Chapter 10:
TRIBAL ART
“You only need one friend,” my mother once told me. At the time, in fourth or fifth grade, I would have been thrilled to have a single friend. Instead, I was the class pariah; a shy, poor girl whose motley secondhand wardrobe smelled of cigarette and wood smoke. I was always chosen last for teams, and no one played with me at recess. I endured name-calling, shoves against the wall, and being tripped in the hallway. I was even spit at on occasion. I learned to navigate the school hallways with my books clutched tightly to my chest, shoulders hunched, eyes always cast downward so as not to meet those of potential tormentors. I have no fond memories of elementary school. It was there I learned to distrust females with sporadic offers of friendship that were hastily withdrawn when the meanest girl in school subsequently aimed her wrath at them.
Ironically, while my parents struggled mightily to send their children to parochial school, it wasn’t until entering public school in seventh grade that I escaped the bowels of my own private hell and made some of my first real friends.
Thanks to a babysitting job that allowed for a few new clothing purchases and several excellent teachers who encouraged my natural talents, I gained enough confidence to join clubs and participate in after-school activities. I wrote for the newspaper, participated in speech and drama, and even played the lead in several high school plays. These experiences brought me situational friendships, at least: girls who were involved in the same activities, but we lost touch after high school. As an adult, outside of a husband who was my best friend, my six sisters, and some pen pal relationships, I’d managed to cultivate but a single friendship.
Mary Humston and I met in Iowa City in 1986, when David and I moved there so he could pursue an MA in social work. Mary had three children, and I was pregnant with my third. We were both stay-at-home moms with writing aspirations and a coupon hobby. Mary introduced me to a mother’s playgroup, La Leche League, and Mothering magazine, exposing me to a wide array of mothering styles, including the attachment parenting and homeschooling I would later embrace as my own. While David’s degree was abandoned when we moved away the following year, my friendship with Mary was not. For the next thirty years, she and I would share a relationship we’d later chronicle in Mary & Me: A Lasting Link Through Ink, a book about a friendship linked by thousands of letters. I believed my mother was right: one friendship was enough. I had a husband who was my best friend. I had sisters. And then there was Mary. I was too busy raising eight children to cultivate or maintain other close relationships.
It wasn’t until June 2011, after reading my deceased mother’s notebooks and seeing her repeated admonition to utilize one’s talents, that I decided I’d honor Mom by taking my writing seriously and attending my first writer’s conference. Thanks to the encouragement of a supportive spouse, I signed up for the Christian Writers Workshop in Cedar Falls, Iowa.
I don’t know how long I stood in front of the closed door of the conference center when I arrived, steeling myself for whatever kind of judgement lay on the other side. I was a fifty-one-year-old woman with a fairly successful writing résumé, but it was Raggedy Mary who hesitated to open it and step inside.
“She haunts me sometimes, the raggedy girl. Mismatched socks, ratty hair, a skinny body averse to baths,” Mary DeMuth writes in her memoir Thin Places. A “raggedy girl” who was bullied mercilessly as a child remains inside me as well. Yet it had been my raggedy roots that had driven me to write in the first place, to succeed at something. To prove, as DeMuth writes, “I am worthy to take up space on this earth.” Writing gave me the voice I never had as a bullied child.
I didn’t expect the warm welcome I got at the conference or the feeling of camaraderie I experienced in a room full of people interested in the same thing. I walked into a room filled with strangers the first day of that workshop. Three days later, I left with something I hadn’t managed to obtain in the previous thirty years: several fledgling female friendships.
When David died nine months later, a group of those women showed up at his wake, and I began to see the benefits of having more than one good friend. Yes, my sisters and Mary Humston proved to be a loyal support system for me in the months following David’s death. Mary traveled once a month for eighteen months to take me out to lunch and ask the questions no one else dared ask. Her frequent letters continued to serve as a lifeline. But because I had forged other friendships, I also had Sue and Jean, who sent cards of encouragement. Wanda, Kristi, Robyn: all friendships formed at that initial writers workshop. Then seventeen months after my husband’s death, there was Mona, who, intimately knowing the loss of a grandchild, appeared on my doorstep in her pajamas on the morning of my grandson’s wake. For the first time in my adult life, my heart was open to friendship, and I’ve made many more cherished friends as a result.
