Friendship Storytelling Event at Fountain House

It’s been about a month since I had been at a City Voices program at Fountain House. I hadn’t been with them long, but even after my first meeting I was very drawn to it. I didn’t feel judged or, in other words, I never felt an external pressure to polish my personality or the way that I carried myself. As someone who has struggled with social anxiety, often this defense is second nature, so it was noticeable when it was not there. I have also, for a long time, been a big proponent of “community.” It was a term that flew around in my head constantly — it was passion, ambition, and motivation. It was a buzzword or it was a coping mechanism. When I arrived at Fountain House for the first time, I believed in it again, and everything that it had meant to me, I felt rekindling.

Last weekend, in the Fountain House living room, was an overflowing circle of new faces, and immediately I thought to myself, this program must mean something. For people to show up on a freezing winter afternoon to talk about their feelings — that must mean something. There was a diversity in ages and backgrounds, people who have experienced substance abuse and mental health issues talking about friendship. Many shared about a moment of friendship or years of friendship; others shared about the absence, the loss, or the complications of friendships. It feels nice to share in someone’s happiness. As someone passed a picture around of a friend and a nephew, you are beholden to their gratitude and love for that person. You are in the imagination of just how special that feeling must have been.

Though it was stories that highlighted complex feelings that moved me — to tears specifically — I hadn’t thought much about the topic before arriving or even sitting down in the circle. I was asked if I would want to share, and I said I didn’t think I would. Ironically, I started writing sometime this summer, and my first piece was about this very topic. And I pulled it out as people were sharing, but I was looking at my words and at that moment it all felt completely insignificant. It wasn’t that I was shy or intimidated; I just had a script in my hand with nothing to say. That my feelings, at one point so poignant that I was driven to immortalize them, were all of a sudden worth nothing — I found this funny.

And then I started to cry, and I was really holding it in because how dramatic would that be. What moved me was hearing my own feelings getting told back to me. A woman spoke about a friendship that lasted years, yet in all that time they hadn’t truly known each other. Another shared a single act of kindness from a stranger that had meant the world to her. And yet another spoke about regret and still needing to become a better friend to people. These were experiences I’d had, written about, lamented — moments I had failed, or felt failed. All of those complicated feelings of regret, wanting more of something that isn’t there, happiness that lasts a second instead of a lifetime — I took them all in, flushed them, and they were nothing to me anymore.

I needed to be reminded to feel. It didn’t matter what the emotion was, but that having the emotion itself brought back an energy in me. It was the existence of emotion that made anything mean anything. Communities — they bring a purpose and a direction. They take us out from the complacency of the life that we live inside and out of, and we find them boring, or inconsequential, or worthless, and we get used to it. Times like last Saturday both remind us, and they turn experiences into moments. And our feelings and emotions into lessons and stories.