I didn't forget about your birthday.

heal different, stay the same, and think different

¿What you heard?

I heal in community, surrounding myself with people and talking about hurt.

Perhaps, it is the ancestors in me. Perhaps, the Lebu in this excerpt on ndeup.

Yet, not all ancestors are my ancestors, so I have had to adapt to the recoveries of others, like that in a film I produced called Healing Silence about a Vipassana retreat.

I hurt my best friend.

Her recovery was nine months of no talking.

We’ve spent all my birthdays together since quarantine lifted, but she wasn’t there when I turned 30.

We finally spoke Friday.

“I didn’t forget about your birthday,” she said.

She had texted me, but I never received it because I was birthday-ing abroad without her.

She also told me that she knew that I knew that our friendship would survive this. I did know! But I also faced a lot of doubting Thomases. I told her that we had to take this selfie so that we could let them Thomases know silence doesn’t always equal death! Hawk tuah on you, Thomas!!

What you doin’?!

I love that this picture with my teacher looks almost exactly like my picture with my friend. Back when I last saw Ms. Spears, the idea of being friends with a teacher would have been crazy to me… but now, I’m grown, and I know better.

My friend and I met in 2008 at a photography class at Harvard-Westlake Lower School.

For the next five years, we didn’t talk for regular reasons — different school buses, different sports, different schedules.

Until in 2013, I joined the theater, where she (working backstage) and I reunited at the Harvard-Westlake Upper School.

Our nine months of no talking ended on that same stage this Friday at a retirement party for a teacher in the department.

Because it was slotted for 1-3pm, I knew anyone available must be an artist — either self-employed or unemployed.

She and I were the only ones there from our class, and it was a beautiful thing to be affirmed that, despite all the changes in ourselves and in the world, we are still friends, and we are still artists.

What you seen??

ONE PIECE (1999-) has been especially comforting as I navigate this difficult time in my friendship because one of the core philosophies the protagonists live by is an extreme loyalty to friends — nakama, they’re called — that closely aligns with my own views.

This underdog value of radical friendship, however, is utterly incomprehensible to the big bads of the show like this scar-faced motherfucker named Crocodile…

Examining the root of my current struggles with my own nakama, I realize that the central issue is a fundamental philosophical misalignment.

Unlike Crocodile, my best friend is deeply attuned to the power of friendship, and yet, she solidly positions it beneath romance and family whereas I, like the One Piece protagonists (who honestly actually don’t really have any families or significant others), see friendship as the primary human relationship.

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