Friendship in the Time of Covid & Genocide
an excerpt from a chapter of my upcoming book
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This is an excerpt (with some things deleted to make it shorter for Substack) from the chapter, “Friendship in the Time of Covid & Genocide” from my upcoming book, The Guerrilla Feminist: A Search For Belonging Online & Offline coming out in March from Iskra Books.
I invited one of the four most popular girls in my grade to my eighth birthday party. Our mothers had us days apart in the same hospital and knew each other. I invited Caitlin the year prior, too. I didn’t understand at the time that she probably only showed up the first time out of some weird sense of obligation. The day of my eighth birthday party, Caitlin’s mom called my dad letting him know that Caitlin wouldn’t be able to attend because she had something else she needed to do, but would drop off a gift. I was bummed, but I had other friends coming. Before my party was to start around 5pm, I was looking out the front window of my dad’s house to watch as my guests arrived. I saw Caitlin’s mom’s car pull into the driveway. Then I saw Caitlin and one of the other four most popular girls sitting together in the backseat. I was crushed. I realized she didn’t want to be with me at my party. She wanted to stick to her class. I stopped inviting her to my birthday parties after that.
As a neurospicy femme, I’ve had more friendship difficulties than the average neurotypical. As a kid, I preferred one-on-one friend time when everyone else seemed to want group hangs. In group settings, I was fighting for attention, which felt a lot like fighting for my life. Being liked and noticed was too important to me; it was rarely something I felt and I really wanted to feel it. I also couldn’t understand how people even had a group of friends–actual friends, not just acquaintances. I craved friendships like the ones I saw on tv: Lucy and Ethel, Kimmy Gibbler and D.J. Tanner, Buffy and Willow. Early on, I made a conscious distinction between friends and acquaintances. Friends were people I had a deep connection with; people who I could be completely myself with and them with me. Acquaintances were people I would see once in a while or hang out with in a group setting. I didn’t feel as comfortable with them. There was a distance between us that I created. There was a wall I put up, but they didn’t seem interested enough to attempt to breach it.
When I would talk about the difference I felt between friends and acquaintances to my neurotypical friends, it was clear that they didn’t feel the same way. I remember getting upset with friends in the past with how easy going they were about friendship. I still have trouble if friends of mine refer to everyone they have ever talked to as a “friend.” It cuts me deeply, even though it’s not about me. I question whether my friendship with them is as deep as I think it is. I see this a lot in online spaces, too, where someone will refer to many people as their “friend,” and it bothers me (even if I’m not in that person’s life). It’s something I don’t understand. Friendship is sacred to me, and I can’t envision that sacredness being supported or sustained with more than a handful of people. And yet, I also try to broaden my perspective and see what others might see that I’m missing.
Beyond whatever our own definitions of friendship might be, many of us find ourselves with fewer and fewer friends, close or otherwise. In her popular newsletter, writer and culture critic Anne Helen Petersen notes that 38 percent of Americans reported having five or more close friends, 55 percent reported having between one and four close friends, and 8 percent reported having no close friends. Petersen discusses a general trajectory of friendships from stemming from young adulthood to old age. For most young adults up to the mid-twenties, a person will have a decent number of close friends. However, late-twenties to early thirties shows a gradual decrease due to people getting married, having children, and generally prioritizing friendship less. In a person’s mid to late 30s, these friendships dwindle even more. Petersen argues this is often due to things beyond our control: more care responsibilities for aging parents, children, divorces, jobs, and illnesses. People hardly have the time to keep up with the friends they have, let alone try to make new ones.
Our society in the U.S. also doesn’t help us with this. Petersen writes: “...we have a prolonged stretch of adulthood that is not conducive to forging or sustaining friendship or community. In many cases, I’d say it’s actually hostile to it.” In an individualist, capitalist nation like the U.S., it’s no wonder we don’t have the time or energy to water our friendships. Work and making money are prioritized for survival. Then there’s the commodified version of “self-care,” which is labor in a different way, and also zaps our time. Whether it’s a 12-step skincare routine or exercising into oblivion, there is little time or energy for our friendships. This lack of time seemed to get worse when the Covid-19 pandemic hit in early 2020. The care that it takes to sustain and even grow relationships can be a lot. The care this takes was tested for many of us when Covid hit.
We are inconvenienced by each other, but this isn’t a bad thing. We owe this to each other. Some of us are more inconveniencing, perhaps. Cultural theorist and author Lauren Berlant writes of this in their book, On the Inconvenience of Other People:
We know that, just by existing, historically subordinated populations are deemed inconvenient to the privileged who made them so; the subordinated who are cast as a problem experience themselves as both necessary for and inconvenient to the general supremacist happiness.
