Personal essays, notes, and ideas worth sharing.
Personal essays, notes, and ideas worth sharing.
This is my corner of the internet. I write about whatever’s on my mind: books that stick with me, projects I’m working on, random ideas, and sometimes just what’s happening in my life. There’s no grand plan here. No content calendar or strategic posting schedule. Just me, putting words together when something feels worth saying.
What you’ll find here: Essays · Projects · Reading Notes · Ideas · Personal stuff
The shirt is almost aggressively plain. On a dark background, in large bold white lowercase letters, sits one word: meh. No illustration. No animal. No rainbow. No second line of smaller text explaining the joke. Just the period at the end, which is doing more work than it should — a full stop that turns a shrug into a verdict.
I keep coming back to that period. Without it, meh is a sound. With it, meh is a sentence. A complete thought. A position.
Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.
Most slogan shirts over-explain. They stack a setup and a punchline, or they announce a personality trait in a font that’s trying too hard. This one — the Meh Funny Sarcastic Saying Introvert Dry Humor shirt from Quirky Cotton Collective — does the opposite. It withholds. The design description is accurate: large bold lowercase meh. lettering on a dark shirt, no animal illustration, no pride variant. That’s the whole thing.
And that restraint is the point. In a culture that keeps asking us to pick a lane, declare a passion, and optimize a personal brand, meh. is the one answer that refuses the question. It’s not sad. It’s not angry. It’s not even lazy, really. It’s the sound of a nervous system that has finally stopped performing enthusiasm for things that don’t deserve it.
I’ve written before about the shirts that function as warning labels — the ones that say not friendly, do not touch — and the ones that read like physics diagrams of wasted potential. Those designs are louder. They argue. This one doesn’t argue. It declines.
Here’s where I have to be careful, because meh has a reputation problem. It sounds like giving up. It sounds like the flat affect of someone who has stopped caring, and in hustle culture, not caring is the cardinal sin. We’re supposed to care loudly and constantly, about our careers, our side projects, our hydration, our five-year plans.
But there’s a difference between apathy and permission, and I think the period is what separates them.
Apathy is meh with no punctuation — a trailing off, a drift. Permission is meh. with the period — a decision. It’s the difference between I can’t bring myself to care and I have reviewed this and I decline to care. One is exhaustion. The other is a boundary.
I’m not making a scientific claim here. I’m not saying a shirt changes your nervous system or cures burnout. I’m saying that the visual grammar of this design — the lowercase, the boldness, the finality of that dot — reads to me like a small act of refusal. And refusal, for those of us recovering from hustle culture, is a skill we have to practice.
Lowercase meh is doing something specific. Uppercase MEH would be a shout. It would be aggressive, almost angry — the typographic equivalent of slamming a door. Lowercase is quieter. It’s the voice you use when you’re too tired to raise it. It’s the shrug that doesn’t require eye contact.
And bold lowercase is a particular combination: soft in form, heavy in weight. It takes up space without making noise. That feels like an accurate portrait of a certain kind of midlife exhaustion — the kind where you’re still showing up, still doing the things, but you’ve stopped pretending it’s all meaningful. You’re present. You’re just not enthusiastic.
The dark shirt and white lettering add to it. High contrast, no decoration. It’s not a design that’s asking to be liked. It’s a design that’s already accepted it might not be.
The retail title includes the word introvert, and I understand why. Meh is a useful word for people who are tired of being asked why they’re quiet. It’s a preemptive answer to what’s wrong? and are you okay? and you seem off today. Sometimes the answer is just: nothing’s wrong, I’m just not performing.
But I don’t think this shirt is only for introverts. I think it’s for anyone who has run out of the energy it takes to fake a reaction. That’s not a personality type. That’s a season. And a lot of us are in it.
The dry humor of it — and the retail description calls it dry humor, which feels right — is that it doesn’t explain itself. It trusts you to get it. If you don’t, that’s fine. The shirt isn’t asking for your approval either.
I keep thinking about how hard it is to say meh out loud. Not the word — the position. To look at something you’re supposed to care about and say, honestly, this doesn’t move me. To let that be enough. To not follow it with an apology or a plan to care more later.
The shirt doesn’t solve that. It’s a shirt. But it names it. And sometimes naming a thing is the first step toward letting it be true.
What would you stop pretending to care about, if you gave yourself permission?
