and seeing ideas and sounds start to come together, and seeing us both get excited and focused, feels like a testament to our commitment to each other, our friendship, and our art. I’m very grateful for that.

The second bright spot was a somewhat unexpected one. I am currently reading the memoir of one of my favorite filmmakers, Desiree Akhavan, called “You’re Embarrassing Yourself.” I was really excited to read this book because I’ve been in love with Desiree and her work for years (it was an important part of my coming out journey), but I had no idea the impact these pages would have on me. This is for lots of reasons, but one of my favorites was a full chapter she spent talking about her best friend/creative partner. The way that she wrote about this platonic love of her life felt so fresh and connected to my heart, that I was immediately inspired to do the same. I don’t feel like there are enough love letters to friendship and I want to spend my life writing more of them. In the spirit of all that, I am going to take the rest of this newsletter to talk about my friendship with my incredible friend Genevieve (they/she, so you might see me swap back and forth in this). Where distance has felt like an enemy this year, I didn’t plan to find so much joy and connection and support in one of my most important but still long-distance friendships.

Genevieve and I met in 2013. I was working at the Ogden Graywhale, which was one location of a small franchise of record stores along the Wasatch Front. My best friends at the time were boys that worked with me, and I’d recently tried and failed to turn one of these friendships into something more. A few months after this boy and I clashed crushes and impossibly bad communication tactics, I was absolutely flabbergasted to hear that he had a GIRLFRIEND and they were a new employee at the SLC store because as far as I could tell, this boy was OBVIOUSLY not interested in having a girlfriend because it didn’t work out with us (lol).

A function of working at a Graywhale is that if you don’t have a specific item a customer is looking, you can see in the database that another of the then 4 other stores might have it. If they did, part of the job was calling the staff at that store to go on a little hunt for the item while you sat on the phone with them. I remember the first time I heard Genevieve pick up the phone. Her voice was bright and friendly and effortlessly cool. I put on my best “SOOOO HAPPY YOU’RE ON THE TEAM” voice and when I hung up, my boss at the time said “you know that’s who Jon’s dating now, right?” and I spent the next hour trying to find pictures of her on then-pretty-useful facebook.

I met Genevieve in person shortly thereafter. I attended a show at the Urban Lounge with their boyfriend/my friend, and she wasn’t there because she was also playing a show somewhere else. When we walked out of the venue at the end of the show, one of the most vibrant people I’d ever seen zipped up to us on their bike, pulling a tiny trailer with a painted black and white cello strapped to the back. She circled us with her bike a few times, then hopped off and hugged and kissed my friend and introduced herself as Genevieve. Their hair was short like mine and our interaction immediately felt tense and guarded. We walked back to the boy’s house where we sat around the kitchen table and drank beers and talked about all sorts of things. Mostly music. I remember us talking about Laura Mvula and playing shows and performing families with such an intense urgency. Like we were fighting but through cool points and which bands we knew first and how many shows we’d played. Armor on both of us too thick to realize that what were actually saying was “wow, we have a lot in common! look at all these things we both love.”

Over the next few months, we kept this tough guy toxic shit up, but with this undertone of respect. We played a show together on their birthday at Kilby Court, and the second I heard her voice I was both in love and furious. I could no longer compare myself to this person because in my head, there was no competition. I was writing the same silly songs in the same few chords, and Genevieve was singing ballads of train hopping and crust punk love with the most buttery soft and mature voice I’d ever heard while shredding on the fucking cello. This sort of performance was not remotely in my world at this time, and I was in awe. Insanely jealous and so deeply impressed.

It was at a mutual friend’s bachelorette party that the first crack in the armor appeared. I found myself wanting to be close to Genevieve, but didn’t know what to do with all the competitive jealousy when we were around each other. But it was intoxicating. It felt like it made us both better in some fucked up, toxic-masculinity type way. I don’t remember which one of us made the plan, but one of us suggested that I come down to SLC earlier in the day of the party so that we could go thrifting and find outfits for it together. The day ended up being incredibly fun. We had bought a bottle of Pendleton whiskey and filled our respective flasks. We got impossibly drunk in the streets of Park City, and while stumbling back from the bar to the rented apartment, we fell back from the group and Genevieve said “DO YOU WANT TO HEAR THE HARMONY I WROTE FOR STRANGERS??” Strangers being a song that I’d written earlier that year and had played at the show we played together. We sang it in the streets and it was the first time my music had inspired something creative to happen in someone else in front of me, and I’ll never forget the feeling. It was burning bright joy in my heart and I stomped in the street. We spent the next several hours sharing horror stories, road tales, fears, dreams, yellow American Spirits, and the rest of the Pendleton on the balcony while the party happened inside.

