You're Not On Your Own, Kid.
Friendship bracelets forever.
I wore friendship bracelets all summer long.
Yes, it was partially because I was Eras Tour pilled in the spring. I attended the third show in Nashville, the one where it stormed for hours and our performance didn’t start until 10 PM. I was stuck in the concrete corridor of the stadium with two of my longest standing and dearest friends, getting rain blown in on us for around 5 hours. It didn’t stop us from having a marvelous time, and it only added to the fable of our Eras Tour. My best friend, Stephanie, gave me a bracelet that said “Lover” on it. This was particularly meaningful to me because she was in the midst of falling in love—a big and expansive kind of love—with a person I adore. They are now engaged. I am tempted to bring this bracelet along to their wedding next year.
My inner teenage girl couldn’t possibly recover from the amount of unbridled support and enthusiasm I received on my You Need to Calm Down themed ensemble, as waterlogged as it ended up being. I was rewarded richly in the currency of friendship bracelets. I made 10 or so to pass out and I walked out of Nissan Stadium with at least double that. A very shy 13 year old girl with a clear backpack full of bracelets chose one for me that said “afterglow” and was adorned with peach and lavender glass beads. Her mother said she’d spent the past three months making them, buying the beads with her allowance each week, and then making as many as she could before her next payday. It felt like an honor to be bestowed one from her stash. I still wear it, and I think about her.
Friendship bracelets exist as a time capsule. They’re tiny symbols of meaning because we bestow it onto them. We choose letters from a bowl containing the alphabet and string together something sentimental from the banal. We make them for ourselves and for others, inviting people into a joke or a shared story. We make something out of nothing and through this we alchemize meaning.
The Eras Tour wasn’t the beginning of my friendship bracelet renaissance.
That happened sometime last summer. My friend Abbey asked if I wanted to go make friendship bracelets at a bar. I remember being charmed that I was in my 30s and I had found friends who wanted to string beads on nights out. If at 13 years old you would have asked me what I hoped adulthood would be like, crafting at a bar would have been exactly the dream. At some point a couple of weeks later, I walked into Abbey’s coffee shop and was presented with a bracelet that said “I won’t tell”-- a call back to a recent conversation about my deeply religious college experience. It made me feel accepted in a way I had seldom felt before. Later that day, my friend McKenna, who works at the same delightful coffee shop, made a bracelet for herself that says “Proud of You” and I followed suit. I loved the idea behind it– bringing a self congratulatory attitude into everyday life. It was what I needed desperately at the time.
From that point forward, anytime we’d hang out I’d add a bracelet to what I was wearing. It just felt right. Many times before entering a situation I was intimidated by or a conversation that would be difficult, I’d put on my “Proud of you” bracelet as an extra line of defense. It is hot pink with smiling daisies on it. I wore it to my grandfather in law’s funeral under the sleeve of a plaid coat and black sweater. It matched nothing, but it felt necessary to get through the day.
Every time I suit up1, and add a friendship bracelet as a flourish to an outfit I feel like I am taking along a piece of the person who made it. It’s been a tangible reminder through the difficult seasons of the past year that I’m not alone, and that my friends love to love me. There’s a teenage girl inside of me that needs that reassurance often.
I’m grateful that 90’s fashion has made a resurgence so that I can pull off wearing friendship bracelets with reasonable panache instead of looking like a toddler who dressed herself (who am I kidding, this is occasionally part of my fashion MO).
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