I saw the graphic before I saw the shirt. A yellow caution triangle, the kind that usually means wet floor or high voltage. Inside it, a hand with a diagonal line through it. Below, in warning-sign lettering: NOT FRIENDLY DO NOT TOUCH. The whole thing is rendered in the visual language of a hazard placard — the same font that tells you not to enter a construction site or touch a live wire. It is not a mood. It is a safety notice.
That’s the part I keep coming back to. Not the joke, though the joke lands. The format. Someone took the universal grammar of public warning signs and applied it to a human being. And the human being is fine with that.
I’ve been thinking about this shirt for a few days now, which is a strange thing to admit about a piece of apparel. But I think it’s because the design does something that most introvert merch doesn’t bother to do. It doesn’t apologize. It doesn’t soften. It doesn’t say “Sorry, I’m shy” or “I’m not rude, I’m just quiet.” It says: not friendly. Do not touch. Full stop. The caution triangle doesn’t mean “approach with care.” It means “this is a hazard.”
Warning signs exist because someone, at some point, got hurt doing the thing the sign prohibits. They are not suggestions. They are not preferences. They are the visual equivalent of a locked gate. When you put that format on a shirt, you’re borrowing its authority. You’re saying: this boundary is not up for negotiation. It is not a bad day. It is not a phase. It is a condition of the environment.
I find that genuinely refreshing. Most of the language we have for needing space is apologetic. “I’m just tired.” “I have a lot going on.” “It’s not you, it’s me.” We wrap the boundary in so many layers of reassurance that by the time we’re done, we’ve invited the person back in. The warning-sign shirt doesn’t do that. It’s not asking you to understand. It’s telling you what you need to know to avoid a problem.
And the crossed-out hand — that’s the detail that makes it work. Not a hand waving you away. Not a hand held up in a stop gesture. A hand with a line through it. The universal symbol for “do not.” It’s not personal. It’s procedural.
I spent years in a work culture where being friendly was part of the job. Not just polite — friendly. Warm. Available. The kind of person who remembers your dog’s name and asks about your weekend and never lets a silence sit too long. I was good at it. I was so good at it that I forgot it was a performance.
When you leave that culture — whether you quit, get laid off, burn out, or just slowly realize you can’t keep it up — you have to relearn what your actual social capacity is. Not your professional social capacity. Your real one. And for a lot of us, the real one is smaller than we thought. Quieter. More selective. Less interested in small talk and more interested in the kind of conversation where you don’t have to perform.
The shirt doesn’t say “I’m an introvert.” It doesn’t say “I need alone time.” It says “not friendly.” That’s a harder thing to admit. Because friendly is the baseline we’re all supposed to meet. Friendly is the default setting. Friendly is what you are unless you have a good reason not to be. And this shirt says: I don’t have a reason. I just am not. Deal with it.
I don’t think that’s misanthropy. I think it’s honesty. And I think it’s a kind of rest.
Here’s where I have to be careful, because I can feel myself wanting to turn this into a manifesto. The shirt is not a philosophy. It’s a piece of clothing with a joke on it. But the joke works because it’s pointing at something real: the exhaustion of being perpetually available.
A boundary says: here is what I can offer, and here is what I can’t. A wall says: nothing gets through. The warning-sign shirt sits somewhere in between. It’s not a wall — you can still talk to someone wearing it. But it’s not a welcome mat either. It’s a sign that says: the terms of engagement are different here. Adjust accordingly.
I’ve known people who needed that sign. I’ve been that person. Not because I hated everyone, but because I had nothing left to give and no language for saying so that didn’t sound like an excuse. The shirt does the saying for you. It’s a preemptive no. It’s the social equivalent of putting your phone on do not disturb.
If you want to see the exact design I’m describing, it’s the Not Friendly Do Not Touch Funny Warning Sign Introvert shirt from Quirky Cotton Collective. The listing shows the yellow triangle, the crossed-out hand, and the warning-sign lettering exactly as I’ve described them.
I don’t think a shirt changes anything. I don’t think wearing a warning sign makes you less tired or more understood. But I do think there’s something useful in the format itself — the idea that a boundary can be stated plainly, without apology, and still be kind. The caution triangle doesn’t hate you. It just doesn’t want you to get hurt. And sometimes the most honest thing you can say to someone is: I am not available in the way you’re hoping. Here is the sign. Please read it.