Those of us who are disabled demand a level of care in our friendships that non-disabled people don’t, but they should. The care I’ve witnessed and received from disabled comrades is monumental. Disabled friendships not only have emotional and physical intimacies, but also “access” intimacy. We all have access needs, including ableds and neurotypicals. Writer, educator and trainer for transformative justice and disability justice, Mia Mingus writes:
Access intimacy is that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else “gets” your access needs… Access intimacy is also the intimacy I feel with many other disabled and sick people who have an automatic understanding of access needs out of our shared similar lived experience of the many different ways ableism manifests in our lives… Instantly, we can hold the weight, emotion, logistics, isolation, trauma, fear, anxiety and pain of access. I don’t have to justify and we are able to start from a place of steel vulnerability.
For me, access intimacy looks like my friends recognizing and celebrating my neurodiversity. It’s the friend who knows to tell me how many people might be at an event they invite me to. It’s the friend who validates that I don’t need “fixing.” Asking each other what we need instead of assuming we know what’s best is something we all should be doing. These needs may change over time, so a consistent checking-in around access is imperative to our loving and caring of each other.
Those of us who live in the United States don’t know how to depend on each other. We grow up depending on caregivers and adults, but it’s quickly squashed out of us in favor of rugged individualism and independence. In How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom, Johanna Hedva writes:
Becoming disabled, for me, was an education in many things, but sometimes I think it was elementally about relearning how to understand dependency, and how disability makes it impossible to ignore that we are ontologically dependent, knotted into each other and everything.
Those of us who become disabled later on in life must relearn how to depend on others. Even as a third grader, I had already learned that I needed to be independent. When I was then diagnosed with learning disabilities, I felt like I slipped backwards. As a child, I needed to depend on the adults in my life, however, adults were my first bullies so this was problematic. My desire to be fiercely independent led me to bottle up emotions and only share half of my feelings with partners and friends. I didn’t want to depend on anyone–even those who loved me.
Many of us are afraid of people leaving our lives when things get hard. We’re afraid our loved ones can’t handle things, and we don’t want to be a bother or a burden. Being human is being a burden–at times. Being human and having needs is natural. The resistance to dependence, to asking for help, to leaning on others is what keeps us stuck in the loop of hyper-individualism and capitalism. We all have a right to dependency. We all have a right to need others’ help. We have a right to know that having a body and living in this world means we are inherently dependent on each other. Our personal need for dependence might wax and wane, but if we don’t lean into it when we need it—if we don’t relearn it, as Hedva says—then we will continue to struggle isolated and alone. Capitalism wants us this way, but we can resist. Often, those of us who are disabled don’t have a choice in this. Dependency is needed for liberation.
Those of us who are disabled demand this level of care and vulnerability because we need it to survive in a world that doesn’t want us alive. Disabled love and friendship is radical in an individualist, capitalist society. Being a part of a society means living with and around others. We are all inconvenient to each other at various times. But we also all owe each other this disruption. Non-disabled and neurotypical people’s friendships are often surface-level, because they’ve never had to dream up other ways of doing and being in relationship to others. They are often stuck in a white settler colonial individualist frame of mind.
Writer, organizer, performance artist, and educator, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha asks, “If collective access is revolutionary love without charity, how do we learn to love each other?” Care is a part of the human condition. This is why many disabled people were rightfully enraged by abled people’s lack of response to Covid-19. This is why so many had to end friendships.
Many people’s friendships have changed or ended in the last few years of the pandemic. Some have ended because of friendship differences with Covid precautions. Others have ended due to friends showing their unbridled and unchecked support for Israel, while the Israeli government and the U.S. government work in tandem to slaughter Palestinians.
Though I have not had to end any recent friendships due to Palestine or pandemic denial, there are people I used to hang out with that I don’t anymore, solely because of their risky behaviors during a global pandemic. There are acquaintances that I no longer speak to because they don’t seem to care about the genocides in Gaza and Sudan. Though this chapter is about friendship, there are other relationships in other spaces where I have lost a considerable amount of respect for people once finding out their pro-Israel stance. Some have lost respect for me when finding out about my pro-Palestine stance.
