How to Be Loved

I had always lived by ambition. I had always lived for my future. Always. What I was going to do next, how I was going to do it. When I’d first gotten sick, I’d seen every plot point as a detour, as a hairpin twist that was interfering with the way my life was supposed to be. I’d always been on my way somewhere. Things were going to be great when. Things would finally be okay if. All I had to do was this one thing. Invest in my future. Plan for the future. But what about now? What about this moment?

In all of the literature about friendship, in all of the advice columns and podcasts and essays and posts about how to be a good friend, I rarely come across its most fundamental point, the one that I learned during these years, over and over again. That friendship, true friendship, is often just about two (or more) people who love each other. The details, which are often extravagant, are just the details.

“We have a freedom, living on this side,” Allison said to me once, after I joined her in the kingdom of the ill, as we sat together in her car, driving to Whole Foods and then to her house, Sadie on a blanket on my lap. She stopped the car, pulled to the side of the road, turned to me. This was important enough for her to stop driving.
“The thing is,” she said, “it’s very, very, very expensive.”
There was a freedom. Things that I had cared so deeply about didn’t matter anymore. The fourteenth time I was on a gurney waiting for the saline to kick in was the first time I didn’t care that it was a Tuesday or a Thursday, a day on which otherwise I would have made myself try to be productive. My grad school cohorts were surpassing me, passing their exams, publishing papers, presenting at conferences. It was, for the first time, okay that I wasn’t the biggest star. (I wasn’t even on the radar.) I was starting to take pleasure in the tiniest of things: in a Momofuku cake a friend had sent from Portland via New York, a box of bath powder that came in beautiful packaging from a friend traveling through Europe; finding a T-shirt that said ZERO FUCKS GIVEN and wearing it to a doctor appointment, under a sweater, of course. I felt myself leaning into these moments of freedom, of laughter. I watched The Lonely Island music videos and when there was a truly funny scene, I laughed, and as I laughed I felt my body move, felt the laughter move its way through my brain and into my bones, and I stopped myself and put my hand on my chest and felt my chest rise and fall, rise and fall, and I knew that I was alive.

We were the only two people who could understand each other—two women, both dealing with cancer, or at least with the cancer world—but there was also, within the collective space of our shared experience, this unbridgeable divide between us. She was dying. I just believed that I might, and sooner than I would have liked. Time with Allison gave me the space to be able to say all the things I felt like I shouldn’t say to my friends, to the people who were supporting me, but it also reminded me about how alone I was in my specific experience. She was someone who understood why a CT scan is scarier the fourth time than it is the first, why reading blood work results obsessively at night on your phone while you’re supposed to be watching Girls is somehow soothing, how sometimes a negative result can be more surprising and destabilizing than one that requires immediate action. But she was also someone who had an answer, who knew exactly what was going on.

infidelity in practice was a way for me to carve out my own space in the world, to remind myself that I existed. It opened up the world for me to a sense of hidden chambers and secrets, pockets of decision and experience and choice that I stitched together to create some sense of solid ground. I believed that if I could string enough of these together, I could begin to make sense of my life. And yet every one led to some terrible destruction, some excruciating pain that I couldn’t understand.

My relationship with Charles felt like a complete counterweight to the one that had come before. Charles was warm. He loved me. He was stable.
“I’m dedicated to you,” he said one night after I’d expressed a fleeting insecurity. “I want to marry you.”
And yet it wasn’t enough. It could never be enough. Because that glue, that connection, that sense of trust that I saw other people have with each other—I didn’t know how to have that. I felt far away, locked into myself, to my own thoughts and fears and worries. I felt braided into a set of beliefs about myself: that I was unknowable; that I was unlovable; that I was fundamentally wired to be alone.

The irony, of course, is that I was desperate to connect, and that I believed that getting drunk or high with the people around me would forge a friendship, a deepening.

Years later, my mother would see my friendship with Allison as another example of this kind of predilection toward hanging out with sick old women. But that wasn’t it, not with Julianne, and not with Allison. It was that I was born with love to give and had never been told where to put it.

I couldn’t tell anyone how scared I was to be at home. I didn’t know how. And so began my separation from other people. My belief that all of my insides had to be kept secret.

Even though I was barely sentient, I already felt that I was on the periphery, that everyone else was connecting in a way I fundamentally couldn’t.