What would your warning sign say, if you had one? Not the polite version. The real one.
Note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner.
There is a white shirt with a physics diagram on it, and I cannot stop thinking about it. The design is simple: the words I HAD POTENTIAL in capital letters, and below them, a curved white ramp descending from left to right. At the top left ledge sits a dashed empty circle. At the bottom right, on a flat ledge, rests a solid white ball. The ramp is curved, not a straight diagonal. It is a minimalist, almost clinical image — and it says something I have been trying to say for years.
Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. This is not an independent review.
I found this shirt while looking for something else entirely. I was not searching for physics puns or sarcastic quotes. But the image stopped me. It is the kind of graphic that works on two levels at once: a literal physics diagram of potential energy and kinetic energy, and a wry commentary on what happens when that potential meets reality. The dashed circle at the top is where the ball used to be — full of possibility, perched on the ledge. The solid ball at the bottom is where it ended up. The ramp is the journey. And the words above it all are the punchline.
What I love about this design is that it does not tell you how to feel about the ball. It just shows you the before and after. The dashed circle could be a loss. Or it could be a relief. The solid ball could be a failure. Or it could be a landing. The shirt does not decide for you. That ambiguity is what makes it useful.
For those of us recovering from hustle culture, the phrase “I had potential” is loaded. We were told — by parents, teachers, bosses, and our own internalized capitalism — that potential was something to maximize. That if we were not climbing, we were falling. That the dashed circle at the top was the only acceptable place to be.
But here is what I have learned in my own life: the solid ball at the bottom is not a failure. It is a fact. It is where the ball is now. And there is a kind of peace in that. The ramp is curved, not straight, which means the descent was not a freefall. It was a path. It had shape. It had friction. It had a beginning and an end.
I am not going to tell you that wearing this shirt will change your life. It is a t-shirt. It will not cure burnout or pay your bills or fix your relationship with your mother. But it might make you smile in the mirror. It might start a conversation. It might be the thing you wear on a day when you need to remember that you are allowed to be a solid ball on a flat ledge, not a dashed circle on a cliff.
The design is available on a standard t-shirt through this Amazon listing. The brand is Quirky Cotton Collective. The title is a mouthful: “I Had Potential Funny Physics Pun Sarcastic Minimalist Quote.” But the image itself is quiet. It does not shout. It just sits there, white on white, and lets you decide what it means.
I am not a physicist. I took one physics class in college and spent most of it confused. But I know enough to know that potential energy is stored energy — the energy an object has because of its position. A ball on a ledge has potential energy. When it rolls down, that potential becomes kinetic energy. The dashed circle represents the potential. The solid ball represents the kinetic. The ramp is the conversion.
In physics, potential energy is not a moral category. It is not better or worse than kinetic energy. It is just a different state. The ball at the top is not “wasting” its potential by rolling down. It is just following the laws of the universe. Gravity does not care about your career goals.
I find that oddly comforting. The shirt takes a concept that we usually use to judge ourselves — “I had potential” — and turns it into a neutral observation. The ball rolled. That is what balls do. You do not yell at a ball for rolling down a ramp. You do not tell it it should have stayed on the ledge. You just watch it go.
Maybe we could treat ourselves the same way. Not as failures for leaving the ledge, but as objects in motion. Not as dashed circles, but as solid balls. Not as potential wasted, but as energy transferred.
This shirt is for anyone who has ever felt like they peaked too early. Anyone who was told they were “gifted” as a child and now feels like they are not living up to it. Anyone who left a job, a relationship, a city, a religion, or a version of themselves that looked good on paper. Anyone who is tired of the hustle and ready to be ordinary.
It is also for people who just like physics puns. The humor works on that level too. It is a sarcastic, minimalist take on a common meme format. The dashed circle and the solid ball are a visual joke. If you have ever seen a physics diagram, you get it. If you have not, you still get it, because the words tell you everything you need to know.
The shirt is not preachy. It does not say “you should rest” or “you should let go of your potential.” It just shows you a ball. It lets you bring your own story to it. That is what makes it a good design. It is a Rorschach test for your relationship with ambition.
I do not own this shirt. I have not worn it. I have not tested it. I am just looking at the image, the same way you are. But I know what it makes me feel. It makes me feel like I am allowed to be the solid ball. It makes me feel like the dashed circle is not a ghost haunting me, but just a previous state. It makes me feel like the ramp — the curved, imperfect, non-straight path — is enough.