In the fall of 2023, a student of mine who was graduating that semester went to the chair of my department and accused me of antisemitism. The student, a Zionist, had found my Instagram account and didn’t agree with or appreciate my support of Palestinians. She told the Chair of the department that she wanted “nothing to do” with me and that she didn’t feel “safe” with me. I had only interacted with the student once. I wasn’t in trouble because of free speech, but I certainly felt like I was. University support for those of us who are against genocides does not currently exist. This support also doesn’t exist for those of us wanting more Covid precautions. I can’t relate to people who can continue on with life as normal when our current times are anything but normal. I refuse to be gaslit. I refuse to comply.
The pandemic created more shifts and fractures in friendships/relationships for everyone. I felt I needed to work harder at maintaining my relationships, and some did not survive (eg. my romantic relationship). My friendships have mostly remained intact—and some are even stronger—but the time and effort it has taken me and others to attend to “friendship maintenance” has been intense. I continue on because the people in my life are worth it. Friends have always meant so much to me—probably more than what is healthy. I am a very caring and loyal friend and expect the same in return. I have a difficult time getting close to people since I’ve been burned in ways I never knew possible. I have a few very close friends in my life. I am fortunate to know and love these people and for them to know and love me.
There is so much I wish and hope and dream for this world. I’m incredibly distressed and saddened by the lack of pandemic response from the U.S. We need to find ourselves and each other outside of capitalism. I think there are ways we can have community—safely—without spending money; without capitalist distractions. Though life is never completely free of risk, there are ways we can all lessen the harm we might create or encounter.
Obviously we have limited control around getting sick, but if we can make things slightly less risky for ourselves and each other, then why wouldn’t we do it? When we’re assessing risk, why wouldn’t we take into account those who are most in harm's way; most affected by risky decisions. Why, at the very least, would we not wear a mask in public spaces? Why, at the very least, would we go out to an establishment a bit less? Life is inherently risky and we each need to assess these risks for ourselves on a continual basis.
In an article about risk and safety, social psychologist and author, Dr. Devon Price discusses the difference between risk admission and risk tolerance/acceptance emphasizing that we can never fully avoid risk. We can only choose which risks we’re willing to take on. Sometimes we don’t have a choice and this choice is made for us, like those who are unwilling to wear a mask anywhere. Most of us are assessing and taking risks every day. The “spectrum” of safe to dangerous doesn’t exist like many of us think it does. Price discusses this as it applies to sexual health, but it’s also applicable to Covid:
…all choices are treated as if they exist on a single spectrum that runs from “safe” to “dangerous,” with the same relative risk levels for all people. But the reality is that every person experiences risks differently, and weighs certain harms over others when they decide how to behave.
Most of us have a kaleidoscope of health issues, and due to this, our risk assessment is going to differ and change based on our current level of ability, disability, and health. We also have to be aware and thoughtful of our loved ones’ health issues. Even if two friends have the same autoimmune disease, their bodies might deal with this disease very differently. None of us can expect to feel the same or have the same level of risk.
Friendship in the time of Covid means openly discussing our comfort and discomfort around risk-taking with our friends. Wearing a mask in public spaces or with friends who we know need this of us is the bare minimum. It is a choice made from a place of love and care. With mask bans in various counties, this makes choice nonexistent, but those of us who can still wear a mask without the threat of fines should continue doing so. In a post about the importance of mask-wearing, Mia Mingus writes:
We should all continue masking because masking is a concrete practice of love for each other. Masking is an in-real-time practice of interdependence, collective care and abolition. Plus, there are many who can’t mask such as some of our disabled kin and infants, as well as millions more who are forced to work in high risk environments such as restaurants, large offices or stores. Masking supports safety for everyone.
The fact that many people abandoned wearing a mask as soon as the government deemed it okay is infuriating. Seeing leftists not walking the talk, but continuing to wax poetic about community and coalition-building is replete with cognitive dissonance. People want to “go back to normal,” when our “normal” was also killing us and our disabled comrades.
The disabilities I have gained in adulthood have allowed me to be more expansive in both mind and body; in vulnerability; in compassion; in empathy. These disabilities and illnesses that have come to me have, in some way, helped me in subverting the status quo. Disabled folks know the most about care—we have to since it’s so infrequently offered in our mainstream, ableist culture. In their essay, “Sick Woman,” Johanna Hedva says about care and protest:
The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice a community of support. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care.
I dream of this “radical kinship,” where people give a shit about each other even if they don’t know each other. I dream of a world distant from hyper individuality. I dream of feeling comforted by the fact that the world I live in and its people will help me when and if I need it. We all will need it at some point. Disability justice allows us the understanding that nothing has to be the way it is. This idea benefits everyone, even those who aren’t disabled yet.
