I will tell you all that this week, the well is running low.  Not the well of stories, necessarily, but my well of time and mental acuity.  I’ve been taking an AP Lit workshop at Northwestern this week, and it’s basically AP teacher boot-camp that lasts from 8 – 4 each day.  AP summer institutes are, bar none, the best professional development I have ever had – but they can be overwhelming.  I am learning so much, and have so many ideas rolling around in my head that I can barely process how and when I can incorporate them into my school year.  So if you find the writing in this entry sub-par, I apologize.  I guess I only have so many words, and this week they’re all being funneled toward my AP coursework the way all your blood rushes to your stomach to digest a massive meal.  How’s that for a metaphor.  As Robert Frost said, “If you are not educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world.”

On Monday evening, I was loose in the world, spending an evening with four wonderful friends.  I can’t remember the last time the five of us were together in one place, but it has easily been six months or more.  As I peeled myself off my couch where I had crashed after my class and walked to my friend Karen’s touting a chilled bottle of rosè, I veritably buzzed with the heady promise of an evening spent eating, sipping wine, catching up, and laughing with these four incredible women under the twinkling lights of Karen’s enviable backyard deck.  The night did not disappoint.  I ate cheese, drank wine, caught up on travel stories, reminisced, and more than once, laughed so hard I cried.  In a group text the next day, our friend Katie said “You girls are good for my heart!” and I cannot agree more.  When you leave a group of people, chest heavy with the lingering joy of their company, that is something special.  I also can’t thank those women enough for the support of this blog – you know how to make a girl feel special.  My friend Taylor even gave me an idea for this very blog, so I’m going to deviate slightly in my subject for this entry, but I promise I’ll bring it back around to talking to strangers next time.

In thinking about Taylor’s suggestion, I first had to think about my friends – specifically my female friends – and as I wandered the Chicago streets on my lunch break today, I thought about them some more.  I’m definitely going to brag here, but I often exist in literal awe of my friends. Each is unique in her own way, but as a general rule, my friends are whip-smart, tenacious, remarkably resilient, determined, fiercely loyal, hysterically funny, and gorgeous to boot.  To use a buzz-word, they are actual “girl bosses” who lead their companies in sales, save lives, run departments, teach children, start their own businesses, manage colleagues, do groundbreaking research, and take professional risks – all while maintaining kick-ass relationships with friends, family and partners, and many of them are now making tiny, perfect human beings and raising them (with the help of their husbands – but seriously, my mom friends blow my mind in a whole new way). 

Every shiny coin has a duller, darker mirror image, and the flip side of being ooey-gooey in love with your truly fabulous friends is the inevitable issue of comparison.  Eleanor Roosevelt said “comparison is the thief of joy,” but I actually beg to differ slightly with FDR’s better half.  I think her quote holds true when we’re talking about comparing ourselves to celebrities, or our arch-nemesis at work, or that ridiculously svelte, lulu-clad mom at Whole Foods with the thick blonde ponytail, angelic sleeping baby, and grocery cart filled with kale, chia seeds, and organic squash to make her own baby food. Those people are straight up joy-stealers.  But the truth is far messier when it comes to the ways we compare ourselves with our friends because we can be simultaneously overwhelmed with joy for the women we love while ruthlessly judging ourselves.  You see, our hearts thrum with genuine happiness for their accomplishments, their triumphs, the relationships they work so goddamn hard for, the homes they meticulously decorate, and their perfectly gorgeous children who we love more than we ever thought we could because we see our friends in their tiny faces.  We can harbor true, authentic, incandescent joy for our beautiful friends and simultaneously feel wholly inadequate about the state of our own lives.  Comparison is inevitable, and when we compare ourselves to our friends, our joy isn’t stolen – it just coexists with the uneasy feeling that we might never measure up to the women who hold us up, and that just isn’t true.

When I was in first grade, I wanted desperately to be friends with a girl named Kerry Miller.  She was pretty, she had perfectly straight bangs, her parents let her watch the Simpsons and eat Doritos, and her family was building a gigantic mansion in the suburbs (ok, so it probably was just an average house – but I remember it as a gigantic mansion).  I’ll never forget the day I was invited to go play at the construction site for Kerry’s family’s new home.  She told me what time I should be there, that I didn’t have to bring anything, and that I should wear jeans.  Here’s the kicker.  I never wore jeans.  I had one pair, and I hated them because every time I wore them, they irritated my sensitive skin. But Kerry had said to wear jeans, and by God, I always compared myself to Kerry Miller, so I adamantly insisted to my mother that I would wear my jeans.

You can imagine what happened.  Kerry and I ran around that construction site all day.  We ate Doritos, played house, and probably would have watched the Simpson’s, but they didn’t have a T.V. yet.  I had a great time until a few hours into the play date when my legs started to burn, but I didn’t complain.  I continued playing hide-and-go-seek, and red rover, and cops and robbers, and every other ridiculous childhood game that involved incessant running, and by the time I got home the inside of my legs were rubbed raw from the rough denim of the jeans I never wore.  I was miserable.  My mom made me get in the bath and it stung so badly, I cried.  I spent days putting ointment on my wounded skin, and I didn’t wear jeans again until the eighth grade (and that is not an exaggeration.  My sixth and seventh-grade holiday dances were spent in stretch pants and sweatshirts commemorating the holiday.  How’s that for a visual?)

Kerry and I were friends for the rest of the school year but she moved away the summer after first grade, and I never spoke to her again.  Why the story about Kerry?  Ahhhh, it’s a metaphor, friends. You see I’m me, Kerry is the proxy for all of my amazing friends, and my first pair of jeans represent all the beautiful, special things my friends have that are not yet meant for me.  The nasty, prickly, red rash on my legs? That’s what happens when I compare.  At first I don’t notice it, and then slowly it starts to irritate me until I’m in tears in the bathtub nursing wounds I should never have incurred in the first place.  I should have admired Kerry’s jeans, been happy for her that she had them, and then proudly zipped around her family’s property in my stirrup leggings like the little fashion forward champ I was (insert groan). 

I firmly believe we are all meant to have the things we desire – or most of them anyway – but in our own time.  I assure you I strutted into my final eighth-grade dance in a pair of dark wash, boot-cut jeans from 5-7-9, a black baby tee emblazoned with the Friends logo, and a pair of high heeled brown leather clogs.  And there was no rash, no tears, and no comparisons.  Own where you are, who you are, and what you have.  Love your friends fiercely, celebrate their joys, and make them your joy, without comparison.  You can be damn sure that someday they’ll do the same for you.

 

Until next time….