If you are in the middle of a midlife transition, or recovering from burnout, or just tired of pretending you are still at the top of the ledge, this shirt might speak to you. Not because it will fix anything, but because it will name something. It will put words and a picture to a feeling you might not have known how to describe.
And if it does not speak to you, that is fine too. Not every object has to be meaningful. Sometimes a shirt is just a shirt. But this one is a little more than that. It is a diagram of a moment. It is a permission slip. It is a joke. It is all of those things at once.
What would it mean for you to be the solid ball on the flat ledge — not the dashed circle on the cliff? Not as a failure, but as a fact. Not as an ending, but as a landing. That is the question the shirt asks. You do not have to answer it. You can just wear it.
I didn’t set out to make friends in the car line. I set out to survive it. For two years, I treated school pickup like a logistics problem: arrive at 2:47, park where I could pull out fast, keep the engine running, keep my eyes on my phone. I was good at it. I was also lonely in a way I couldn’t name, because I had a full calendar and a family and a job history that looked impressive on paper. Loneliness doesn’t always look like an empty room. Sometimes it looks like a minivan with the windows up.
What changed wasn’t a decision to “put myself out there.” It was a mechanical failure. My driver’s side window got stuck in the down position for eleven days while a part was on order. Eleven days of sitting in the pickup line with my window open, which meant eleven days of hearing other mothers talk, and being heard by them. That’s the whole origin story. Not courage. A broken window regulator.
I’ve started calling what grew out of that the Car Line — a named experiment in low-stakes, recurring, geographically convenient contact with other women in the same season of life. It is not a friendship strategy. It’s closer to a habit of leaving one small opening.
The Car Line is a twenty-minute window, three to five days a week, in which you are already parked near the same people. You don’t have to schedule it. You don’t have to host it. You don’t have to be interesting. The only requirement is that you don’t fully seal yourself off from it.
For me, that meant three changes:
That’s it. I’m not going to dress it up. The Car Line is not a program. It’s a container.
I spent most of my thirties believing that the only relationships worth having were deep ones. Close friends. Confidantes. People who knew my history. Everything else felt like small talk, and small talk felt like a waste of the only currency I thought I had, which was time.
Sociologists have a term for the other kind of relationship — the casual, recurring, low-intimacy ties that make up most of a social life. They’re sometimes called weak ties, and the research on them is not new. Mark Granovetter’s 1973 paper “The Strength of Weak Ties” argued that these looser connections often carry information and opportunity that close friends can’t, precisely because they reach into different circles than your inner ring does. That’s a claim about information flow, not about emotional health, and I want to be careful not to stretch it further than it goes. But it gave me language for something I’d been dismissing: the acquaintance is not a failed friendship. It’s a different structure, and it does different work.
What I noticed in the car line was that the low-stakes contact did something the deep friendships couldn’t do at that stage of my life. My close friends were also in the weeds. We loved each other and we rescheduled each other constantly. The car line didn’t require rescheduling. It happened whether or not anyone had the bandwidth for it.
I want to name the thing underneath the window being up, because I don’t think I’m the only one.
Part of it was introversion. Part of it was the hustle-culture reflex that says any unstructured time is time you should be using. But the bigger part was comparison. Sitting next to other women in the same parking lot, I could feel myself measuring: whose car, whose clothes, whose kid got invited to what, whose life looked more handled than mine. Keeping the window up was a way of not playing a game I was sure I’d lose.
What I found when I rolled it down was that most of the women beside me were playing the same game in their own heads. The first real conversation I had in that line was with a woman who admitted she’d been sitting three cars back for a month, pretending to be on a call so she wouldn’t have to talk to anyone. We laughed about it in a way that felt like exhaling.
I’m not going to tell you that everyone in the car line is kind, or that you’ll click with everyone, or that this is a cure for anything. Some of the women I met there I never spoke to again after the school year ended. A few became people I text on a Tuesday. One became a friend I’d drive across town for. The ratio matters less than the fact that the line existed at all.
It is not a networking event. I made that mistake once, early on, and asked a woman what she did for work in a tone that made it clear I was filing her. She answered politely and then got in her car. I don’t blame her.
