Tag: The Guys
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Friend Mountain
1) Think about your friendships, figure out which ones aren’t in Quadrant 1, and demote them down the mountain. I’m not suggesting you stop being friends with those people—you still love them and feel loyal to them, and old friends are critical to hold onto—but if the friendships aren’t that healthy or enjoyable, they don’t really deserve to be in your Tier 1, and you probably shouldn’t be in theirs. Most importantly, doing this clears up time to…
2) Dedicate even more time to the Quadrant 1, Tier 1 rocks in your life. If you’re in your mid-20s or older, your current rocks are probably the only ones you’ll ever have. Your rock friendships don’t warrant 2x the time you give to your other friends—they warrant 5 or 10x. And keep in mind that seeing one of them for an hour-long meal isn’t really enough—your rocks deserve serious, dedicated time so you can stay close. So go make plans with them.
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Requirements for a New Group Dynamic w the Guys
After a couple more weeks of multiple therapy sessions per week – some have been couples sessions, most singular — everything is coming into clear view about what’s been my problem all along.
The root of my pathology is this: I’ve never known how to manage my vulnerability. For the past 30 years I led each conversation with my “Hi, I am Matthew Shepard” introduction.
It’s always been an unfair burden to put on the people I am in relation with. To force them to choose between these black-and-white options: support me, or abandon me.
It’s why I blew up with you guys.
With Cameron.
With Tony.
With Dan’s wife, Julie.
With my older brother, Chris.
My parents.Fuck, Guys, The list goes on and on for as many years I’ve been alive.
What happened with us has nothing to do with you and everything to do with me. It’s a vestige of my Harford County upbringing. The Catholicly dogmatic belief from my conservative upbringing that things are either good or evil; that people are either citizens in my family or foreigners — safety or danger.
Never an in-between.I was the one unable to respect people’s boundaries. But most specifically Kevin’s boundaries.
From now on, I’m only allowed to be vulnerable to a list of people and in manners that we both mutually agree upon.
All of our friendship can’t be premised solely on my vulnerability anymore. I can’t keep rehashing the story of “what happened to me.”
It was only very recently that I was a child to Baltimore, but now I’m an adult in DC. Kevin and I were children in our group’s collective story, but now we’re living his and my next chapter.
For us all to become a cohesive group again, we all have to find a new center. My friendships need to be full of levity and conversations about map-making, work and aesthetic taste — television, books, art, whatnot.
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The Space Between Us Is a Creative Possibility
If teams designed their relationships to each other — and around the opportunity in front of them — they could grow together as friends, business partners, and as leaders in their roles based on how they chose to design the partnership. It all starts with a subversively simple question: “What would you like?” And it is followed by a commitment to consciously co-create that answer into being.