It would make for a much simpler story if I could say “and we’ve been inseparable ever since!” but it continued to take a few more years for us to break down a few more doors. It took several breakups, several shows, several bands together, and a move to Seattle and then back to SLC for me for us to really find our friendship. We had a lot of layers to unravel and most of them weren’t together at first. I think we hit our next big stride in 2016 with the release of Beyoncé’s Lemonade. They were living in by the U of U in an upstairs apartment and we’d write songs together and drink whiskey and sing along to Beyonce and Paul Simon. In December of that year we got our toes tattooed with the words “LIVE TINY” as a protest against Christmas and mothers.

In 2017, Genevieve was in my band as I recorded “Strangers,” my first full length studio album. They sang that original harmony they had written 4 years before on the final version and played cello through the whole record. That year, we also unfortunately bonded in grief. I lost my stepfather to suicide in March of 2017, and Genevieve lost her father in a tragic bicycle accident that September. By the end of that year, we were pretty inseparable. We built our lives up with the support of each other. We have always been fierce cheerleaders of each other, and I think this is about when we both started to really believe that we could trust each other in that.

In 2018, Genevieve moved to the east coast to build a career that didn’t exist yet and put some distance between her and the grief that Salt Lake City had become associated with. I remember being sad that she was leaving SLC, but it made so much sense that what they needed to do was bigger than this place. There was no doubt in my mind that our friendship would continue. When I got divorced that fall, Genevieve was the first person I called. I was on a plane within a few weeks to go cause havoc in Boston with them. For the next year and a half, we collided in chaotically planned “best friend trips” by picking place to travel together somewhere in the country (Boston, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York City), colliding in a whirlwind of far too much whiskey and tears and grief and love. We’d take little breaks in talking after these trips to process all we could and couldn’t remember, but we’d always end up coming back together. Easing back into the comfort again.

I visited Genevieve in NYC at the end of February 2020. We had a particularly tense time - she had just moved there and I hated it in NYC (I thought I did at the time, but now that I’ve been there in warmer weather a few times, I REALLY love it). We were going through our own separate sadness and feelings of fear and anxiety and disconnection, and the news at every place we went to kept warning about Covid-19. We stayed as close as we could through the pandemic, but it was deeply lonely for both of us. We kept in touch, but with no plans to get together anytime soon, we drifted a bit away from each other.

In 2021, Genevieve got married to one of the biggest sweethearts I’ve ever met. Tim feels like a brother after just a few visits to NYC. Since then, I’ve been out to see them a couple of times, and Genevieve and I have been working hard at being intentional in all of the things that we do, not just in our friendship. About a year ago, we realized that in order to stay connected with the distance, we had to fucking schedule our hangouts. Having a set time to catch-up helped us set the stage and get back into a rhythm of connecting.

In the last several months, it feels like we text nearly every day. They’ve come to SLC twice this year and I feel like I have her in my life more now than I ever have before. Even when she lived here. I wouldn’t have been able to navigate this year without their cheerleading and warm embraces and loving call outs when I’m being actually insane.

Genevieve is one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met. If you are in any non-profit space or care about justice-oriented activism through feelings and data, then I highly suggest checking out their work through GV Advisory - watching her build this work from the ground up and connect to her values and community inspires me to bring my best and most values-aligned self to everything that I do. I got to watch them give a presentation last week about data and feelings, and seeing the chat light up with “this was my favorite presentation of the whole conference!” made me beam like a proud parent. Watching her grow into a life that she built for herself with such strength and intention has been one of the greatest joys of my life. They are also the funniest fucking person I’ve ever known. She accidentally became a real life New York Mets fan by simply committing to a bit for too long. She goes to their games now. Like takes a train all the way to Flushing. She convinced me that bears could whistle for 5 years of my adult life. She once ordered me a balloon bouquet as a congrats for getting divorced that I had to go pick up myself with no prior warning and watch in horror while a small woman filled my Prius up with balloons. They write songs that speak to your guts and play the meanest mouth trumpet you’ve ever heard. There are ways that we take turns holding each other that have taught me how to be a person more than anything else in my life.

Lately I have had a mean part of my brain telling me that I am afraid of commitment and will be unable to accept true love when it comes into my life. When that part starts to speak up, I just remind them of all this. If this isn’t true love and commitment, then I don’t know what is. I love you, Genevieve! Thank you for being my person! This is me shouting from the digital rooftops about it because it’s just that important.