It is not a performance of having it together. The conversations that stuck were the ones where somebody said something true and slightly unflattering — that they’d cried in the school bathroom, that they’d forgotten to sign the permission slip again, that they were dreading summer.
It is not a replacement for therapy, or for the close friendships you already have, or for the kind of rest that requires being alone. It’s one more room in the house.
The fastest way to ruin the Car Line is to turn it into a commitment. I tried that once — a group text, a standing coffee after drop-off, a rotating schedule. It collapsed within a month, because the whole point was that it required nothing.
What worked for me was keeping it unplanned. No group chat. No calendar invites. If I saw a familiar car, I parked near it. If I didn’t, I read a book. The line was there either way.
I also gave myself permission to skip it. Some days I put the window up and answered emails. That’s allowed. The experiment isn’t a rule; it’s a door I can leave unlocked.
Not a best friend, though I got one of those too. What I got was something harder to name: the sense of being a person in a place, rather than a function performing a task. For twenty minutes a day, I wasn’t a project manager or a mother or a former coach. I was a woman in a parking lot, talking about nothing in particular, and that turned out to be enough.
I also got information I couldn’t have gotten otherwise. Which teacher to request. Which summer camp was worth the money. Which pediatrician actually returns calls. The weak-tie research says this is exactly what loose connections are good for, and my experience matched it. The car line was a low-bandwidth channel that carried high-value local knowledge.
And I got a corrective to a story I’d been telling myself for years — that community requires effort, and effort requires energy I didn’t have. The Car Line required almost none. It required proximity, repetition, and one small opening.
I’m not prescribing this. You know your parking lot, your schedule, and your tolerance for small talk better than I do. But here’s what worked for me, in case any of it is useful:
That’s the whole experiment. It’s not impressive. It’s just available.
Where in your week are you already parked next to the same people, with the window up — and what would it cost you to roll it down for twenty minutes?
My best friend and I have a standing appointment that would embarrass a wedding planner. It lasts five minutes. Sometimes four. Occasionally, if one of us is walking to the car, it stretches to seven. We call it the Five-Minute Friend, and it is the least impressive, most reliable thing in my adult life.
I want to tell you how it started, why it works, and what it has taught me about the difference between the friendship I thought I was supposed to have and the one I actually need.
For most of my thirties, I measured friendship by the dinner party. If we hadn’t sat across a table with a bottle of wine and three hours of unhurried conversation, I assumed we were drifting. Every text that went unanswered for two days felt like evidence. Every canceled plan felt like a verdict.
Then I left my corporate job, and the scaffolding of my social life came down with it. The lunch breaks, the hallway conversations, the after-work drinks that felt like friendship but were really proximity — gone. What was left was a handful of women I loved and a calendar that looked like a game of Tetris played by someone who had given up.
My closest friend lives forty minutes away. She has two kids in middle school. I have a schedule that changes weekly. For about a year, we tried to do friendship the way we always had: long calls, planned visits, birthday dinners. We failed at it constantly. And every failure carried a little charge of guilt, because I had absorbed the idea that real friendship requires real time, and anything less was a slow fade.
Here is where I have to separate what I know from what I have lived. I am not a researcher. I am a retired wellness coach who reads a lot and experiments on herself. So let me be clear about the difference.
What is well established: social connection matters for health in ways that are hard to overstate. Harvard Health Publishing summarizes decades of research showing that people with strong social support tend to be happier, have fewer health problems, and live longer. One analysis of more than 309,000 people found that a lack of strong relationships was associated with a 50% increased risk of premature death from all causes — an effect the article compares to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. The same source notes that the quality of relationships matters, not just the quantity, and that negative or disappointing interactions with friends and family are linked to poorer health outcomes.
What that research does not tell us is the minimum effective dose. Nobody has handed me a study that says five minutes on a Tuesday is enough. I looked. The sources I could reach were either unavailable or didn’t address brief calls specifically. So I am not going to pretend there is a prescription here. What I have is a lived experiment, and I am telling you what it produced for me.
The Five-Minute Friend started as an accident. My friend called me while I was folding laundry. I almost didn’t answer, because I had nothing to say and no time to say it. But I picked up, and we talked for four minutes about nothing — her son’s science project, a weird smell in my hallway, whether either of us had eaten lunch. Then we hung up.
I felt better. Not transformed. Not deeply nourished. Just less alone. And I noticed something: the call had cost me almost nothing, which meant I would do it again.
