🧿don't spin this block🐍

on cleaning house

It’s a quiet, gloomy Sunday morning. In a few hours, the sound of drums will reverberate through the windows of my Chinatown apartment in celebration of the Lunar New Year. It’s the year of the snake, which feels fitting for personal and political reasons. In the Chinese zodiac, the snake represents rebirth, transformation, wisdom, and healing — a stark contrast to the Christian interpretation I grew up with, which views snakes as an emblem of evil, sin, death, and temptation. What does the unveiling of others and ourselves incite in us? Is it an opportunity to curiously engage with the newly shed layers? Does it trigger us into victimization, blame, or judgment? These are the questions I’ve been reflecting on for the past year and a half as I end a cycle of clearing out misaligned relationships.

There is a common belief that friendships that last longer than seven years will last a lifetime, based on a study conducted by Dutch sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst. What most people don’t know is that Mollenhorst’s research was not testing whether friendships last a lifetime but rather the considerable changes within personal relationships that happen over the course of seven years. His conclusion was that only 30% of people who hold a specific role in our lives at the start of a seven-year period will play that same role at the end of it. This is primarily due to what he calls opportunity over personal choice (i.e., you no longer live in the same city, see each other at work, or live next door to one another, or you’ve had significant lifestyle changes such as marriage and/or children). As society grows more individualistic, this becomes even more true. It’s worth noting that this was a study conducted on a Dutch population, and one could argue that the percentage of friends who remain could be less than 30% amongst Americans who have a more pronounced sense of individualism. The findings from Mollenhorst’s study are compounded by the overreliance on technology and social media, which erodes our social skills, the death of third spaces, and the late-stage capitalism hamster wheel that keeps many of us in a perpetual state of burnout. The rarity of sustaining long-term friendships should not come as a surprise in a culture where virtually nothing is sustainable. As someone who prides themselves on sustaining long-term friendships, I have grappled with internalizing my inability to build lifelong friendships in the nine years I have lived in New York City as a personal failure.

In the early years of living in New York, I had a very low tolerance for misaligned friendships. I cut ties with male-identified PickMesha’s who ditched their friends at the drop of a dime if it meant they were closer to reaching their goal of being married with kids by their 30s. I walked away from frenemies who were secretly in competition with me and would go after guys they knew were interested in me. I stopped responding to texts from celebrity worshippers who had no sense of personality outside of their fandom. I got the ick from people who talked my ear off about nonsense every time I spoke to them, barely letting me get a word in edgewise. I stopped inviting people who could not read the room into my rooms.

But sometimes, I was the problem. I’d go through periods where I’d be aloof or indifferent towards people who had a genuine interest in befriending me. I routinely flaked on plans due to social anxiety or depression. I had strong opinions that made me come across as intense or too critical. Four years into living in New York City, I concluded that I must be the common denominator because I had no girlfriends in the city to create a COVID pod with. I thought the best way to reckon with these traits in myself was to start from scratch. I met new friends and decided that I would embrace differences and do a better job at showing up. The problem was that I didn’t know to what extent I should do this. I very quickly began conflating what I felt was my tendency to be judgmental with my intuition. I overextended myself, showed up in spaces I did not want to be in, and ignored questionable behavior patterns because I wanted to give everyone the benefit of the doubt in favor of being a better person. I did not realize how much I was sacrificing my authenticity in the process.

By the end of 2023, I had gone through two friend breakups and had begun the process of quietly quitting a third friendship, all with people I had met in the early days of the pandemic. The first friendship breakup started after a succession of issues in the months leading up to the Renaissance World Tour, to which we had tickets with two of my other friends. It started with expecting to be included in every aspect of my social life, including things I was doing with people I had been friends with for years before knowing her or people she expressly did not like. I responded to her feelings about this by carving out more time to hang out with her on a weekly basis.

Shortly after this, the friendship progressively devolved when some dismissive and insensitive comments were made about the exploitation and burnout I had been experiencing at work. I made an attempt to address how these comments made me feel and was told that if I had explained myself differently, perhaps she would’ve understood better instead of an apology or full accountability for making the statements. I went on a family vacation the day after this and needed to take some space before addressing yet another issue with her. It all came to a head through a petty social media subliminal post, which was her way of trying to make me feel how she perceived I was treating her by not including her in all aspects of my social life or responding to a text message she sent me about seeing her ex’s car parked on a street in their old neighborhood when I was on vacation and still processing my feelings about our most recent conflict. I was triggered and blew up in a way I had never done before with a friend. I didn’t like how the interaction made me feel, and I knew that anyone who could bring that side out of me was not someone I needed in my life.

I’m not afraid of conflict, and being in a long-term partnership and sustaining lifelong friendships during messy periods of growth have taught me how to address them in a healthy way, and this was not it. I had yielded to her feelings even when I felt they were unreasonable, but when my feelings were hurt, not only was there no yielding (which I wouldn’t have even expected, I just wanted empathy), there was no care or consideration given to them. In my hurt, I chose not to engage with her until I felt ready to speak again, and I was being punished for it.

