How to read this: the strikethroughs are lines I was uncomfortable with but wanted to leave in anyway, and the notes in the margins are me editing myself in real time. You’re watching me grow across the piece — start to finish.
I've been having a really tough time with friendships lately. I can't quite tell if this is a me problem or a them problem.
Don’t open on the complaint. Start with the idea.
I turned 50 this year, and it’s become a kind of marker. A starting point.
Katy Milkman, a behavioral economist at Wharton, calls it the “fresh start effect”: a birthday, a new year, any threshold quietly files your old self away as, well, the old you. Her research is about the stuff of life: people start diets, join gyms, finally save for retirement. Sometimes you turn 50 and you look around the room and go, wait, why is everyone still here in my life?
My working (and evolving) theory is that my friendships, and some family relationships, have the potential to make me sick. Or, more accurately, more sick. I’m already going to be sick — that’s my daily experience. But “more sick” is the part that’s somewhat in my control: who I am when I see people, who I pretend to be, whose presence makes me hide my symptoms.
Keep this whole. It’s the part I actually mean.
My whole life I've spent performing wellness. On stage, of course, because that's the job. But also in every friendship where something goes wrong and I justify it away, scared to confront it, and stuff it down so I don't upset anyone. I don't want anyone mad at me. Ever. It makes my skin crawl in an outsized way that is probably not good for me.
You’ve made the point.
You don’t have to prove it hurts.
But then I get sick.
The betrayal of my soul unleashes her fury on my immune system.
There’s that saying I can never get right, the one about becoming the average of your five closest friends. That’s not it. But you know the one I mean. And the older I get, the more I feel the thing underneath it: as I age I keep growing closer to myself, settling further in, and the people who can’t quite meet me there start to stick out. Not because they’re bad. Just because I can feel the gap now, where before I couldn’t.
Here’s my theory. I thought this was going to be a post about how certain people make me sick. The friendships on the chopping block fall into a few categories:
The person who doesn’t like what I do for a living.
The person who won’t commit.The one who never really liked me.Your husband and I don’t get along.And then there’s politics.
This is the letter again, just with bullet points. Naming everyone’s failures isn’t the essay.
Let it go.
And listen — I love friends! I feel very lonely a lot of the time. I’m a seeker. I’m endlessly curious about the inner workings of my own mind, and most people just aren’t. What I’m talking about is something deeper. That’s what I’m missing right now.
The loneliness doesn’t need the exclamation point. Say the quiet version
and trust it.
But the more I sit with it, the more I don’t think they’re the ones making me sick.
I think the suffocating is.
And I’ll admit the part that makes me sound bad: I think I’m a little more awake than they are. Bratty, I know. Like I’m more evolved than you. But, um. I guess I do mean that.
I know I wanted to keep this. But the whole point is to put the ego down, not read it aloud first.
Crossing it out is best.
I’m a people pleaser (recovering, ish, on a good day). I mean, who isn’t nowadays? So when a friendship goes out of alignment, I don’t cool off and drift like a normal person. I grip. I overcompensate. I get more agreeable, more available, more fine — and pretending costs me a body I don’t have to spare.
Martha Beck has this idea: integrity isn’t about being good. It’s about being intact. In one piece.
And so my theory is that the friendship doesn’t hand me an illness. My response to it sometimes splits me off from myself. The grip is the sickness. And boy can I grip tight.
Which brings me to the letter.
I wrote a letter to “clear up some things.” Twenty-five, thirty years of friendship, every way you wronged me, in order, the full indictment, delivered in one go. 😬
I know. 🙄 I knew better. I have Harriet Lerner on my shelf. The Dance of Anger is one long argument that the big cathartic blowup feels righteous and changes nothing — because it isn’t a new step, it’s just the old dance at maximum volume. The pursuer pursues. And I pursued.
And do you know what came back from sending that letter? “I don’t want to go back to the past. I like to live in the future.”
Leave it cold. Don’t add a line telling everyone it was cold.
And then I did the last, most me thing of all. I apologized. For the letter. I took it all back to smooth it over.
Except I didn’t take it back. Because I meant it. I still mean it. I just meant it in the worst possible format.
So here’s where I actually am, and I should be truthful: I’m not writing to you from the other side of this. I’m in it.
The only thing Lerner really recommends is that you stop trying to change the other dancer and change your own steps instead — and see who was only ever a dance partner. Not confront them. Not grit my teeth. Just, stop leading. Let the friendships cool without a verdict.
Someone who can let a relationship end without needing to be found innocent first.
My instinct was to write the big letter. And I did. And it went about as well as you’d imagine.
I’ve made some progress this past week. I’m left here on the other side of it with the uncomfortable realization that growth, for me, is discovering I can leave a relationship without announcing it. Quietly. On my own time, in my own way, to protect my own body. That family member who triggers my immune system into freaking out doesn’t really need to know I’ve set boundaries in place. The friend who never calls will just continue to… never call. And I can simply move forward.
I think the biggest lesson here is that one should not send the big-ass letter. To most things. I’ve done it maybe five or six times in my life, and it has NEVER gone well.
Just yesterday I wrote a letter to my contractor, cataloguing every way he’s disappointed me. And then I ripped it up. I felt better having written it. But I didn’t send it.
Brevity wins the day. Brevity is something I haven’t really stumbled across before. It feels powerful. And my body agrees.
I feel the weight lift.
Thanks for reading! If this post filled you up in any way please ♥️ and share.
♥️Molly
🎁 The Goody Bag
A few things keeping me company lately. Take what’s useful, leave the rest.
The Charisma Myth by Olivia Fox Cabane. It’s where the Responsibility Transfer up above comes from, and it’s so good. Highly recommend for anyone looking to build their listening skills and find a little more inner confidence.
This piece by Jenna Park, who writes Everything Is Liminal called How many versions of ourselves do we leave behind?
Dan Harris in conversation with Charles Duhigg (author of Supercommunicators) on 10% Happier, “The Science of Effective Communication.” The four rules of a real conversation, when to be vulnerable, how to turn a shallow question into a deep one. I actually haven’t read his book yet, but it’s on my list.
The Jinx (HBO). I’m rewatching it with my daughter, who’s becoming a true-crime-doc convert after we tore through both seasons of Making a Murderer as a family. I know that’s weird to some, but she’s very interested in it and when you find something that you have in common with your fourteen year old, you go with it!
📺 Also just finished watching with the entire family — Jury Duty (Amazon). Season two holds up, and is called Company Retreat and is so funny! It shows such a great side of humanity. A nice palate cleanser after all the murder.
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