Through the Narrow Passage

I reconnected this spring with one of my oldest [former] friends, via FB.

We worked together when we were nineteen.
She came from an affluent family in business; I came from an academic family.  We were both experimenting with what direction we'd go in our own lives.

She ended up working to administer social good through high-end nonprofits (not like the nonprofit dump I work for, LOL).
I'm sure she does excellent work, and, she let me know, has been excellently paid for it, as she should be.
As we all should be.

I left academia but stayed with books in various forms (libraries, publishing, now thrift store Book Lady). I have chosen to work part-time, for the sake of my creative, mental, and emotional sustainability.
(Uh, erm... so I could lie on the couch and read the books.)

Old Friend and I fell out some ten+ years ago. It's been kinda nice to catch up, after all that time.
Nice, . . . for a while.
But I kept running into these huge differences in p.o.v.
It's like long ago we swam different directions through a narrow-necked fish cage: easy to enter, difficult to reverse back out of. And now we are way, far apart.

I was talking recently to Depressed Cashier, PhD, about
how we don't feel we could easily tolerate going back to the sort of workplaces we used to be in:
middle-class, white culture jobs, where everyone has a college degree and does a lot of Good (truly!) for "Other People".
That's the culture my Old Friend thrives in. (She is the helper, not the Other People.)

But it's more than different economic and social milieux Old Friend and I swim in.

This past year, working a mile from George Floyd's murder, has changed me.
I'm not sure how, exactly, but it has.

I was just talking to a coworker––
Ass't Man (AM), of all people (has he changed, or has he merely gone dormant, like a volcano?)––
about how hard we both find it to communicate how we feel, where we find ourselves, and who we are (becoming) after this devastating, eye-opening year,

a year when the wheels came off.

Eye-opening in all sorts of ways:
I didn't know, for instance, what was inside tires until last year when AM and I went down Lake St. on May 29, 2020, the day after the first uprising after the cops killed George Floyd---after he and I had painted the boards covering the thrift store's broken windows---
and we saw a car burned down to its skeleton.

The rubber tires had melted, revealing their inner web of wires:

And that's a metaphor for a whole bunch of stuff I saw and learned about How Things Work.

Below is one of my favorite photos of the day (have I posted it before?): AM shaking  out of his shoe in a parking lot.
The Covid masks helped with the haze of smoke from still smoldering buildings. The photo is out of focus, but the haze IS smoke.

So, I've swum through another narrow passage---another birth canal.
I do think of it as an entrance into life, not death, because difficult and wounding as it has been, and continues to be (and sometimes dangerous too), it's a vital place to be.

I feel sort of like the Dye Plants teacher making vivid dyes out of invasive species, while Old Friend is hiring immigrant gardeners to chop them down.

Writing back and forth, it's become clear that if I had a hard time reaching Old Friend before, it's even harder now.
Impossible, maybe.
Or, maybe more to the point, just not worth the effort.

Writing about this feels as if I'm taking a depth sounding.

I'm not lost, but I'm getting my bearings in new waters.