“But for the most part, there are friends who are forever part of you and your journey. Those you can cry with, sharing griefs and faults. Those you can laugh with, free and joyful as small children in uninhibited mirth,” Madeleine L’Engle writes in Friends for the Journey. “Those who have proven time and again that they can be counted on. Those you can pray with on the deepest level, exposing yourselves totally to God’s love. I have been richly blessed by such friends, and for each of them I daily give deep thanks. Yes, friendship is risky. But the risk is worth it. It is worth it to strip off your protective coating. To be vulnerable. To be known. To risk being loved.”
I discovered the value of friends as a support system during tough times, but it turns out that friendships are also good for our health. When Julianne Holt-Lunstad, professor of psychology at Brigham Young University, did a meta-analysis of 148 studies, she concluded that a lack of social support increased the risk of premature death by 50 percent, an effect on mortality risk comparable to smoking up to fifteen cigarettes a day.
The root of the Hebrew word for friendship, chaver, is the word chibur, meaning “connection.” Feeling connected to others contributes to better health, improved immunity, and a reduced risk of heart disease and depression. In fact, in a Harvard longitude study of nearly three hundred men over the course of seventy-five years, having meaningful relationships was identified as the only thing that truly matters in life.
Robert Waldinger, MD, the director of the Harvard study, was quoted in an AARP magazine interview as saying the quality of your relationships at age fifty is a better predictor of your future health than your cholesterol levels. How many friends are needed to see that kind of benefit? Not as many as you’d think.
“The research doesn’t show you have to have a ton of friends and love cocktail parties,” Waldinger said. “It just means you have some close connections. It could be one. It could be two.”
Technically, then, my mother had been correct: we do only need one friend. Unfortunately, some people don’t even have that. According to a “girlfriend” survey conducted by Family Circle magazine, 4 percent of respondents reported having no friends at all. The majority, 52 percent, said they had between three and five friends, and only 19 percent had six or more.
There appears to be a whole lot more Raggedy Marys out there. A full 17 percent reported a lack of confidence as the reason for not establishing more friendships, and 5 percent cited a history of being rejected as preventing them from even trying to establish friendships.
Considering our increasingly busy lives, the greatest barrier to establishing friendships should be no surprise: 40 percent of respondents said a lack of time was their single greatest obstacle to making friends as an adult.
Friendships do take time to cultivate and nurture—36 percent of those surveyed got together with friends one or more times a week, one in four texted a friend daily, and one in five touched base via social media four or more times a day. Those things are hard to prioritize in our lives when we have children, jobs, and maybe aging parents to contend with. Yet to look at some of our social media statistics, it appears as though we have plenty of friends.
Considering I had few real friends until seven years ago, how on Earth did I manage to accumulate 550 on Facebook? Several of my Facebook “friends” claim over 1000 relationships. Despite those kinds of numbers on social media, research demonstrates we can’t possibly maintain that number of close relationships. In fact, according to anthropologist Robin Dunbar, the average number of friendships a person can maintain is about 150.
“It’s the number of people you know as persons and you know how they fit into your social world and they know how you fit in theirs. They are a group of people to which you have an obligation of friendship,” Dunbar says.
Dunbar’s number, 150, refers to those people with whom you have a personalized relationship, one that is based around general obligations of trust and reciprocity. The circle of 150 consists of four layers called circles of acquaintanceship: an inner circle of 5 core people, then successive layers of 15, 50, and 150. With each successive circle, the number of people in it increases but the emotional intimacy decreases. That inner core includes those people you might consider calling in the middle of the night if you needed them.
At that first writers’ conference, I connected with women and men who shared my interests in writing and being published. Later, I would make additional friends outside of that Christian writers’ circle through a workplace setting, classes I taught, and my involvement in grief ministry. The first “tribe” I formed was a Bible study I held at church for two years before moving it into my home: a group of people with the common desire to connect with God. The initial group at the church included fifty participants. Five years later, seven of us continued to meet. The lifelong learners group at my library was the second of my own making, an attempt to gather like-minded individuals who wanted to imbibe in creative endeavors. When I began working at a spirituality center in mid-2018, I immediately began a similar “Artisans Soul” club and formed a “Faith Writers” group, all in the name of finding my tribe, choosing to spend time with people I wanted to be more like.