We went to the Renaissance World Tour separately. I sat on the far left end of our four seats with my two friends I came with in between us. She came right before the show started, and when the lights came back up, she was already gone — I knew then that this friendship would never recover. If a Beyoncé concert couldn’t bring us together, what could? For months, I ruminated and tried to look at it from every angle. I carried shame for the abrasive and highly emotional way I blew up. I was mad at myself for not seeing how false the perceptions we had of one another were. We bonded over loving and hating the same things and coming from broken homes. I admired how unapologetic she was when it came to shaking the table— it made me feel affirmed as someone with polarizing opinions. Sometimes, the traits you admire in others turn out to be the very thing that pushes you away from them. I’ve learned that shared interests and trauma bonding do not equal alignment. In fact, you can be more aligned with someone you have little in common with solely because you have a similar approach to how you communicate, empathize, and regard the people you are in relationship with. As I unpacked these issues, it became clear that this friendship was reflective of my shadow side. I was repeating a childhood pattern of holding emotional space for someone who was wholly incapable of reciprocating it and connecting with someone over a shared sense of hyper-critical thinking because I am hypercritical of myself. Eventually, I got to a place of focusing less on my anger and how I was wronged and more on the areas of growth this conflict incited in me.

The second friend break-up came just a few months later in the Fall of 2023. It happened with a fellow creative who had appropriated my intellectual property and remixed it in A.I., thinking I wouldn’t notice. I previously wrote about this and will spare you the details. However, this was another opportunity to do shadow work. I was triggered because I am someone who puts a lot of time and energy into my artistry. I don’t take shortcuts, and I try to embrace the tedious and challenging aspects of making art because they yield the most growth. I’m also an independent self-starter who will try to figure out how to do something on my own first before enlisting other people to help me. Another pattern created in childhood was being repeated. The parentified little Black girl to hyperindependent Black woman pipeline was at play here. Black women are so used to shouldering the weight of multiple people that many of us view seeking support as a personal inadequacy. There is nothing inherently wrong with delegating or outsourcing, which is what I believe this person thought they were doing. When I peeled back that layer, I was able to see that the core issue was the tactlessness of it all, though, for a while, I thought there was a possibility I was being unreasonable. All of my second-guessing came to an end when I learned from one of her ex-collaborators that I had been accused of pulling out of producing a project I had never agreed to produce, which left me in the position of having to pull up receipts and defend my reputation. As disappointing as that was, I’m grateful for the confirmation because, without it, I’d still be questioning if I had been fair in my reaction to her theft of my work.

For a while, I was paranoid. I put up walls and questioned everyone’s intentions. I started to feel like I wasn’t meant to have close friends in this city full of self-serving energy vampires. Maybe my purpose was to nurture my long-term relationships and just focus on my art. I fully deprioritized my social life and began treating my time like it was my greatest currency that none of these morally broke bitches could afford. I began to slowly separate myself from friendships that didn’t have any issues but also had not evolved past surface-level connections. Maintaining relationships with people who only hit my line when they needed someone to pull up to the function with was utterly pointless. But I still found myself struggling to identify the difference between judgment, discernment, and intuition. Is it shitty that I no longer care about surface-level friendships, what’s wrong with “fun friends”? Should I have just sucked it up and went to that event I had no interest in being at? Is it rational to view people who are apolitical in this current climate as sociopathic opps? Why does being around people who are vapid and vain bother me so much? Why am I even regarding people as vapid and vain? Is there more to them that I’m not seeing? Is it because I, myself, am uncomfortable with centering my looks? I spun round and round in circles in an unhealthy mental loop until it dawned on me that this neuroticism about friendships was another layer I needed to shed.

When I think back on when I first began building friendships with my long-term sister-friends and even when I first met my partner, the one thing that was similar about all of these initial connections was a sense of ease. They all made me feel comfortable with them like I could be my fullest, messiest, most imperfect self, and they would still love me, respect me, and show up for me. They are honest with me and show me my blind spots. When we’ve had conflicts, love and curiosity are the driving forces behind their approach to working through them. They have all been active participants in my growth as a human being, and I have done the same for them. The people who love me the deepest have set the highest bar for the kind of humans I allow into my life. What an incredible blessing to have. What I was missing was not a sense of belonging or an inability to empathize or not be critical of others— it was simply knowing how to trust my heart and the people it is organically drawn to.

The proper way to shed layers is to allow them to fall away naturally. Otherwise, you run the risk of peeling so much of them back that there are no remnants of the flesh that held your spirit intact. I had been so consumed with guilt, shame, and confusion over how I may have treated people who, by all accounts, did not give my feelings nearly as much consideration. And who exactly was that serving? We don’t always have to hyper-fixate on the faults in ourselves and others or agonize over why things went wrong — sometimes, shit really just is what it is.

This winter, I received some e-mails and text messages apologizing or wondering why I had drifted away. The version of me these people were attempting to reach did not just drift— she has vanished. I will no longer shrink, contort, or betray myself for anyone’s comfort. I embrace every quality about myself without assigning them limiting qualifiers such as good or bad, I simply am. I have incredibly high standards for the people I invest my time and energy into because I hold myself to a high standard for how I treat others, too, and I’m done apologizing for it. My time here is limited, and I don’t want to spend even one second of it in spaces that do not enrich my spirit. If we lost touch, please, don’t spin this block, because she don’t live there anymore.

💋 ✌🏾With love,

LaChelle

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On The Vlog: Your desire to be validated is keeping you from being great.

Expanding on detaching from outcomes to talk about the thirst for social media validation and accolades and talking about how to balance capacity and consistency and the willingness to be uncomfortable when betting on yourself, plus more gems from The Creative Act by Rick Rubin.

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