It sounds so simplistic, and yet, we continue to see during the Covid pandemic and the genocide of Palestinians that most people can’t even muster an ounce of empathy. It doesn’t help that here in the U.S. we have a collapsing healthcare system that doesn’t care whether we’re in pain or not; whether we’re ill or not; whether we’ll live or die, especially if we’re disabled.
As so many disability activists have reminded us: we are all moments away from becoming disabled (or further disabled) ourselves. Ableism lets us think this will never happen to us, thus, we don’t need to care. The state doesn’t care about us now. They certainly won’t care about us when we become disabled. Isn’t that infuriating? Isn’t it terrifying? We need to care for each other.
I think many people take their friendships for granted. I think many people assume that friendships don’t need water and sunlight to grow and expand. Many don’t seem to understand that we have to till the soil; we have to get our hands dirty. Friendship is not a “set-it-and-forget-it” thing, at least not in my world. It takes energy, and unfortunately, due to the pandemic, genocides and many other horrific things, many of us are lacking energy. It’s hard to care for others when we can barely manage caring for ourselves, especially during such an untenable time. Questions I have been asking myself around friendship during Covid are:
How can I best care for myself so I can then have the capacity to check in on others?
What does checking-in look like? (This can/might be different from friend-to-friend).
What is our friendship agreement? How can we feel supported and cared for by each other?
What are my expectations around this friendship and what does communication look like? What are theirs?
While granting my friends the utmost grace and best intentions during a (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, does this friendship feel reciprocal and nourishing?
I am thinking about these questions a lot more as of late. I am, again, realizing how important and necessary my friendships are to me. Most of us desire human relationships with each other. Most of us crave loving, trusting, and supportive people to be in our lives; to help walk us through life. We can’t have this if we’re unwilling to commit to friendship maintenance. And we can’t commit to friendship maintenance without committing to maintenance of ourselves.
I don’t like going out much due to the pandemic, but also because of the potential for a mass shooting. It’s difficult for me to even go to my office and would prefer to be a fully remote worker. I work on a university campus in the Gender & Women’s Studies department, and I worry often about some man coming in with a gun. I don’t think it’s paranoia, when this is sadly a very real possibility in the country that I live in. Being forced to be onsite a few days a week is incongruent to my nervous system and what it needs. I don’t like overriding my nervous system, but a girl’s gotta get paid. Some might say I’m “living in fear,” but I’m actually living in survival mode—and have been since I was a child. That's all I know. The current state of the world is unsustainable, especially without friendship and care networks.
I’m at a point in my life where I do wish I had more friends—actual friends, not acquaintances—but making new friends in our late 30s is tough, especially if neurodivergent. It’s difficult finding people who have the same level of Covid cautiousness as I do. It’s difficult finding friends who are fervently against genocide. I try to put feelers out there with people I’m interested in for friendship, but I have a very difficult time trusting people, so this is often difficult and draining. I have three close friends at the moment, but only one lives in my city. I would love to have a close friend that lives close, is Covid-cautious, against genocide, and can hang more regularly. I miss friend dates. I hope to return to them someday. I want more friendship intimacy and care. I think of the gorgeous quote by Lora Mathis:
Kiss your friends' face more/Destroy the belief that intimacy must be reserved for monogamous relationships/Be more loving / Embrace platonic intimacy/Embrace vulnerability/Use emotionality as a radical tactic against a society which teaches you that emotions are a sign of weakness/Tell more people you care about them/Hold their hands / Tell others you are proud of them/Offer support readily/Take care of the people around you
I want to live in a world like that. I want my friendships to be deep, fluid, and spacious. I want care webs, access intimacy, and love that stays.
Think of the world we could have if we care deeply for each other; where our friendships are prioritized, whether they’re romantic or platonic; where everyone gets what they need (and then some). A world that doesn’t throw people away. A world where nobody has to worry about going to work (ever) especially when they are sick or having a flare. I want to live in a world that loves people over profits and invests in its bright kaleidoscopic communities. Maybe we’ll get there when more people become disabled by Covid, when more people have a better understanding of the necessity for mutual aid and care amongst our friends and those we’re in community with. Hedva writes:
…once we are all ill and confined to the bed, sharing our stories of therapies and comforts, forming support groups, bearing witness to each other’s tales of trauma, prioritizing the care and love of our sick, pained, expensive, sensitive, fantastic bodies, and there is no one left to go to work, perhaps then, finally, capitalism will screech to its much needed, long-overdue, and motherfucking glorious halt.
Our sick, disabled, and “fantastic bodies” might break capitalism, redefine our friendships, and create a societal landscape of care and trust.