It was entrepreneur and motivational speaker Jim Rohn who said, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” That could be good news, or sobering, depending on who those five people are for you. While we might not have much control over who we work with, when it comes to friends, it means we should be choosing carefully.
The Longevity Project, which studied over a thousand people from youth to death, found that the groups you associate with often determine the type of person you become. In The Start-up of You, Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha talk about how the best way to improve good qualities in yourself is to spend time with people who are already like that.
In choosing friends from a Christian writers’ group, a Bible study, and creativity groups, I’d chosen wisely, becoming a better writer, growing stronger in my faith, and upping my creativity quotient by associating with other creatives. In other words, if you want to be more interesting, hang out with interesting people. If you want to be more creative, hang out with creative individuals. I experience a surge of creative energy in the room during each of my writing or creativity group meetings.
“When you find a people committed to a common mission, a common purpose, you find those individuals who are like-hearted and like-minded and carry the same fire you carry and whose passion burns as brightly as yours,” Erwin Raphael McManus writes in The Last Arrow. “People don’t slow you down; the wrong people slow you down. When you choose the right people, your life begins to come together in a way that it never could when you walk alone.”
I also know what it is to feel pulled down by the wrong association. I’ve dropped out of groups that left me feeling depressed or anxious and learned to avoid people who pull me down into the muck and mire with them, spreading negative energy.
In her book Living a Life You Love, Joyce Meyer gives us permission to take a break from those who bring us down.
“In order to really give yourself a break,” Joyce writes, “step away from people or things that bring you discouragement and sour your outlook on life . . . because they will affect you. There are just some people whom we need to love from a distance. If you have family members, friends, or coworkers whose constant negativity drains your joy and saps your peace, you probably need to create some distance. It doesn’t mean you don’t love them—it just means you need to give yourself a break.”
McManus agrees. “The truth is, there are relationships that will keep you from the life God created you to live. There are people whom you need to extricate from your life because they pull you back to the person you were rather than forward to the person you must become,” he writes. “Yet this must never blind us to the deeper truth. We were not created to do life alone, and if we want people to be for us, then there need to be people whom we are for.”
Then there’s the relationship that not only lifts but also builds a person: that of mentorship. I discovered what it was to have a mentor when I met author Shelly Beach.
“A mentor is someone who sees more talent and ability within you than you see in yourself, and helps bring it out of you,” Bob Proctor, author, speaker, and success coach, describes it.
The first time I heard Shelly speak, I was entranced. I mentally took note of her mannerisms, the way she spoke from the heart, and how she referred to notes instead of reading from a prepared speech like some other presenters I’d seen.
I want to be like tha, I thought. I want to be that kind of speaker.
Through a desire to emulate her, I began reading Shelly’s books and following her blog. I learned about the publishing world through her workshops. It was Shelly who advised me to drop the agent that represented my coupon book but had failed to submit to more than a handful of publishers. Shelly who would write a blurb endorsement for the book when it was finally released. And when I became a presenter at the same conference the following year, I discovered Shelly’s speaking style came naturally to me.
I’m often asked about mentoring relationships in the writing classes I teach. “Ideally, the mentor would be someone further along in the writing field, someone knowledgeable who is also willing to share their wisdom and expertise,” I tell them. My mind automatically goes to Shelly.
“How do I find a mentor?” someone will ask, and I’m tempted to answer “You don’t. They find you,” even though I’m aware that isn’t completely accurate. The arrangement of mentorship can be a formal one through an organization or workplace, something loosely based that happens in a creative environment, or even cases when someone isn’t aware they are serving as a mentor through their books, blogs, podcasts, or webinars.
Becoming Shelly Beach’s protégé didn’t feel like a strategic career move. Ours was not coincidental meeting. It was as though an invisible thread drew me to her, linking us irrevocably. A year later I would meet my second mentor, widely published author Cecil Murphey, under similar circumstances. I’m blessed that both Shelly and Cec have since become my close friends. I keep in touch with them through newsy letters, read their work, and feel free to seek their wise and experienced advice. I also count on them as my strongest prayer warriors. Knowing them has changed my life. Initially mentors, they are now “soul friends.”
