Friendship and the delicate business of composing a self

The following paragraph from Megan O’Grady’s essay, A Shared Devotion, speaks to me. It was published in the April 18, 2021, New York Times Style Magazine as a reflection on the magazine’s theme—how friends who are creative people (or, creative people who are friends) bonded during the pandemic.

“I’ve come to believe that friendship—not the Facebook kind, but the real kind—is a kind of romance, and that its resilience to … unadorned truths is its test of strength. (“Better to be a nettle in the side of your friend, than his echo,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it.) At the same time, a real friend can also be counted on to tenderly shelter our idealism in a transactional world: That person who might help us believe, against all odds, in our own consequence as we go about the delicate business of composing a self—an act of imagination in large part, after all. The moral anxiety of any creative practice—standing, as it does, uncredentialed and fiscally insecure, in dubious relation to necessity—can be acute, and it does something to you when someone else believes in you. I think of Margery William’s 1922 children’s book, The Velveteen Rabbit, in which a young boy’s devotion makes the titular stuffed animal believe itself to be real—despite what the rabbits in the forest, the kind that hop nimbly about on their hind legs, might say. We all know the pain of having our dreams dispelled by pedestrian day jobs, student loans, family obligations and amiable philistines. An artist’s self-conception depends on the durability of our private mythologies, our sense of the possible ignited by those who believe in it, and in us.”