Being Known

Reflections on friendship, and finding your people

I stared down at the giant box, unsure where to begin. Pictures, notes, wonky crafts, report cards, school projects—every item seemed tangled up with ten others. Delicately, I opened a baby book and found its sole content: a lock of hair from my very first haircut.

Late at night in the basement of my parents’ home, crouched over the box, I found myself face-to-face with my entire childhood. You see, my parents kept a memory box for each of their three children, and as I was back for a few days from where I live in Germany, my mother took this small window of opportunity to lug out this enormous box and ask me to go through it.

Seeing as I’ve been a writer since before I could write—drawing is our first form of storytelling, after all—my box was FILLED TO THE BRIM with pictures and, eventually, stories.

Filled.

To.

The.

Brim.

“Wouldn’t it be strange if the sun never went down? The lines would come off to make a full moon.”

My mother had hopes of me being able to sort through this massive collection and get rid of some things.

Oh mom, how silly, you should know me better than that! As I say in my SubStack profile blurb: “Some call me Paige but I call myself The Most Sentimental Human Being Alive.” Cut me open and you’ll find I’m made up of 50% nostalgia and 50% chocolate (my two loves).

Okay, maybe we could toss the lock of hair, but the rest? It’s staying.

Grinning, I flipped through my notebook from second grade language arts class, when I was learning how to spell properly and develop my long form writing. (The very first entry was from September 10, 2001. Eerie.)

The notebook begins pretty harmlessly. Spelling lists and the like. At that age, I often drew “smileys.” Ask anyone who knew me as a child, and they’ll associate me with three things: cocoa puffs, sleep, and my smiley drawings.

"How to draw a smiley" by kid-Paige (L); Paige and JB, who you'll meet soon (R)

So it wasn’t exactly surprisingly to see smileys littering these notebook pages. Partying in the margins, doing gymnastics in the corner, sleeping on the lines. Some even held a drawn pencil, helping me spell the words I wrote.

Is it possible to be charmed by your child self, as if they are completely separate from you? It’s like, a part of my brain understands that was me. But another part of me was so completely endeared by those smileys, wishing I could ask her (me?) how she came up with them, why they were always cross-eyed, and why she loved them so much that she spent hours of her day creating giant smiley murals for the foyer.

…I digress…

The only other thing more present than smileys in that notebook was the name of my best friend (which I’ll hereby refer to by her initials, JB). When we began to write short stories for class, all main characters were Paige and JB. When we wrote journal entries about our days, I only wrote about something if it included JB. Countless drawings showed the two of us having various adventures—one with a little ‘P’ underneath and one with a ‘J,’ lest the viewer mix us up!

One of my favorite lines: “JB and I laughed so hard we couldn’t hear ourselves laugh.” UGH. There I am being charmed by my own dang self again (lol).

Spoiler alert: JB and I did not stay best friends forever.

The friendship began to fall apart in fifth grade.

Fifth grade was the first year of middle school at my school district. Suddenly you had lockers big enough to accidentally lock yourself inside (which one boy actually did on the first day). Suddenly you didn’t have to walk the halls in a straight line. Suddenly you didn’t have to sit with your class at lunch, but could sit with friends of your choice—but only five, as there was a six-chair-per-table rule.¹

Naturally, that last rule shot a lot of fear and insecurity straight into the heart of fifth graders everywhere, most of all me. Keep in mind this is the era of MySpace. While I was too young to have one of my own and create a digital “Top 8,” my middle school essentially made us create a Top 8 in real life…only worse. A Top 5.

Source: Reddit.

JB was my #1, of course. (She’d be all 5 spots, if we’re being honest.)

But then JB began to make some new friends. The audacity!!! And I couldn’t handle it. I hated the idea of her hanging out at other friends’ houses, of her passing notes back and forth with a friend who wasn’t me, and most of all, of her wanting to eat lunch with another group that didn’t include me.

So we had a friend breakup. In fifth grade, foreign hormones pumping through our pre-pubescent bodies, it was the most dramatic thing I’d ever experienced.

And reading through this notebook last month, it all finally made sense. JB was my best friend. My person. The SpongeBob to my Patrick, the peanut butter to my jelly, the other half of my BFF heart necklace. She was the only person I wanted to draw pictures of and the only person I wanted to write about.