“Soul friends evoke, sustain, affirm, and unify us,” Stephen Cope, psychotherapist and author of Soul Friends: The Transforming Power of Deep Human Connection, said. “A soul friend becomes critical to determining who we become as a person. They’re people we form deep connections with. Connections that transform us. Soul friends call us forth. They draw out the person in us that we want to be. It’s almost as if an invisible bond of energy connects us with these people.”
I’ve experienced this same unexplained “connection” with others. One morning, while writing a letter to my friend Mary, I lamented that I’d never had a friend who could truly understand what it is to raise a large family. “I’ve never met a woman who believes, like I do, that children are a gift from God, a gift she couldn’t say no to,” I wrote. The next day I met a woman who introduced herself as a mother of nine. “Nine,” I marveled. “That’s one more than me.”
“What other gift from God would we say no to?” she replied, and I’m certain my mouth dropped open as I recognized the very words I’d said that I’d never heard another woman say. Sheri became a cherished friend, and I became her writing mentor. I don’t consciously choose these connections—it’s as though they are chosen for me. I wonder sometimes if it is two souls recognizing each other, as they will in heaven.
Once I established relationships beyond my friend Mary, I needed to learn how to maintain them. Apparently, I couldn’t just collect friends like pretty knickknacks, propping them on a shelf to be dusted off whenever I needed them.
According to Marquette University psychologist Debra Oswald, who has studied high school friendships, there are four basic behaviors necessary to maintain the bond of friendship. She discusses these in a November 2006 interview on PsychologyToday.com. The first two are self-disclosure and supportiveness. “We must be willing to extend ourselves, to share our lives with our friends, to keep them abreast of what’s going on with us. Likewise, we need to listen to them and offer support.” Consistent communication facilitates both these behaviors, whether it is through phone calls, emails, or the letter writing my friend Mary and I depended upon for over thirty years.
Another essential ingredient to keeping friends is being positive, according to Oswald. “The intimacy that makes a friendship thrive must be enjoyable, for the more rewarding a friendship, the more we’re willing to expend the energy it takes to keep it alive.”
The fourth essential ingredient to tending to a friendship is spending time together. What you do together doesn’t seem to be as important as the regular interaction. Because some of my friendships are long-distance ones, I don’t always have that luxury. In lieu of shared time, I’ve managed to maintain a connection in these long-distance friendships through postal mail. My interaction with Shelly and Cec has been relegated mostly to letter writing, while their return interaction is typically email.
I also practice gratitude through snail mail thank-you notes. I’ve written to former teachers, authors, and musicians whose work has touched my soul, or to businesses to laud praises upon their employees. I wrote the nurses who cared for David during cancer treatment, a mechanic who gave him a ride when his car broke down, and the staff at the funeral home that handled my mother’s, husband’s, and grandson’s funerals with dignity and grace.
A short note can be handwritten and addressed in a few minutes, and the benefits reach both sender and receiver. A study at the University of Pennsylvania found that when participants were assigned to write and deliver a letter of gratitude, they immediately exhibited a huge increase in happiness scores, an effect that could last up to a month.
While there is no substitute for spending time with friends, our Ignite activity serves as a way to connect with a current friend, an avenue for reconnecting with an old one, or as a form of encouraging another person by taking advantage of snail mail.
IGNITE
Letters and notes can serve as a strong thread to keep friends connected. Never underestimate the power of a handwritten letter or note. My husband kept every single card that he received during his cancer treatment. I was poised to throw them away when, in November 2011, he unexpectedly asked to look through them. For one solid afternoon, he spent time poring over those notes and messages, celebrating his five-year cancer survival with the reminder of how much he meant to others.
Your assignment, should you accept it, is to mail a card or letter to someone going through a tough time: grieving the loss of a loved one, a job loss, a divorce, a cancer diagnosis. You shouldn’t have to look too far around you to discover someone who could use something more than bills and advertisements in their mailbox to lift their spirits. Who knows? This simple act might spur you on to a card-sending campaign of saving the world one letter at a time. Here are ten other ways you can utilize the power of snail mail. Choose to do at least one, or challenge yourself to do all of them, in the next month:
1. Write a thank-you note to someone who doesn’t expect it but certainly deserves it. Write to a former teacher, the nurse who did such a good job caring for your spouse, the barista at the coffee shop who never fails to smile. You might just make their day—maybe even their week.
