I had breakfast yesterday with Jon Katz, a writer who lives a town or two down.

Jon and I have known each other for a few years now, but have been very much on the periphery of each other’s lives, having coffee or a meal every couple of months, but that was about it. Recently we’ve begun to meet more regularly, and we becoming friends.

Becoming friends is for me, something that happens slowly. And it is something I don’t think we men do particularly well. We have co-workers, buddies, allies and a host of other almost friend-like relationships, but for the most part, few of us have friends like women seem to have friends – a safe haven where we can be ourselves completely – strong when we are strong, weak when we are weak, gloriously incomplete and flawed and still somehow valued and loved.

There are thousands of reasons why. Really, thousands! I looked it up on the internet. They run from primordial makeup to societal reasons and most of them are probably valid. As I looked into it, and looked into myself, all of them boiled down to the fact that we men suck at allowing ourselves to be vulnerable.

It was dangerous to be vulnerable back in the days of cavemen and clubs and it is dangerous to be vulnerable today in our hyper-competitive world. We don’t deal with our own brokenness very well. And we often don’t deal with others’ brokenness very well, always wanting to fix things. Often things that can’t be fixed, or things that aren’t ours to fix.

For us, I think, brokenness is something to fix. It makes us less. And we don’t like to be less. We want to be wonderful.

For me, this is complicated by how slowly I process feelings. How slowly you may ask? I am the snail in the interstate of life.

This has always been true. i could go into all the reasons why. A few years of therapy have given me the long list of whys that would likely bore you to tears. (I am sure it would. It bores me at this point.) It hit it’s worst point just as I went through my divorce and in a way, had to learn to feel again. Or if not feel, had to learn to give words and understanding to those feelings.

We litterally began at ground zero. Each day in my journal I had to end the day writng down what I had felt today. It was basic. “I was happy when…. I was angry when….” Feelings were single words, with no gradations or color.  Slowly, over time, I began to give color to the basic emotions. Everything wasn’t black and white. Maybe I wasn’t angry. Maybe I was frustrated. Maybe I was a little upset, or a lot upset.

Slowly, oh so slowly, over years, I had to reconstruct a vocabulary of feelings. I had to learn to sit with those feelings. It sounds so second grade, but for me, as broken as I was, it was hard work.

Writing helped. I kept a journal (I still do) of feelings. I wrote poetry, helping me to find words for emotions again.

Today, I am pretty good at understanding my feelings. And understanding them, they don’t overwhelm me the way they once did, or at least, not as often. But I largely lost confidence in my initial emotions. I tend to have to set with them a while and let them soak and meld a while before I am confident in them.

Which makes friend building a slow process. At least for me.

I am crazy grateful for the people who have given me the time to process, who have had the patience to let me catch up. I only have a few good friends, a few women, two, maybe three men. They are beyond precious to me becaue they invested the time to let me catch up, when they might have felt more surely, more quickly.

Jon, for instance, went home from breakfast and instantly wrote a piece on the growing friendship we are developing. I admore that kind of certainty of emotions processed quickly. He said things I felt but could never have put words to so quickly. I could never trust my own emotions so quickly.

It used to bother me, this slowness. It doesn’t any more. My friendships are proven things. They have lasted through some tough stuff. We’re all a little broken and that’s OK. I have learned that if I am patient with myself (not an easy thing), and let feelings settle at their own speed, then they can almost always be trusted. And for someone who lost all faith in his feelings for a time, that is beyond important. It’s like rediscovering myself.

It used to bother me, this slowness. It doesn’t any more. Because just like in a fine wine, or a good stew that cooks slowly through the day, when I allow the to steep, I end up with a far richer experience than I ever used to have when I processed feelings quickly. Sometimes, it’s worth the wait.

In fact, it almost always is.

Be well. Travel wisely

Tom