JB nor the friendship itself were the problem. It was the fact that, at ten years old, I’d built my entire universe around one person.

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Around the same time that friendship was crumbling, another one was quietly being built.

A girl with chin-length brown hair, blunt bangs, and a laugh that shook her entire body. I was drawn to her goofy energy—the very same I recognized in myself. By sixth grade, it seemed like everyone else was in a hurry to grow up and become someone else. But Sarah? She was embracing the strangest versions of herself, and encouraging me to do the same.

Together, we made a home in our imaginations. We counted down the days each week to our Saturday morning acting classes. We wrote letters to each other from our alternate egos, Cali and Cocoa. We filmed short movies on our parents’ camcorders (footage I desperately hope has been lost to time). We worked on novels, trading excerpts and feedback like Very Serious Authors. We invented absurd inside jokes that left us cry-laughing and breathless. More than anything, we reveled in our weirdness and gave each other permission to be exactly who we were.

Sarah and I attended different colleges, and my early twenties whisked me away to the other side of the state in a foreign land called Philadelphia. (And then, of course, the end of my twenties brought me to an actual foreign land, Germany).

And for the first time in a decade, I found myself back in my hometown the same week as her birthday. We were probably teenagers the last time we celebrated her birthday together. (Literally half a lifetime ago? Ouch.)

After spending the Saturday morning at the Aviary with my family, I strolled my way over to Sarah’s for her birthday backyard barbecue. The sun was showing off, mixing well with the light breeze, and as I shrugged off my jean jacket in the living room, I could hear the light chatter and laughter drifting in from the open door to the patio. I joined them, spiked punch in hand for courage.

Standing in Sarah’s backyard, I watched people drift in and out of conversations. Different people from different eras of her life. I only knew Sarah and her boyfriend, but the friendly smiles on everyone’s faces quickly folded me into the fun.

The hours melted away. Soon enough, we moved inside, gathering around as she began to open her gifts. (Everyone brought her a gift, even though it was a potluck and she did not expect it at all.) A record by her favorite artist, watercolors from a brand she offhandedly mentioned once, fairy lights and decorations for her growing garden.

Her guests bashfully explained their gifts ("Do you remember when we saw the sequel in the free library down the street and I promised you I’d buy you the first one for your birthday?”) and she freely hugged and traded “I love yous,” the smile on her face so bright it rivaled the moonlight.

Years ago, seeing someone I loved surrounded by other people might have filled me with panic. Or fear. Or had me duking it out in a cringey back-and-forth toast like that legendary scene from Bridesmaids:

Instead, I felt something else entirely. Joy. One thought kept popping into my head, gift after gift after gift: “Sarah is so known by her friends.”

---

I’m still processing my thoughts on everything. I think that’s my favorite part of writing—I sat down with no idea what I wanted to really say in this blog post, and now I’m at the end, and I feel like I need to provide some kind of wisdom or takeaway. But what if I’m still trying to figure out the takeaway myself? Okay. Let’s give it a try.

What if…we don’t need a best friend? As in, we don’t need one person to be everything?

As a kid, I wanted all five seats at the lunch table filled by JB. I wanted one friendship that could be every friendship. That be-all and end-all.

But in Sarah’s kitchen, watching various friends of her life pass her gifts, the collective ooh-ing and ahh-ing over what was inside, I found myself wondering if that’s too much to ask of any one person.

Maybe friendship isn’t about finding your person. Maybe it’s about finding your people.

The friend who understands your writing. The friend who remembers who you were at eleven, and loves you anyway. The friend who texts you when something absurd happens. The friend who is always down to meet up for a coffee. The friend who shows up with watercolors because they remembered an offhand comment you made six months ago.

Back in second grade, every story I wrote was about Paige and JB. Looking through that notebook, I wasn’t surprised to find evidence of a friendship I’d lost…but I was surprised that I found evidence of how small my universe used to be.

Twenty years later, in Sarah’s backyard, witnessing the wealth of friendship in her life, I wish I could open my hand for kid-Paige to grab hold of and whisper:

A whole universe is too big for only two people. My love, there’s more than enough room.

Middle school notes from Cali and Cocoa (L); Sarah's backyard birthday bbq (R)

1. NAME A WORSE ARBITRARY RULE FOR MIDDLE SCHOOLERS, I DARE YOU.