2. Write a letter or card to someone in the military. The website “Operation We Are Here” (http://www.operationwearehere.com/IdeasforSoldiersCardsLetters.html) includes a listing of organizations that receive cards and letters to distribute to the military community, including deployed military personnel, wounded warriors, home front families, and veterans. Be sure to follow the instructions for specific organizations.
3. Support a cancer patient. Sign up to be a volunteer “Chemo Angel,” becoming a buddy to a cancer patient currently undergoing treatment (https://www.chemoangels.com). You choose what type of angel you want to be: someone who sends notes and gifts throughout treatment, a card angel who commits to sending greeting cards, or a prayer angel. Another group is Girls Love Mail, sending letters and cards to women newly diagnosed with breast cancer (https://www.girlslove-mail.com).
4. Send cards to children in the hospital. My grandson was five when he was diagnosed with cancer. Over the next three years, as he underwent treatment, he ended up in the hospital for days, weeks, and even more than a month after he underwent a stem cell transplant. Greeting cards, small toys, DVDs, and handheld game systems were invaluable to making the hospital bearable, for him and also for his mother, who slept on a couch in his room. Ask your local children’s hospital how you can help cheer up a child’s stay. In the patient’s best interest, they have rules and regulations as to what they can accept, but even a cheery greeting card can go a long way in brightening a child’s day. This group collects cards for hospitalized children: http://www.cardsforhospitalizedkids.com.
5. Send gift cards to the parents of hospitalized children. When you send greeting cards to children in the hospital, you might want to think about their parents too. While my grandson had meals served to him, my daughter had to eat food she brought, utilize the vending machines in the hospital, or go to a nearby café. The cost of gas to get back and forth to his many appointments and treatment was exorbitant too. Generous donations of gift cards for local coffee shops, fast food places, and gas stations were invaluable.
6. Write to your children or grandchildren. When I left home for college, I’d always check the mailbox at the dorm. My parents and a couple sisters did not disappoint; that first year I received at least one letter a week. I still have those letters, some forty years later. Even when I lived a block away from my grandchildren, I’d surprise them with a card in the mailbox occasionally, or splurge and have a cookie bouquet delivered, always with a coupon code that made them affordable. Now that I live an hour away, it’s even more important to keep in touch. I’m not one for FaceTiming, but I will make sure there’s something in their mailbox from Grandma Mary.
7. Mail a postcard to Postcrossing. Like postcards? If you’d like to get postcards in your mailbox, you can register with Postcrossing (http://www.postcrossing.com). When you send a postcard, you’ll receive a postcard back from another participant somewhere in the world. With nearly 800,000 members in 210 countries, approximately 350,000 postcards are traveling to mailboxes right now in this manner.
8. Have a secret? Share it with PostSecret. Whether it is a secret regret, fear, betrayal, desire, confession, or childhood humiliation, you can reveal anything, anonymously, on a postcard, briefly but creatively. This is a group art project, and shared postcard secrets can be viewed at www.postsecret.com, where you can also find the current address to send your secrets.
9. Get creative with envelopes and stamps. You can find envelope templates online, or take apart an envelope and lay it on an old map, decorated scrapbook paper, or even a page from your favorite magazine to cut out your own envelope pattern. Fold, and glue the edges shut. Use blank white address labels or a black marker to write the recipient’s address. As for stamps, ask at the post office what designs are available and purchase those that add a little fun to your mailings.
10. Find a snail mail pen pal. Back when I was a young homes-chooling mother of several children, magazines with pen pal listings were plentiful. Not so much anymore, but there’s still a large letter-writing community at “The Letter Exchange,” https://letter-exchange.com/index.html, a forum that includes a print magazine, pen pal connection listings, and fun articles for fans of letter writing. A couple other forums for letter writers:
Letter Writer’s Alliance: https://www.letterwriters.org International Pen Friends: http://ipfworld.com