So we made it a rule, loosely held. We call when we can. We aim for five minutes. We do not save up news. We do not wait until we have something worth reporting. The call is the point, not the content.
That last part is the whole thing. There is no penalty for missing a Five-Minute Friend call. There is no makeup call. There is no conversation about why you didn’t pick up. The system is designed to survive neglect, because neglect is the baseline condition of midlife.
I used to think the goal was quality time. Now I think quality time is a trap for women in their late thirties and forties, because it sets a bar that most of us cannot clear on a regular basis. If the only version of friendship that counts is the three-hour dinner, then most weeks I am not a friend at all. And if I am not a friend at all, I start to believe I am bad at it, and then I withdraw, and then the friendship actually does fade.
The Five-Minute Friend breaks that cycle by lowering the bar so far that it is almost impossible to fail. A four-minute call is not a substitute for a long visit. It is a different thing entirely. It is a pulse. It says: I am still here. You are still here. We are still us.
I have found that the pulse matters more than the feast. The feast happens twice a year, maybe. The pulse happens twice a week. And the pulse is what keeps the friendship warm enough to survive the gaps.
I resisted the Five-Minute Friend for a long time, and I want to name why, because I don’t think I’m alone in it.
Part of it was ego. A five-minute call felt like a downgrade. It felt like admitting that my life had gotten too small for real friendship. I wanted to be the kind of woman who hosts long dinners and takes weekend trips. I did not want to be the kind of woman who talks for four minutes in a parking lot.
Part of it was guilt. I had absorbed the message that if I really cared, I would make time. And I couldn’t make time, which meant I didn’t really care, which meant I was failing at something fundamental.
And part of it was fear. If I called and had nothing to say, I worried it would be awkward. I worried she would think I was calling out of obligation. I worried the call would reveal that we had nothing in common anymore.
None of that turned out to be true. The calls are often awkward. We often have nothing to say. And that turned out to be the thing that made them work. The awkwardness is the intimacy. The nothing-to-say is the proof that we don’t need a reason.
There are days when I hang up and think, That was pointless. Four minutes of nothing. What did that accomplish?
On those days, I remind myself of something I learned in my coaching years, back when I was working with women on habit change: the smallest version of a behavior, done consistently, beats the ideal version done rarely. I used to teach that about exercise and food. It took me a decade to apply it to friendship.
I also remind myself that the alternative is not a longer call. The alternative is no call. And no call, repeated over months, is how friendships die — not with a fight, but with a slow accumulation of nothing.
I am not going to tell you what to do. You are the authority on your own life, and you know better than I do whether this fits. But here is what worked for me, in case any of it is useful.
The Five-Minute Friend works because it is low-maintenance. If I tried to do it with five people, it would become a chore, and chores get dropped. One person. The one you would call if something terrible happened. Start there.
I told my friend what I was doing. I said, “I want to call you for five minutes sometimes, with no agenda, and I don’t want you to feel like you have to be interesting.” She laughed and said yes. Naming it gave us permission to be boring.
We tried a standing time. It lasted three weeks. What works better is calling when the moment appears — the pickup line, the dog walk, the ten minutes between meetings. The call fits the gap, not the other way around.
Some calls are great. Most are fine. Some are four minutes of silence and a sigh. All of them count. The bad ones are not failures; they are the price of admission for the good ones.
We do not say, “Sorry I haven’t called.” We do not explain ourselves. We just pick up where we are. The apology turns the call into a debt, and debts get avoided. The no-apology rule keeps the door open.
I am less lonely than I was two years ago. That is the plainest way I can say it. Not because I added more people to my life, but because I stopped requiring so much from the people already in it.
I also feel less guilty. The Five-Minute Friend gave me a way to be a good friend that fits inside my actual life, not the life I thought I was supposed to have. And that has made me more generous, not less — because I am not spending all my energy feeling bad about what I am not doing.
I don’t know if five minutes is the right number for you. I don’t know if phone calls are the right medium. I don’t know if your closest friend is a person who likes to talk on the phone at all. What I know is that the version of friendship I was taught to want — the long dinners, the weekend trips, the deep conversations — was not available to me on a regular basis. And the version I built instead, small and unimpressive and slightly awkward, has held.
If you lowered the bar for one friendship this week — not the bar for how much you care, but the bar for what counts as contact — what would that look like?
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