Small Note, Big Feelings: Making “Find New Friends”
Before texting, we had one tool for emotional communications: a badly written note in pencil.
Middle school crushes were logistical nightmares for me. Who do you trust to pass the note? Did they read it? Did everybody read it? Building this piece meant recreating that entire ecosystem of panic: the scribbles, the erasures, the TRUE/FALSE loopholes.
For me, rejection was pretty much a given back then. At school, at home, everywhere. You’d think that would have trained me to stop putting myself out there, but it never did. I kept writing notes, kept handing them off, kept hoping someone might actually circle “True.” Deep down I always knew Grace wasn’t going to, but it didn’t stop me from trying again the next week. Looking back, that persistence might be the only thing I took with me into adulthood.
